Sure, the idea of BarFly popping up unexpectedly and opening windows
in front of an unsuspecting user is daft. But, there's no reason not
to do this while running in the background. You don't normally use the
program in the background except to play through a whole file of tunes
while you use the machine for something else, but there's nothing that
BarFly does (apart from interacting with the user) which requires it
to open windows or run in the foreground.
It would also be possible to get around the problem of transmitting
high-level events from a different platform by means of a "watch folder".
I have an encryption program which does this; the user designates a
directory as his watch folder, and the program checks this for new
files every few seconds, and automatically encrypts anything it finds
there.
It would be relatively easy to write a faceless background version of
BarFly which would turn any abc files dropped into the watch folder
into pictures or MIDI files without any user intervention. That would
work locally, or (given the necessary file permissions) over the net.
Phil Taylor
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