>I promised to evaluate Skink; I did so on a local >Windows XP box with the latest JRE installed.
For comparison, here's what I found on MacOS X 10.2.1, Titanium Powerbook 867 MHz. >1/ After I doubleclicked on the Jar file, it took 5 >seconds for Skink to startup. About 8 secs. >2/ When clicking on a menu item that needs to open a >dialog window, such as "Open" or "About", it takes >about 3 seconds. Open too fast to measure, but About was quite slow. >3/ In the right pane, when the name of the tune is >selected, it is displayed in brown on dark blue (I guess), >it was not readable. Displayed in black against the (user modifiable) selection colour. Perfectly legible as long as the selection colour is not too dark. >4/ When Skinks plays a tune with different endings, on >the repeat both endings get played. The same when >exported to midi. Played correctly for me. >5/ When I click on "Close" in the "File" menu, not only >the currently opened file is closed, but the whole >application. Yes. Lots of single-document programs do that though. >6/ When displaying lyrics under the staff, for no >apparent reason whole measures get skipped. > >Try this example: > >X:1 >T:Hama'avir Banav >M:3/4 >L:1/8 >K:C > C/C/C/ (ED E)F | G4 z c/c/ | (E2 F/E/D/E/ A)G | >w: Ha-ma-'a-vir** ba- | nav bein giz- | rei ***** yam | > F2 z/F/(3F/F/F/ dc | BA (GD) z D/D/ | G2 (GD EG/F/) | >w: suf et rod-de-fei-hem ve\-et | son\-ne-ei-hem* bit-hom- | mot ti- **** | That doesn't work in BarFly either. The alignment is disrupted because bar lines in the lyric are treated as words. Also because neither the program nor I knows what \- means. (It's not one of the TeX escape sequences, and if it means the hyphen is to be treated literally why bother, since the hyphen gets displayed anyway?) After editing these oddities out it displayed correctly. >7/ When editing a tune, and selecting "Play" from the menu, >you get "No Tunes To Play." Only if you do your editing without selecting a tune in the index panel. Once selected by clicking on it the tune always plays. >8/ [DFGB] is displayed with the F and G overlapping. Yes. >9/ Tunes with a typo or unsupported syntax in them are >completely rejected. No way to display or play them partially. Yes. My pet grouse is that the Open dialog doesn't seem to work properly (or maybe I just don't understand it, as it's not a standard Mac construct). Whole areas of my disk appear to be unavailable, and I have to use the Finder to move files to places where Skink can see them. Phil Taylor To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
