On Tuesday 16 September 2003 04:05 pm, Robert van Herk wrote: > - is the virtual keyboard needed soon?
I'm just some worthless bum who threw in a few pieces of code and still thinks he has the right to hang around and answer questions like this, even after two or three months without doing anything at all. Just so you know who you're talking to. :) > I am an experienced programmer, but I have not written Linux apps nor > written code in C++ before, so I will have to learn the language while I > am coding... If someone is planning to fix this midi keyboard fast, I > could probably better not touch it... I don't think anyone is likely to touch that for many moons yet to come, so AFAIK it's wide open for the taking. Inexperience is not a problem. They were desperate enough to accept code from *me*. :) > - should it be like a seperate executable? > Should the keyboard be intergrated into Rosegarden, or is it just an > loose executable, that could even be used without Rosegarden? The three amigos will have the right to hold stronger opinions, and you should listen to them and ignore me. For my part, I think you could go either way. I think the best thing might be to do it as a separate project entirely, because it seems to me that if you can do something that Rosegarden can use, any other ALSA-capable sequencer could use it just as easily, and it might appeal to a broad base of users. I had a program like that for Windows years ago. It was difficult to play well, but was better than nothing. I used it for a long time. > - why "for aRTS"? > I read on your website that your software suppotrs aRTS as well as ALSA. > Is there any reason why the description of the task speaks just of aRTS? Probably because it's a really, really old to-do list. I think everyone would agree today that ALSA is what you need to look at. > - Interfacing > Is my idea correct that the keyboard should work as a virtual midi > device, i.e.: a device with it's on MIDI IN and MIDI OUT ports in the > OS? Does anybody know if that's even possible? What good would it do to have a MIDI IN on a virtual keyboard? I'm not the ALSA guy, and haven't ever really looked at the API. Based on incidental knowledge, I'd say you want your keyboard thingie to provide an ALSA input port that programs like Rosegarden can connect to. I think it would be pretty easy to handle that side of things, and I think that if you're providing an ALSA port then any old thing in the world could hook up to it just as easily as Rosegarden could, which is why I'd lean toward a stand-alone app. I think Harmony does this, but I won't swear to it. I'll bet there's something out there already that you could borrow to get some guts to use as a foundation though. It sounds like a good first project to me. No pressure, wide potential appeal, and between KDE/QT and ALSA making it all work would largely be a matter of stringing together the right pre-fabricated parts. > - Coding style > Are there any principles on coding style you use? docs/code/guidelines.txt Most of all, don't be afraid to try. Nobody who can make any claim at all to be a programmer is a worse programmer than I am, and I actually managed to add a whole new feature from scratch. -- Michael McIntyre ---- Silvan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Linux fanatic, and certified Geek; registered Linux user #243621 Confirmed post number: 17785 Approximate word count: 533550 http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Rue/5407/ ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek Welcome to geek heaven. http://thinkgeek.com/sf _______________________________________________ Rosegarden-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] - use the link below to unsubscribe https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rosegarden-devel
