In the process of converting the entire project across to the Visual Studio 2008 .Net platform, while simultaneously learning to think in C# and VB.Net instead of Object Pascal (kind of like thinking in your head in your mother tongue and speaking a new language out loud) I’ve also been able to consider some of the issues in relation to Microsoft’s Windows 7.

Most of the visitors I get to the MixAction website, according to the server stat’s, are still running Windows XP.  No surprises there, though the three visitors running Windows 3.11 did raise my eyebrows a bit! 

When Microsoft released the Windows 7 beta on MSDN I downloaded it and installed it in a VM.  A couple of issues immediately raised themselves.  Windows 7 did not like the “virtual hardware” after the “additional tools” were installed.  A problem as this meant no audio support, which makes it rather hard to test an audio application.

So, into another box on it’s own and I was able to give it a full run with MixAction with audio support.

Not a single problem I’m glad to say, and I’m extremely pleased with Windows 7 as well, very sharp for a beta.

This is however where things get sticky, believe it or not.  Vista and Windows 7 introduce the Core Audio API in adjunct to plain vanilla DirectX.  There are some great features in there I’d really like to include, but then there’s the issue of the Core Audio API not running on XP.

Ooops.

Like it or not one finds oneself in a bit of a dilemma.  The additional stuff is extremely useful, yes I could conditionally compile or even load assemblies according to the version of the OS, however, from experience looking at other multi-media software user forums, the moment Group Y gets a cool feature Group X wants it too and to blazes with the fact that they need to upgrade their OS in order to do so.

Plus, it is additional maintenance doing it this way and such code tends to be a sore spot when it comes to little bugs raising their heads.

So, for now, sadly, I’m holding off on the neat Core Audio features until until I notice the number of XP visitors has begun to dwindle.  I’m not planning on holding my breath for this event to transpire. 

But in time, they will.

I’m one a, hopefully last time before public release, icon shopping tour again.  MixAction has rather specific needs in terms of interface icons, or glyphs.  While it has some document type paradigms very few of these fit comfortably and fail to deliver the desired metaphor.  So I’ve purchased a number of packs, based on screenshots, from a few vendors.  Is it just me or are a few icons in many of these packs really good quality and the rest utter crap?  Another thing.  How come so many of these icons look the same (read colour shifted) yet claim to be 100% original designs?  Who’s fooling who?

I mean – I can colour shift a design in Fireworks in around 3 seconds so I tend to resent paying for an “original” design that was clearly lifted and shifted from a free collection or commercial collection by another icon designer.

The simple solution of course is paying for custom  icon design.  That’s going to have to wait however until after a release iteration.  So I’m looking at yet another collection, which do seem to be extremely good and have a high price tag, comparatively,  to boot.  They are also extremely specific. 

Scott Kane

The bigger the hat, the smaller the property – Australian proverb

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I’m not complaining here, this was the arrangement when I started and I’m delighted to be working in this arrangement, both of us are.

Bob Walsh has 47Hats.com as his blog domain name.  It’s a “nail on the head” domain name.  It implies the reality of a micro ISV and the fact that, probably more than most micro businesses, the principal performs a plethora of roles that the average punter never pauses for a moment to consider.

And why would they?

This year, 2008, I made a decision.  It’s been well documented throughout this blog.  I won’t go painfully over the details of that decision in this post other than to say I decided to take the idea for a new product and build a multi-media software company.  While the idea for the product is not unique, has some competitors and is something I have great affection for I was, and am, adamant that this time around it was a company I was building, not just a product.

In June this year I admit that in some respects I got a little bit lost in terms of bringing the product to market.  I can’t resist a challenge.  So June saw me trying to bring a product to market in 30 days.  Very few of the participants of this “challenge” realized their goals.  Though some did.

For me the 30 days galvanized me into producing a product that I labeled prototype.  The inner analyst in me refused to allow me to release it.  I think some people were disappointed in this decision (developers following the 30 days RSS feed).

But I wasn’t.  For me it was an affirmation that indeed my mindset had changed this time for the better.  There is more to “quality” than “shine”.

For me the 30 days represented  405 man hours of solid product development.  I don’t take breaks when I’m coding solid.  Fourteen hours a day – with a few days out for “good behavior” or necessity. 

As you know I did not release.  I kept plowing on.  Near enough was not good enough.

It’s true the product “worked”, but there were banshees under the hood that for the months that followed would continue to threaten escape if I released the software, until I made an abrupt and arguably perilous change in direction to banish them.

In some respects, I admit, I tend to be a little to much of a perfectionist, a neat-nut and a egotist.  I can’t help that, it’s my nature, but I do try to analyze it and keep the knowledge foremost in my mind.

That knowledge is this.  I code UI elements like a magpie collects shiny trinkets.  It’s almost a psychotic addiction.

For me a piece of software is more than just the code, a basic UI and a job done for the user.  For me it’s an experience.  It must empower and it must feel right.  But it must be more than “right” it’s got to make the person using it feel like they can and want to do more – and feel proud of what they did.

When people look at my software I’m forever disappointed because of this.  I set myself up for an emotional fall.  I point out a widget or UI element that took hours or days of coding or design to get their impression and nearly always get a “yeah – it’s nice.”  There is nothing unique to me in this experience, I’m sure we all get it,

Such is the life of the developer.  Get it wrong and they’ll not be short in telling you.  Get it right and you’ll probably never be told a thing.  Even though most of us get most things utterly wrong in this respect – it’s a dilemma that few take the time to analyze.  Maybe it’s the reason most mISV’s and a good proportion of ISV’s don’t pay heavy attention to UI – particularly on Windows?

Linux application developers are exempt in this equation.  It seems UI rarely gets any attention to detail on that platform.

I Coded On.

It’s been, since June 1st 2008 146 work days. Average of 15 hours each day. A total of 2044 man hours.

MixAction has not been released at the date of writing.

I spent much of this time writing bug fixes for a poor implementation of COM that my compiler handed me.

It wasn’t the audio library, I tested the results in C++ and VB 6 and both returned correct values.  Delphi did not – at least no consistently and nearly always a different value.  I then discovered that COM has been broken with no intention to repair it in Delphi since version 4 (despite years of requests to attend to it by several COM based solution providers).  In short, I was screwed on this one.  I could of course hand code DirectX and implement the solution that way – throwing away a grand of investment in an excellent audio API and release sometime in 2012.  Or I could ship warts and all and hope nobody noticed.

Not bloody likely

When you are fighting with a compiler and it’s associated primary libraries on something that is fundamental to the core of your own application you are, in effect, building a house – of cards.

With a great deal of hesitation, deep consideration and a healthy dose of fear I moved IDE’s and began to embrace the .Net framework after signing up with BizSpark from Microsoft.

Not everything is perfect on .Net.  I’d be an idiot to make that statement.  But my application core – the audio engine (or engines as in this case) – is now solid.  No more calls to COM coming back weird and not wonderful.  No call to COM and getting 7, 11, 57 or 1098 back in a call to an OLE_Bool (I exaggerate not).

There Were Other Gains

While my domain knowledge is reasonably good I managed to amass more information from the “horses mouth”.  Beta testers, other developers and my own new experiences.  The nature of how the product worked, it’s assumptions in some respects, evolved for the better.

Under .Net Reflection became a prize unattainable without enormous pain in Delphi.  I will expand on this in the coming weeks.

Suffice to say for now – true separation of the audio from the GUI, a vital design for this product, has now been fully achieved without pain and best of all it’s native to the application.  Clean, neat and tidy.  What else could a neat nut want?

There are other major changes that I’ll document as begin to move now towards a finished product.  Database decisions, which one, should I use one at all and other decisions I’ve made.

One thing is for sure.  November saw me embrace something new, something I was accused of as seeing as “Oooh – What’s this new shiny thing” on the Business of Software forum.  That new has meant that while November saw me head down and bum up inside a new IDE learning new tricks out of necessity, that particular 30 days just past in November has paid dividends.

MixAction will not be released in 2008.  It will be released in 2009 and the first release will be a simple implementation on the surface.  But through a variety of tools and technologies iterative enhancement after release is now possible without breaking anything fundamental, at least until a Version 2+ release.

I expect, when I release, for a bunch of folks to declare “what was all the fuss about” and in a sense that’s the beauty of it.  What’s underneath now gives me flexibility to implement features in the future with more precision and assurance.

I wanted a product that could grow comfortably, that, through iterative development, would please customers through the power of “new things”.  I wanted something that would take the playing field the product will exist in and break the paradigms.  There are existing competitors (beyond that nut who attempted to clone) that I want to try to play catch up with me, ultimately, and not the other way around.

Business, like politics, is a game.  A deadly serious game without question.  Akin to chess.  I do not see software development and the business of software like fishing, or farming or the other analogies so often used.  It’s chess.  A new product, to my mind, should be a reckoning – not an attempt to harvest in Autumn by hoping it will rain this Spring.

Scott Kane

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1. What is MixAction?
   MixAction is a Windows software product (Win 2000, XP and Vista or above) for theatrical live audio playback.
2. Why are you blogging about it?
   Transparency.  The idea is two fold.  One it keeps me moving forward as I chart my own progress, secondly it’s my hope that it the blogging process assists others starting up in their efforts.  I also hope it encourages others to start their own blogs and blog about the development of their own products.
3. Wasn’t this supposed to be finished in 30 Days or something?
   No.  The idea was to see if a product could be written and released in 30 Days.  That 30 Days was from June 1st 2008 to June 30th 2008.  What I ended up with was a working prototype for the product.  Given the complexity of multi-media software, the requirements for live playback and the necessity to make it genuinely simple to use while working using paradigms that fit with live theater (theatre) in particular, 30 Days simply wasn’t enough time to do the product justice.  So I bit the bullet and held of releasing and instead continued to refine the product.
4. So you’ve abandoned the idea of “release early”?
   Not at all.  The defintion of “release early” is certainly not “30 Days”.  While a simple product can be written in that time frame a complex product can not.  It can take months and even years.  At this point though I expect to release this product this year, though I am not prepared to even estimate the actual release time.
5. Isn’t the audio playback software market crowded with freebies like Windows Media Player, iTunes, WinAmp and so on?
   In the context of just audio playback yes.  But if you have ever done live audio, or theatrical live audio – as I have – then you would know that using one of these tools for this purpse is quirky, unreliable and extremely limiting. Many live audio people are still using CD’s and fighting with mechnical failures, disk skipping, bad labelling and human error. MixAction’s name was chosen because Mixing Action is exactly what it does, further it does it in a manner that supports the notion of Acts and Scenes and allows for automation and project building in order to minimize mistakes and mechanical failures during a performance.  Increasingly MixAction leans more towards being a simple to use live performance DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) rather than a “player” given the toolkit the software is shipping with right from release.
6. You make a lot of noise on this blog about “domain knowledge”.  What’s yours?
   I’ve been involved in software development since my early twenties at a professional level.  I’ve been an ISV before – though at that time the term was not used – the term mISV wasn’t coined until a few years ago.  So I have several decades of experience as a developer.  I began programming however when I was sixteen.  My first product was a music synthesizer using the Vic 20 and later the Commodore 64′s SID chip.  Yes, I actually used this as an “instrument” live in a band and on multitrack recordings.  I began doing voice over work in high school.  I appeared first on an a parody production of Jeff Waynes “War of the Worlds” and later on an original musical production of  “The Time Machine.”  Later I gained a certificate in radio broadcasting in Melbourne and did voice overs for radio commercials for Melbourne’s 3AW and 3XY.  My voice can also be heard on many training and sales videos for software developers on the Internet as well as some DVD’s available in Australia to companies for staff training.  It also appears on many telephone answering services.  In addition I hold certification as an audio engineer and own and operate a small recording studio, used primarily by myself, in my office.  So I’ve worked as an audio engineer and as a live sound engineer.  Most of these roles where performed in addition to my full time employment as a programmer for several multi-national companies.  I have also worked at night as a nightclub DJ in the 1980′s and have taught computer related subjects and programming at tertiary level as I hold some limited teaching certifications.  I have also taught and assisted startup companies in the process of business development.  I guess you could say a wide variety of “domains” here.   Needless to say my work in live audio meant direct hands on experience in theatrical evnvironments including plays, musicals, pageants and as the voice and music for county “fairs” or “shows” as they are called downunder.

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