Links #61

Alexandre Prokoudine on 2023 in preview for Libre Arts. Looking forward to Metal support in Blender.

The MuseScore 4.0 announcement video. When I used MuseScore recently for the hymn prints, I didn’t realize it was a new version and had completely forgotten what the old one was like. 4.0 is so much better. Wow.

Tantacrul with an in-depth video on how they made MuseScore 4. This was great, loved it. I wish there were videos like this more often for open source projects. (Maybe there are and I just haven’t seen them.) The new instruments and playback quality are incredible and have me itching to get back into composing, now that I can export audio that will actually sound good.

Tantacrul on designing Leland, MuseScore’s music font. Loved this. Especially liked learning about SCORE.

Oktophonie on engraving changes in MuseScore 4.0. A lot of this is covered by the video, but I still really enjoyed reading through it. Mmm. (Very impressed by the engraving quality in 4.0, too.)

SMuFL, the Standard Music Font Layout. Bookmarking this here in case I ever end up getting into type design for real and want to design my own music notation font.

BlenderBIM, a BIM plugin for Blender. I have no need for this but I wish I did! (Alternate timeline.)

The Visual Dome, AI art from a semi-consistent secondary world. Freaky but fascinating.

Andy Matuschak on cultivating depth and stillness in research. This resonated — both the part about feeling the need to release work frequently and the part about social media making it hard to think slow thoughts and read books. (Some of that might be more my takeaway than things he actually says, by the way.)

David Heinemeier Hansson on why 37signals is largely leaving the cloud for their own servers. Bravo. Decentralization is a good thing, and AWS’s monopoly is a bit worrisome for the future of the internet.

Zach Leatherman on the JavaScript community. I hadn’t seen that only 3% of sites use React and a staggering 77% still use jQuery. Wow. While I do use React at work, I too have felt the disconnect (as is probably clear from some of these link posts) and have often feel at odds with the direction of contemporary frontend engineering. More JavaScript isn’t the answer, at least for me. (Which I say in spite of really liking JS. It’s my favorite language to write code in at the moment.)