Finally I had the opportunity to work with the improved note properties functionality previouslydescribed. This is what I have achieved so far:
There now is a visual representation of wether or not a note is retriggered, which will hopefully make them easier to use as well as more obvious what they do. Also, the color of the notes will be lighter on notes with lower velocity. These changes will make it unnecessary to open the note properties to inspect the velocity and retrigger status of a note. Best of all, it will be possible to select and operate on more than one note at a time, which has been a major niggle of mine.
Hopefully people will come over there and share ideas, issues, questions or songs with each other. I will certainly keep an eye on it and will also be posting news items from this blog.
Today I have expanded the bug reporting dialog to include links to this blog as well as the new subreddit, which is included in the new release 1.0.2:
After four weeks of vacation, I am finally back to my day job and of course working one day a week on Sputter. This year was spent within the borders of Norway (given the current circumstances) and it consisted for the most part of visiting relatives and enjoying the great nature of our country.
During this time I have also thought more about the note properties upgrade, previously mentioned. There is now a complete sketch which will be implemented in the foreseeable future. But first I want to work a bit with user engagement, so the next version will feature links to social media channels in addition to the current option for reporting bugs.
UI design is a complex task, and when you have an idea which seems to make 100% sense while out and about, once you sit down and begin implementing it the devils in the details become clearer. Also, sometimes better options reveal themselves which opens up new possibilities.
As I worked on the new note properties as described in the previous blog post I realised that the velocity value would not make sense on notes which have retrigger off. So I added functionality for a note to adjust its velocity while it is playing. The problem is that in real life scenarios one would probably want velocity changes to be stepless over time, so one can fade individual notes in and out, for example.
Sputter was published to Google Play silently a couple of weeks ago. There was no fanfare and no announcements. This was because there was only a limited number of testers in the alpha and beta stages, and I wanted to catch as many bugs as possible before the “big day”. Today I have notified some relevant news sites, blogs and reddits about its existance. Already, there is a news item up on KVR, and hopefully there will be others too.
Development of Sputter has gone on in my spare time over the last seven years or so. Before that I was working on Vibrafun, Kalimba, and a couple of other apps, soon totaling to ten years of development.
All these years I kept development to myself and a couple of friends and family until the “big day” of release. Posting on my blog and to social media was not prioritized and usually only (hastily) done when something was released.
