Multimedia (was re: HeatedDiscussion)

Russell Allen russell.allen at firebirdmedia.com
Thu Mar 16 04:30:25 UTC 2000


>"Andrew C. Greenberg" <werdna at gate.net> wrote:
>>"Russell Allen" wrote:
>>Out of all of the content forms, Squeak seems closest (at this time) to
>>being able to be an authoring system for multimedia (such as Director) and
>>being a development system for business applications (such as VB).  This is
>>not to say that Squeak should be limited to these areas!  However the
>>amount of work needed to bring Squeak into an area such as , eg, music
>>composition and notation (like, to take a piece of software I use,
>>Sibelius) is much greater.
>
>I find it peculiar to be comparing Squeak, a program development
>system, with Sibelius, a special-purpose application.

I would respectfully disagree with the description of Squeak as a "program
development system".  In my opinion, this is as limiting to Squeak as
saying that Squeak is a "multimedia authoring system".

Squeak is fast on its way to being a "content development system" as well
as a "program development system".

As it does so, it subsumes the functionality of more specialised programs.
Within Squeak is a compiler, an IDE, a web server, a flash player, a midi
player and sampler, a web browser and email reader etc.

Why not a common music notation program?

And why shouldn't the functionality of that common music notation program
be compared with the best special-purpose examples currently available?

>Sibelius is very nice, indeed.  It does many cute things and is very
>WYSIWYG.  Try to get it to do something it was not programmed to do,
>however.  Try extending it.  What you see is sometimes all you get.
>
>Squeak is certainly not Sibelius, but given that you have Sibelius,
>why would you want to make another Sibelius from Squeak?

For precisely the reasons you have stated above - Sibelius is limited in
what it can do because it is a specialised, closed-source program.

>Did you think that a solid product like Sibelius was easy to code in
>C, or that it was easier to code Sibelius in C than it would have
>been to code it in Squeak?

No!  Not at all.  I am very much aware of the complexity of Sibelius.  If I
thought it was easy to write I would not have bought it!

Eventually, I hope that Squeak will be able to handle common music
notation.  This will not make Squeak a Sibelius clone, any more than Squeak
is now an Apache clone because of Commanche.

>But the other hand, have you seriously looked at what others have
>already done in Squeak?  For example, consider Stephen Travis Pope's
>Siren package and his earlier MODE, both described in much greater
>detail at:
>
>	http://rain.create.ucsb.edu/Siren/

Yes, this is a good start.  But I am a greedy person - I want the
flexibility of Squeak and the ease and power of Sibelius too.  And lots of
other stuff!

:)
Russell

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Russell Allen

russell.allen at firebirdmedia.com

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