Notation Composer and Mac users

[Reinhold H.]

Hi all who use MACs and other PCs than Windows,

As you can imagine we continuously have demands to offer Notation Software on other operating systems than Windows. The demands are growing and for us such an offer is an opportunity.

In this thread as well as in that one, proposals were made what is the best way going forward. However, the only acceptable solution of today is based on third party software. The solutions is either to run a second bootable image using Parallels + Windows, VM Fusion + Windows, Virtualbox + Windows, somehow directly using Codeweavers or others. The key downside is that it costs additional money and/or is complicated to use for someone who is not familiar with those configurations. On our side we are only able to provide basic support for a Windows environment.

Based on the recommendations in this and this other thread we have started an investigation what feasible options we have to offer our software conveniently on other operating systems at low costs. I would like to share shortly the findings here. They are just a snapshot as of today (August 20th, 2014) but given the discussions in the past it might be interesting for some of you to know.

In a nutshell:
We used the free open source package WineHQ. WineHQ meanwhile became very powerful and offers Windows applications to work on Mac OS X, Linux, BSD and Solaris. We used Ubuntu-Linux and were able - with tweaks in the Notation Software - to get Composer 3 installed and running on Ubuntu using the WineHQ package. Clearly, there is still work to be done before we can offer a final solution (from coding, testing, beta test to ordering). But due to the powerful capabilities of WineHQ it is worth spending more investigation effort to see if we can offer a convenient and cheap solution to non-Windows users based on WineHQ.

Please see a screen shot of Composer 3 on Ubuntu-Linux below .

I am going to use this thread to keep you informed about our further directions.

Reinhold

[Reinhold H.]

Hi friends,

as stated in my last post I would like to share the progress on this subject further with you.

Our next step was to test whether the findings of Composer 3 on Ubuntu are reproduceable on other Linux distributions based on WineHQ.
YES, they are. We have now Composer 3 running on an off-the-shelf openSUSE 13.1 and tested playback and recording with a Yamaha keyboard PSR 910.
This again looks very promising. However, there is still a way to go. As you can see from the screen shot below where we have loaded Peter B.'s arrangement of The Fat Man. There are a few bugs in complex arrangements like Peter's when displaying ties, slurs or brackets.

Our next step is to achieve the same status on a Mac based on WineHQ. The outcome of this test will be the final proof point whether we are going to start a project in this direction.

Reinhold

[Reinhold H.]

... and here comes Composer 3 on a MacBook Pro

But as mentioned earlier there are still software changes required for a full product launch. (For the time being the Paralles/VM Fusion + Windows works fine)

Reinhold

[dj]

Looks good! Odd to see the familiar icon on a Mac desktop!

That will open up a whole new market for you (and a very strong one, given the Mac's historic dominance in music software.)

Congratulations.

David

[Reinhold H.]

David, thanks.

We completed the investigation whether Composer and Musician 3 can be ported to a Mac using WineHQ.

The results are fantastic. The answer is a big YES.

Currently we dig into what is the fastest and most effective way to have a Mac version available. The ideas are that we could even create one software build which is able to run on Microsoft Windows and on Apple OS X simultaneously. Something like to have 'OS X + WineHQ' handled similar to just another operating system within the same software build. This would make all our lives very easy. The ordering would be the same and in particular we would be able to keep the same price. For a Mac customer the total price would be the same as for a Windows customer because WineHQ is for free.

As of now I won't make any statement or commitment by when such a software build is available but I can promise you that we do our best.

Reinhold

[Reinhold H.]

Hi all,

meanwhile I changed the status from an "investigation" to a "project".

Further results are that it is possible to have the same software package 1:1 running on Windows and on MAC OS X (Mavericks and future versions).

This concept results in opportunities for customer and us (these are our ideas but not yet finally confirmed):

- a customer can decide whether to run the software on Windows or MAC OS X. No difference when a customer purchases.
- we plan to offer that any customer who purchased a 3.0.1 license for Windows can move this license to a MAC without any additional charge
- we can keep the same prices of the software for MACs
- because usually MAC software is more expensive than Windows software, this is a great opportunity for everybody
- we can use the same proven tools for software creation and delivery. It is mandatory that we do not have additional efforts other than testing.

As mentioned above, these are the ideas subject to be confirmed within the project.

So far we have not yet worked out a project plan, firstly I need to get my arms around those bugs shown in this thread when opening Peter B.'s arrangement of "The Fat Man".

Reinhold

[Reinhold H.]

Hi,

A short update on our MAC tests:

Those red marked bugs from Peter B's Fat Man arrangement (see my former post) are fixed. In addition we have performed overall tests. So far only one display issue was found when opening the Page Setup dialog in Format menu that the shade behind the paper is not nicely dispalyed. This is a little confusing. All other tests went very fine including playing and recording with a Yamaha keyboard (import of device description, sound changes, playing etc). All access tests to the different file structure of the MAC OS X went fine. Composer is fully integraded as other MAC applications are. The software package is 1:1 identical to Windows.

After these findings I am very optimistic to release our products on MAC as part of the next correction version.

Reinhold