MarbleMice.com

It has been a quiet week. Spent a few hours refactoring SpiderSynth and tonight have removed some adsense from this site and put up and text link to spiderflock.com. This site is not exactly high traffic but is should help spiderflock.com start to gain a little bit more traffic.

I have not started work on any new features just yet and imagine I have another week or two refactoring to go.

A quiet few days as I had a trip visiting family and then some recovery days from the trip.

SpiderSynth wise I am into a bit of a refactor mode at the moment. The code base has reached the size that a more proper separation of UI and “other stuff” is needed. Yep it is time to use the trusty Model View Controller paradigm. Code was not set up using this design pattern mostly because at the start I was experimenting with both Java and the idea for this app. Now the code base is gradually growing I need to gradually knock the code into shape.

A quick line count reveals the total code base measures at 5398 lines. Actually that is smaller than I thought particularly given the verbosity of Java and that there is considerable amount of machine generated code - thanks netbeans for saving me from having to type that.

I am rolling over the next feature to add in my mind, it is a fair amount of work so until I am committed to implementing I wont discuss it here.

You may well have stumbled upon this blog through a search engine, so for those of you who do not know Spider Synth is program the lets you create sounds (Synthesize them) and then export them out as wav files. You can find out more and get the latest release from spiderflock.com.

It is really an piece of beta software but then what software isn’t these days. The release philosophy is release early and often meaning each release adds only a few number of features but you get the additions happening fairly frequently.

In the latest release, version 0.15, I have added a an extra wave form to use and fixed a small number of bugs to do with rendering various the generated sound.

Just a quick update for spider synth, this time I have added a noise effect. Get it over the spiderflock.com

I am always on the lookout for a nice desktop editor for writting blog posts in. I have used windows live writer for some time but find it a little slow to start up and slow to keep up with my typing once I add images - admittably my laptop is starting to age not but it is not that old. So it has fallen out of favour for all but the shortest of posts. BlogDesk seems to be a popular alternative.

This is my first post using it. So far it seems faster in the editing stakes even when I added a few test images (now removed). So far I have not been able to figure out if it can edit static pages on a blog but that is not really a deal killer.

Test post finished :)