[Tapper-develop] Welcome Wayne

[<Gre...@ub...>]

[I sent Wayne e-mail on this already, but I thought I'd repeat it here for
everyone else benifit as well]
First of all, Welcome, we're all glad to have you.  Maybe we should all
write a quick "Howdy, this is who I am " note to the mailing list???


**1)  May I propose that as a goal all intermediate representations be in
XML?

I really like this idea.  My favorite text editor is Jext and the source
code for Jext saves all of it's parameters in XML.  They go so far as to
put every single bit of text in every menu, window, and dialog in an XML
object so if Romain (the lead programmer) wants to make a French version
(which he might, he lives in Lyons France) he would simply change the XML
files.

I havn't done XML parsing but I'd like to learn.  I see that Javasoft has
released jaxp.jar which is an XML parser.  I havn't had any time to look
into it though.

If you want to make your objects save themselves in XML then go right
ahead.  I've got my tuning objects saves as serialized objects but I could
learn the jaxp API and change it to XML objects.

**2) When scale and chord dictionaries are developed, then they can be =
make available via the web.

Wow awesome idea.  I made a comment to myself in the code somewhere that we
should be allowed to have users "merge" in their chords and scales.  But
doing it via the web makes perfect sense.  I think sourceforge provides an
anonymous ftp site.  We could use that as the "library".

NEW FEATURE IDEA:  I've always assumed that we would save chord formulas.
i.e. a Major triad will be root, Major 3rd, 5th.  or the 0, 4th, and 7th
note of the chromatic scale.  (0,4,7 is a better representation for our
algorithm).  Then Tapper would run it's engine and compute a bunch of chord
and scale positions based on the key and the formula.

WHAT IF: we also allowed the user to place the dots on neck to show one of
his "Favorite Fingerings".  People could upload their "Favorite Fingerings"
and we allowed people to choose from a "Favorite Fingerings" list?  Folks
could upload and download these fingerings via the web or ftp.


**3) Microsoft, et al.  Even though we will be providing source code,
Visual J++ can compile Java into executables which we can supply to
others.

AAARRGGHH He said the "M" word on my mailing list!!  ;-)

I guess it wouldn't be too hard to provide an executable with each
"official" release, but I'm not sure if J++ supports java 1.3.  I know
there are certain parts of Java (RMI for one) that J++ does not support.
If it's an easy thing to do then let's go ahead and do it when we're ready.
If it's a pain then I don't think it's worth it.  Just IMHO YMMV.

**4) We will be supporting the Stick bass, Stick 8 and NS/Stick, I =
presume?

The Tuning object can have either 1or 2 TuningBlock objects.  The
TuningBlock object can have up to 8 strings, but this is an arbitrary
number that I used because 8 seemed to fit into the Create Tuning dialog
box easily.  But I'm going to change that dialog box anyway.  I'm not happy
with the way the create a tuning process flows.  I think my GUI has bad
Feng Shui.

BTW: I got Rex's code for the color selector dialog box last night.  I'll
make a build and put it up on the file section as soon as I have a free
hour at home.  (The house painting job is ALMOST done.  I'll have free time
again!)  I have lots' of changes I want to do.  For one, I want to change
the package names while we're still early in the process.  I also need to
add 2 check boxes to the tuning dialog box (and all the serialized objects)
for "Allow Open Strings?" and "Allow Barre Chords?".  I'd sure like to
build a bunch of those little "support" classes that Sean and Wayne need.
All I need is time.  If it wasn't for this darn job . . .  ;-)

Keep tapping.
Greg