This is something I wanted to blog about since last week, but now I found time for it.
Have you ever heard of tafiti.com? It is Microsoft’s attempt for a showstarter for their Silverlight product. Silverlight is supposed to be a competitive product to Macromedia Flash, uhm sorry Adobe of course 
So tafiti is using Silverlight and shows how much bling-bling one can have on his webpage. The background is the Microsoft Live search engine, so you’re supposed to get the same results.
Ok, here is how it looks like when I was searching for myself on tafiti:
This looks very clean and polished I have to admit. You can even arrange and sort results on the right side. But I wanted to point out something else, meaning the “Tree View”. I was very excited about it. Did the search engine maybe filter the results and combine it into some logic? What would this logic be? Ordered by hit probability? Ordered by webpages? Well, I had expected anything, but take a look yourself:
As the name said, it is a Tree View! A tree which shows your result.
Now anybody in the world, tell me again, that Microsoft has no sense for humor….
Some of you already know that since some time I try to learn how to play the piano. Although I bought the Cubase application from Steinberg, I was very unhappy with the startup time. It took around one minute just to be able to start playing. In case you want to rehearse a little bit, that is very inconvenient.
As a developer only one solution comes to your mind: “Write your own stuff”. As I am more into developing the background and engines, I investigated on the MIDI C++ support on Windows and I was fairly surprised how easy it is to get reasonable results. These have been integrated into a little Qt library which handles all native MIDI events for you. Since the GPL exception added by Trolltech with the Qt 4.3.2 release I am now also able to publish this code under BSD license, so feel free to do with it, whatever you like to.
Ok, that explains one thirth of the topic, but why Meep? It has multiple backgrounds. First is, I wanted to quote a friend of mine, as we had some long discussions about libmidi3.so But mostly it was because of the reason that this is the first thing coming to your mind when you think of MIDI. MIDI? Isn’t that this crap, which only does meep, meep? It always takes some effort to get usable results out of your MIDI device and/or application. Finally I wanted to get rid of the “Kald-” prefixes like in Kaldience and Kaldile.
For code and examples continue reading…
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