Beginnings

So I'm going to start my blogging off with an introduction to my project: a free cross platform musical score editor (which currently has no name). Our team consists of just myself and a classmate from my undergrad. We previously worked on a team project during our undergrad (a required course), so we were already familiar with team development.

For me, projects come in two flavors:

1. those I do simply for my own personal enjoyment, such as a game and,
   
2. those that fill a need for me, such as small scripts to get repetitive tasks done.

The musical score editor falls into category 2, but it is definitely an enjoyable project too. I personally found myself unhappy with existing free software for editing scores. Since I focus on guitar, I was looking at something with a simple interface to whip up a guitar tab and be on my way. Probably the best I could find is TuxGuitar, but it was far from a pleasurable experience. This established a need for me, one whose solution we will eventually share with others. So with a project idea, the next thing was to lay out some basic requirements:

• Cross-platform. I am an OS X user, and my friend is a Linux user.
• An interface that is both simple for the first-time user, but powerful for the more advanced users.
• Quick keyboard access to the most common commands to greatly improve throughput.
• Fully-featured. We want users to be able to do just about anything and everything they'd want to do with their musical scores. Clearly this will take time, but it is our goal.

With these requirements in mind, we decided that Java would make our lives far simpler. We chose Swing over SWT for our GUI library, since we both know and enjoy Swing. Our goal is to eventually bring this project to a level comparable to that of commercial software. It's a big goal, but we're extremely motivated and really enjoy this project. Anyways, some things I plan to blog about in the near future:

• Java: not always that cross-platform. Various topics on producing code and user-interfaces that feel more native.
  
• Working with JNI.
• Developing a flexible and easy-to-use plugin system.
• Object-based rendering systems: the pros and the cons.
• Other cool stuff!
  

We already have a highly functional and [mostly] stable version of our score editor internally, but we want our first public release to really be something amazing. We have many incredibly powerful features planned, some of which we have never seen before in the area of score editing. Hence, if you're reading this entry you should stay tuned for some good stuff! I'd post a teaser screenshot, but everyone likes a bit of suspense :)

Let's get 'er goin'

So it has been awhile since my last post, but I've been keeping myself busy with research and a large personal project that a friend and I are working on. It's a musical score editor written in Java. I'm keeping this post short but I think I will start blogging about that project, the issues we face, and the decisions we make to resolve these issues. I'll also talk about various design decisions we make, and maybe even some other stuff too, like our rendering system. Hopefully my future posts will provide useful insight and information on various topics surrounding development in Java.

Summer Work

Well my research job started last week and I'm looking forward to some results, although they won't come till later on this summer. I will be researching two areas:

1. Image stitching
2. Image [feature] matching
   

The basic idea is to take a set of photos and generate multiple panoramas from them appropriately. After this I will be estimating camera poses and with some form of a transform allow the user to travel from one panorama to the next. This should end up being a fully automated process so that one can easily create "virtual tours". It is sort of a combination of different software (such as Microsoft PhotoSynth and Quicktime VR).

I'm hoping by the end of the summer I'll have most of the concepts straightened out and some tools/software created to generate these tours and display them. Depending on the results I may carry on with this project for my honours thesis. Such a thesis would be an extension on this work and would probably include improved algorithms along with efficiency improvements, such as utilizing the GPU for tour generation.

Whenever I start getting results, I'll make another post. Once I understand the domain better I'll probably even post some technical information (for those of us who enjoy learning)!