Noel:
I think this is an excellent idea, whether there is enough interest in others to make it a serious pursuit remains to be seen. Two comments:
I. The manipulation of library items may possibly be automated to some degree with scripting, especially if you have the task of going back and mining/cobbling libraries from existing files. I have found AutoIt (http://www.hiddensoft.com) to be extremely effective with Finale for automating predetermined tasks, and I am considering building up a resource library for each interface I want to automate. AutoIt is open source and well documented and its development is being shepherded in a very sensible way; the documentation is very good. Thus, if a group of Finale users were to agree to pursue something along this line for the purpose of creating an open source type library system, a scripting element could be a very useful tool. In this area I would be pleased to assist.
II. Moreover, source control is an effective way to manage and distribute files. The scheme that you are starting to outline would lend itself very well to a source-control delivery structure. Assuming you have no programming experience, the concept of source control may be foreign to you. To get a quick graphical picture of what source control can do, see the screen shots and text for the Windows client: Tortoisesvn at:
http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/
They have a mac plug in as well.
I've made a similar suggestion about using source control to manage building libraries for scripting on Finale's Scripting forum, my suggestion has not resulted in further comment other than a response from someone associated with Finale, a developer? I'd be happy to run a free Subversion or CVS server where people, previously identified and registered, could keep their library in synchronization with the repository as well as make contributions. This would be something of an open source effort focused on Finale.
If you would like to chat about this, please do not hesitate to contact me directly.
John --
John Poole
Editions Poole http://www.editionspoole.com _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
