The Deadline is July 31st

I’m writing this blog post on my phone with a bluetooth keyboard and the WordPress app for Android that I’ve never tried before. So far, pretty good. My LG G6 seems more responsive that the old iPad I tried using before. Unfortunately the screen is significantly smaller on my phone, but I will manage.

So I’m continuing to work on that music-generating software that I hope to turn into a business. My deadline is July 31st of this year (2019). By the end of July, the app must be presentable, either to advertise it and open it to limited paid beta-testing, or to seek interest from investors. (Or both, I guess.) That gives me about 5.5 months to build the first version of the app. If the app cannot be completed by that date, it will have to go onto the back-burner. Because money. Can’t afford to spend the entire year tinkering with it if it will need a significant more amount of work to be presentable.

At the moment, I’m working on the “music / MIDI note editor” part of the app. It will be a browser-based web app (at least the first version of it), and I’m programming the editor in JavaScript using the WebGL library three.js and jQuery for the GUI. (I’ve seen developers argue that jQuery is outdated, but for prototyping I think it will work fine.) The midi editor will be a lot like the “MIDI animator” I programmed with jMonkey engine; I’m using a lot of my code from there, translating it from Java to JavaScript. Check out my twitch channel if you’re curious to see some of this [often boring] programming process.

Hoping to get the editor part done by the end of next week, March 1st. Then I’ve got to start thinking about how to get the browser to play sounds. MIDI synths from one’s operating system are no longer supported by most browsers, so it may be a matter of using JavaScript and a bunch of little MP3 sounds, or utilizing the WebMIDI API (which I don’t know much about yet). We’ll see. 162 days left!