We wish you a GUI Christmas

Please forgive the kitschy title, I have never really gotten much into the Christmas spirit. Anyways, I'm stuck in Stockholm this Christmas, thanks to a last-minute flight cancellation, but I'm making the best of it. Hence, the enormous progress made on TeragonGuiComponents and associated plugins in the last few days. And really, a few uninterrupted days of coding, what more could I possibly ask for?

Yesterday I made big progress doing GUI work for several plugins. Now that I've pinned down a good workflow for doing layout with Pixelmator/Introjucer, I can really just bang them out. Specifically, I finished new GUIs for BeatCounter, HiLoFilter, and NotNotchFilter. I did some casual testing with 64-bit Ableton Live and all of the plugins seem to perform beautifully with their new shiny GUIs. I expect that I will have released new versions of each of these plugins by the end of the week.

I also busted out the old Windows laptop and fixed a few minor issues and got TeragonGuiComponents building with Visual Studio 2013. However, my idea of a nice and relaxing Christmas doesn't exactly include fighting with the retardedness that is Windows development, so I'll likely wait a few days before attempting to port and release the above plugins.

Today I made a GUI for ChaosChimp, a plugin I haven't talked about much here. It's still in beta but will be ready for a 1.0 release soon. Inspired by the Netflix Chaos Monkey, the plugin is designed to make bad things happen to your sequencer. Why on earth would anybody want this? Well, I see ChaosChimp having two main uses:

1. Providing a tool for sequencer developers to simulate naughty plugins in their host.
2. For DJs/Performers to simulate bad things happening to their computer and react accordingly.

That second point is originally why I developed the software. As technology improves, music setups become more complex, and the more complex things get, the more likely they can go wrong. Having backup plans can be the difference between a small glitch and an embarrassing evening.

For instance, one of the things ChaosChimp can do is attempt to crash the host. An easy "backup" for this is having an iPod (or whatever) playing on shuffle on a muted mixer channel. So instead of freaking out when something crashes, one can calmly cross-fade to the MP3 player and restart the sequencer in the meantime. It won't be the best mix of the evening, but it sure beats 60 seconds of silence, right? :)

Anyways, ChaosChimp currently has five different chaos providers, and some basic controls to how often and long the chaos lasts. Before today, this could only be controlled with the sequencer's built-in sliders, but with the new TeragonGuiComponents I was able to whip up a fully-functional GUI in about 2 hours (yes, I timed it).

Enter the chimp

Expect a 1.0 version (along with the releases of the other plugins) sometime after Christmas.