VDLMidi

Last week I was finally able to release a little app I've been working on - VDLMidi. A couple of links:

VDLMidi announcement on the tapspace forums
VDLMidi product page

I also happened to get my Subversion repository up and running again, which makes me feel more secure while doing development.

The app is only really useful for people that own Virtual Drumline 2 - the description line could make it sound like it would be useful when only using a music notation program, but it is specifically for using a notation program WITH Virtual Drumline 2. You can check it out without the other apps, but at that point it's just eye candy :)

It's an interesting experience trying to put all this together - there's all kinds of stuff to do that I normally don't have to think about at work: I needed to get a website up and running, create a quick icon, make a readme file, put together a disk image, figure out build versions, etc.
With that finally done I got the app listed on MacUpdate.com and VersionTracker.com, and started getting feedback from users that saw my original forum post.

It turns out that it crashes in Panther because the search field has a binding that is new to Tiger (and the IB compatibility checker didn't warn about this), so I created a version of the app without the text field so people could run _something_ on 10.3.9. Eventually I will just check for the OS version and dynamically hide the search field (for Panther) or enable the binding (for Tiger)

I will probably have more development posts about this going forward, and link here from the product page so people can see what I'm planning next. Let me know if that's too annoying for anyone, because I could always create another blog just for that... (even with the high costs of these blogger.com accounts :)

Things I don't miss about the old Mac OS (and things of that era)

I was reading a rather inaccurate post about the history of the Mac OS recently, and it brought up memories of the various different OSes and pieces of software and hardware I've dealt with in the past. By the way, Wikipedia has a pretty good history of this stuff.

Here are the big things that I really don't miss at all:

• floppy disks
• getting to file servers from the Chooser
• having to restart my machine to turn off RAMDoubler so I could play games
• the System 7 look
• running things in Classic (which I haven't done for years now, thankfully)
• the rattling noises that my PowerTower's metal case would make
• all of my failed attempts to get Rhapsody and the DP's working on my PowerTower
• having to reboot to OS 9 to watch a DVD
• having to turn off my machine and swapping my optical drive so I could burn a CD or watch a DVD (back before we shipped combo drives)
• SCSI
• blinking alerts in the application menu (back when it was on the right)
• my first weeks ever trying to get sample code _to even compile_ for OS 7

While I'm at it...
Things I miss a little:

• having edges on all of my windows :)
• hacking things with ResEdit
• macsbug

Things I miss a lot:

• having time to play games
• having time to play around with control panels, extensions, change icons, etc
• finding the cool, weird Apple apps like Gerbils(?) and Project X (I think that's what it was called... possibly something with 'sauce' in the name... the 3D web navigation tool, where shift moved your forward, and option moved you back)

So what have I missed? :)