• I’m currently finishing my final project for my computer science studies. It is called “SimView” and is a traffic visualization tool, which is part of the simTD project and which I’m developing for the chair of traffic engineering and control of Technische Universität München. See the screenshot below. Originally I wanted to work on this project in early 2012, but due to time constraints I had to do it now, so I could not work on Zong! as much as I wanted.
• I’m preparing for my future life as a freelance software developer, which will basically start in November 2011, but finally in March 2012 when I’ve finished my very last lecture and when I’ve been awared a M.Sc. degree. Zong! is an important part of this plan, although I’m currently not expecting to earn money with the project in the near future

So stay tuned, Zong! will be much more active again starting in the following month! I can hardly wait to continue with this fun project

Here is a screenshot that shows an exported MusicXML file opened with MuseScore:

• The Zong! Viewer is currently being ported to the Android platform. All the MusicXML loading, layouting and rendering is done on the device, no internet connection is needed. Expect a first public alpha version in April.
• We are also working on the Zong! Web Viewer which allows to embed scores on web pages, without requiring any plugins like Java, Flash, Silverlight, ActiveX or something else. It uses pure HTML and JavaScript. The rendering is done by our server, which can be accessed for free. We are also experimenting to integrate audio playback There will also be a public alpha version in April.

Here is a first screenshot of the Android viewer, just a proof of concept:

The Zong! Converter is free software, based upon the Zong! core, layout and renderer projects. It allows the conversion from MusicXML files into PDF files (much more formats will follow later) and presents no GUI, because it is launched from the command line. This for example allows to provide an online converter on a webpage, so that MusicXML files can be converted without having to install software on the local machine. A first prototype is available on our server (but note, that many files are not supported yet and the layout is often bad. Of course, this will get better in the future).

The Zong! Editor (which is not free software, so don’t look for it in our source code repository) now includes a completely revised user interface, based on the Flamingo ribbon component and a custom L&F, Substance. We are still discussing about the best way to arrange all items, but here is a first screenshot:

I’ll take an exam break for the next three weeks. The next version of Zong! will probably be released on March 5.

I was a little anxious if it was hard to adapt the editor’s tools and commands to the new functional core. It turned out that it is now much easier than before to temporarily change the document’s layout for preview the user’s actions, and undo is really a one-liner:

document.setLayout(oldLayout);

Using the functional core, this can be done for nearly every command and tool, while the mutable core required lots of defensive copies and sometimes confusing undo algorithms for achieving the same thing. This is amazing, and only possible because of the great work of the pcollections project. I can really recommend having a look on this library to all Java developers. Together with a little experience gained in any functional language (like Haskell oder ML), it can (it will!) totally change the way you work with data structures in Java.

It will be released on 2011-09-30 and will include the following features:

• The Zong! Editor to create, modify and playback musical scores
• Edit all important musical notations like notes, articulations and ornaments, clefs, time signatures, key signatures, barlines, lyrics, directions and tuplets
• Support for selections, copy & paste, undo & redo (the last one is trivial to implement thanks to the new functional core )
• Create and modify instrumentations
• Input using the mouse, keyboard or MIDI instruments (stepwise input)

During the v0.5 development process we will publish alpha versions from time to time. One of the next things is an Online Converter for MusicXML to MIDI, PDF and image formats.

The next days we will create a detailled plan for version 0.5. We want to release a usable beta version of the Zong! Editor in October 2011. Of course, one of our main goals is also to improve MusicXML loading and musical layouting during the next months, to make Zong! a competitive viewer for MusicXML documents.

Here is a demo video:

The program can be launched by clicking on the following button:

Have fun!