Several users have complained that it’s difficult to figure out how to get Accompanist to play anything. To help new users get started, I’ve written a tutorial.

As always, feel free to email me with any questions or suggestions.

Sometimes, new technology can trip you up In a recent effort to automate the build process for Accompanist, I wrote a script that would automatically set the program’s version number in the ‘About’ window and in the ReadMe file. Being a little overzealous, I decided to also include the Subversion revision number, so that the full version number would read ‘Version 1.0.3 (Revision 646)’.

Unfortunately, Sparkle, the automatic update framework Accompanist uses, doesn’t like version numbers formatted that way. So when version 1.0.3 of Accompanist would launch, it would see that the latest version was 1.0.3 instead of ‘1.0.3 (Revision 646)’, and it would attempt to update to that version.

So, for the time being, I’ve switched back to the old version numbering scheme. My apologies for any problems this has caused. I’ll be more careful about messing with my build scripts in the future

Today, I released version 1.0.3 of Accompanist. This version fixes a couple of small bugs:

• Resize cursors are now drawn correctly for SmartNoteEvents in the bottom track.
• Chord names in Chord Event Inspector sheet are no longer editable.

In addition, version 1.0.3 fixes a strange bug that occurred only when running iShowU screen capture software. While recording a screencast, newly created songs would not be drawn until the user resized the window. The new version fixes that problem, which means that I’ll be able to post some screencast tutorials soon.Version 1.0.3 also removes the default Cmaj chord for new songs. I originally added the default chord so that new users could more quickly figure out how to make Accompanist play notes. However, the support emails I’ve received over the last few weeks suggest that the default chord just made things more confusing, so I’ve removed it.

That’s all for now—enjoy the update, and let me know if it causes any problems.

Today, I released Accompanist Version 1.0.2. This version fixes a crash on Mac OS X 10.4.11.

The crash was caused when Times.dfont wasn’t present in /System/Library/Fonts/. The new version fixes this by loading the font from Resources bundle. Unfortunately, this increases the size of the download from 1 MB to 2.2 MB. Still a relatively small download, though, so I’m not too worried about it

I want to thank the users who emailed me to let me know about the crash. Once I knew about it, the problem was easy to fix, and I was able to post an update very quickly.

Version 1.0.2 also replaces my home-grown Check for Updates system with the Sparkle framework. From the user’s perspective, everything should work about the same, except the appearance of the Check for Update dialogs will change a bit.

I want to thank the users who have emailed me about Accompanist’s interface. My goal is to make Accompanist as intuitive and easy-to-use as possible. Unfortunately, I’ve gotten so used to the way Accompanist is now that it’s difficult for me to tell if parts of the interface are counterintuitive or difficult to use.

So if you can’t figure out some part of the program, or if you think some part of the program could be better designed, please email me. The more suggestions I get, the better I’ll be able to tweak the interface.