What we need now:

• a meta-list: i.e. a site which ranks the rankings. How do I know that Urbanspoon is the best ranking? (I suppose this could always be Google.)
• more open APIs. Open APIs may seem like a strategic no-no but actually they’re a big yes: they’re a signal about the value and quality of your data. More importantly, they amplify your signal too. Everytime someone creates a Twitter app, there’s the Twitter brand in play again. (I want Urbanspoon to have an open API so someone can write a trending application for it. Their implementation on this isn’t enough for me!)

Every year I have searched for an emerging, quality FOSS notation product. Musescore is that product. Certainly, Musescore is young software, it crashes occasionally, it is a little glitchy, there are a few things I would like it to do that it doesn’t do.

But I would prefer to concentrate on the positives. It’s been a long wait for those of us who can’t justify the (considerable) expense of pay music scoring software. Using Musescore, it feels like the wait is worth it. At its core, Musescore is a multi-platform, WYSIWYG FOSS music notation editor. I think that’s unprecedented. Previously FOSS notation software was either too basic, platform-specific, or non-WYSIWYG. Better, Musescore is mostly very intuitive, well-designed, and offers very high levels of customisation of the score. They are aiming very high. I used it to score a complicated piano arrangement with loads of weird tuplets, exploded staves and unusual grace notes. It came through with aplomb.

If I were Sibelius or Finale, I would be quaking in my boots. I think Musescore is already miles better than Finale Notepad, Finale’s “free” version of its product. It’s better because it doesn’t come with a raft of restrictions which limit it to simple scoring. And while it may not have some of the advanced features offered by the two incumbent providers, it seems only a matter of time. Many of these features are non-critical, such as precision in MIDI playback and quantized MIDI input.

I believe it’s only a matter of time because Musescore has pushed into the “viable alternative” territory. In the same way that programs like Inkscape, OpenOffice, and Firefox are completely viable alternatives to their pay cousins (and often better), Musescore already offers features that demand to be taken seriously. Musescore is already a perfectly viable program for many relatively complex notation tasks. Off such a creditable base, Musescore deserves to garner the community input that will allow it to be the complete alternative to any pay product.

So if you thought notation software was something you couldn’t afford, try Musescore. I think you’ll be very pleased.

And to start a renovation. This blog is now past its sixth birthday, so time to ditch the old design, (based on Michael Heilemann’s Kubrick,) and bring in the new.

I’ve used Srini’s beautifully-coded Plainscape as the basis of the new design with aesthetic modifications. The sidebar uses the excellent Delicious Plus, Wickett Twitter Widget, and Picasa Photos widgets. I am running Wordpress version 2.9.

I went to their website. It is a true study in absolute shitness. You can do better than this with a five-year old chimpanzee and Microsoft Word. I don’t know how they managed to block out half their heading but they have. Of course, it’s perfect branding for them – it says cheap, it says Asian (this is a definite positive) it says cheap and cheap some more. I don’t know why anyone would go into computer hardware, it’s such a race to the bottom – margins are wafer thin and the stock’s superseded almost as soon as you’ve bought it. Great for the consumer though…

What I’m trying to work out is, did these guys:
a) slap up the shittiest website they possibly could because this is genuinely the extent of their style
b) maintain a shitty-looking website because at some point they realised that having a shitty website was the perfect way of saying “we are Asian and we are cheeeeaap”
c) pay some branding consultants a quarter of a million bucks to do market research and then engineer them the shittiest looking website since the early 1990s.

I’m guessing it might have started out as a) but progressed to b) or c) because these guys are obviously not amateurs – ten years in the game, 17 stores (they even give you how many square metres the store is – so useful) and big expansion plans too.

In any case, I love their branding and they’re totally getting my patronage!

–UPDATE–
I have just discovered that MSY’s website and PDFs are so unreadable as to have spawned their own fanpage, which takes MSY’s data and puts it into a more legible, aesthetically pleasing format… hilarious… check out MSY but Readable

1. Where’s the scrollbars? This isn’t intentional is it?
2. I don’t want programs to decide for me which language I want to type in. That’s what the language toggle in OSX is for. I particularly don’t want Firefox to change my language back to Japanese / English almost every time I enter a new text box. I have another program (JEDict) that also thinks it knows what language I want to type in. Shits me up the wall.
3. RSS link to NetNewsWire doesn’t work.
4. Not so keen on that magic address bar thingo. (You can probably switch this off, but I didn’t get that far.)

Now, off to Hendrix.