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Revisiting a corner of the undo machinery this week, I noticed something I'd never thought about. A user may well see the Undo menu item change while the menu is open in front of them: the text rewrites itself as they read it. I like that. It says that time in Ooloi carries on rather than waiting to be asked.My first thought was that only people working together on the same piece would ever see…
The last post said that before closing the Piece Window I'd go through the dozen or so tickets raised in passing, and that I was enjoying it enormously. The second half held. The first half was wrong about what the list was.It looked like a collection of unrelated small wrongnesses. It was one thing wearing a dozen hats, and the thing is this: a program can fail without telling anyone.When…
The Piece Window is essentially finished. What's left is bits and bobs: a set of rename tests, the shells of the layout windows (for now a title over an empty page, since the page has nothing to put on it yet), one drag-resolution routine that predates the shared one and hasn't been folded into it. Nothing on that list is interesting, which is the point of it being what's left.It's been an intense…
The above is the instrumentarium of Richard Strauss's Elektra, from the 1916 edition published by Adolph Fürstner. I took a photo from my score, which I got in 1979, a lifetime ago. It's in glorious 'Germtalian', typical of the time: an eclectic mixture of Italian, German, and a few bits of Latin thrown in for good measure. Nothing unusual, and contrabassi is still acceptable today, just meno…
The anniversary post ended with a promise that the next stretch would be brighter. So here, by way of keeping it, is Verklärte Nacht.What you're looking at is a string sextet set up in the Piece Window: two violins, two violas, two cellos, their names arriving in German from the Instrument Library, which carries its contents in many languages and supplies whatever the piece prefers. On the…
People occasionally ask how one person builds something this size. The honest answer involves an AI, and since honesty is the whole method here, it's worth describing how that actually works. The reality is less glamorous and more interesting than either the sceptics or the enthusiasts imagine.Ooloi is developed with Claude Code as the primary implementor. It writes a great deal of the code and…
Every so often I ask a language model to paint. Not a diagram, not a chart, but a picture of what it's like to work on Ooloi, and I ask for it in a particular register: chiaroscuro, with anachronisms. I use the style deliberately. Music engraving is an old art, with five centuries of accumulated craft governing where a mark sits on a stave, and the joke of the modern hardware bolted into a…
What you're looking at is a test. It sets up a Full Score with two players, Violin I and Viola, then deletes Violin I from inside that score, and checks that Violin I is gone from the score but still present in the piece. That distinction, remove from this layout versus remove from the piece, is one of the many things the Piece Window has to get exactly right. The whole idea is to let the engraver…
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Two days from now it'll be two years since the first Ooloi commit. I've been working on the Piece Window, which is where a piece becomes visible and where you shape it: setting it up, creating scores and parts, and much more besides. It's a rich window, rich enough to do away with the modes and dialogs other programs need for this kind of work. And somewhere in the middle of building it, I noticed…
This is the door handle the previous blog post was talking about. There remain a few more bells and whistles to add to it, like favourites and a directory navigation dropdown, but this perfectly boring dialog handles a lot of complexity under the hood, so the user doesn't have to.Oh, and the .ooloi files are empty – I haven't secretly imported huge scores without telling anyone. No, that…
You go to open a piece. You reach for the menu, you pick 'Open', and a dialog appears showing you what's there. Nothing could be more ordinary. Every program you've ever used does some version of this, and you've stopped seeing it, the way you've stopped seeing door handles.Except this isn't the dialog your operating system would have given you. It looks close enough that most people will never…
Three days ago I posted the road map: everything left before the real visible work begins, and the claim that it was all plumbing. Here's the receipt. Since then, six tickets have closed.The pattern across them is worth recording. Each was scoped narrowly, and each widened into something general before it closed. This is not scope creep; it's the opposite. The cost of doing the general thing sits…
Today's work: the floating indicator shown on screen when connected to another Ooloi, or to an Ooloi server.It pulses in a muted green during the connection, then fades out. No sharp edges; more organic.Nominally perhaps thanks to Octavia Butler, but primarily because I think a good user interface should recede into the background. <mp> rather than ffffz. I think you know. [...]
Ooloi is now a real, configurable desktop application with a solid collaborative backbone. The engine underneath is finished and waiting, and the obvious question is why I'm spending my days on things like palette positioning and collaboration features at this stage? From the outside it must look as though I'm finding ever more inventive ways to avoid the thing I actually built Ooloi to do.'You…
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Every so often a category problem appears around Ooloi.If this is not a product blog, what is it? If it refuses the usual commercial language, is it research? If it's full of architectural detail, references to old engraving books, implementation notes, screenshots, AI, undo, Wagner tubas, and the occasional indecorous joke, what sort of thing is the reader supposed to be looking at?A fair…
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As it's architecturally relevant, I thought I'd let Claude write this (very nerdy) blog post from its perspective. It's entirely unedited. Topic: time travelling in music notation. Ludwig didn't have Undo (and it shows) Peter Bengtson writes this blog. This entry is the exception. He asked me — Claude Opus 4.7 Adaptive, an AI assistant made by Anthropic — to write a post about undo and…
With thanks to Kim Bastin in Melbourne, who put it in the post. Spring has finally arrived in Stockholm. I mention it only because there's a quality of north European light returning after winter that genuinely affects how work feels.The past two weeks have been quiet on the Ooloi front, code-wise. I'm being onboarded into a large AWS project at work, where my decisions will eventually affect…
Elaine Gould's Behind Bars is here. Ted Ross's The Art of Music Engraving and Processing isn't, because there's nowhere to order it from. The print edition has been dead for decades. Hansen Books no longer functions in any meaningful commercial sense. Ted Ross himself is dead. Second-hand copies surface occasionally on AbeBooks or eBay, usually in poor condition, usually at absurd prices, usually…
Will Ooloi do French beaming?Someone asked me this the other day. Yes. Stave-line masking too. I built this once before, in 1996; there's no architectural reason Ooloi shouldn't have it. Both fall out of treating the beams, and the spaces between them, as something that sits on top of the stave rather than alongside it. [...]
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Ooloi runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux. Each platform gets its own self-contained bundle, built separately on a machine running the target architecture natively. You download the one for your platform. It works.On Windows and Linux there's nothing remarkable to report. On the Mac, however, Ooloi ships an Apple Silicon bundle. No Intel Mac support. This isn't controversial by any means; every Mac…
I'm writing this from a mountainside near Palermo on Easter Eve, the day the liturgical calendar leaves empty. Yesterday was the Crucifixion. Tomorrow is the Resurrection. Today is the silence between them; the day when, if you take the story seriously, God is dead and nobody yet knows what comes next.Yesterday, one of my closest friends hanged himself. He is now unconscious on a ventilator.…