I’ve just finished and uploaded the tutorial for the Scale Finder:
See all of the tutorial videos in the ongoing Chordious 2 Tutorial playlist.
Enjoy!
/jon
I’ve just finished and uploaded the tutorial for the Scale Finder:
See all of the tutorial videos in the ongoing Chordious 2 Tutorial playlist.
Enjoy!
/jon
I’ve just finished and uploaded the tutorial for the Chord Finder:
See all of the tutorial videos in the ongoing Chordious 2 Tutorial playlist.
Enjoy!
/jon
It’s been just over a week since I released Chordious 2.0, and already I have the first minor update!
The primary purpose of this release is to unblock all of the users in countries that use commas instead of periods as decimal marks (ie. 1/2 = 0,5 instead of 0.5). Turns out that little thing caused all kinds of havoc in Chordious.
Thanks to the two users who reported the issues that pointed me in the right direction!
I also took the opportunity to clean up a few other things, and add a couple of features that (may) pave the way for creating a portable, USB-drive friendly version of the app, and publishing to the Windows Store.
Here’s the full change list for 2.0.1:
Update to the latest version of Chordious today, and keep the feedback coming!
/jon
As promised, I’ve begun recording video tutorials on how to use Chordious 2.0. First up is a basic tutorial for getting the app installed:
After that, we have a basic tutorial on the quickest way to get started with Chordious, namely to find chord diagrams for your favorite instrument and exporting them as image files.
I will continue to announce new tutorial videos as I create them, and add them to an ongoing Chordious 2 Tutorial playlist.
Stay tuned and enjoy!
/jon
Yes, it’s finally here. Three and a half years since I first got this crazy idea of writing an app to generate chord diagrams, two years since I finished Chordious 1.0 and I decided to rebuild Chordious from scratch, and after 185 commits to GitHub, 46 preview releases, and at some 43,401 lines of code, Chordious 2.0 is done!
I’d like to give a big thanks to my wife Anne for not just tolerating all the time I put into this little app, but encouraging me to keep working on it. Another big thanks to all of the users who have sent me feedback over years, especially my number one beta tester Brian L.
Thanks for all of the feedback!
This is a big milestone, but I’m not done yet. I’ve got plans for more features, support for other platforms, and so much more. But for the immediate future, stay tuned for some long awaited video tutorials.
Try out Chordious today!
/jon
It’s been a while since I posted last, and a lot of work has gone into Chordious’ style editor in that time. So today, I thought I’d give a quick update, and I’m proud to say that all of the major work that I planned out for Chordious 2.0, both UI and features, is done as of a couple days ago. It’s all there in the latest preview build.
My focus now is on final fit and finish as well as some dedicated user testing before I cut the official 2.0 build. I’ll fix whatever minor bugs and inconveniences I find, and I should have the official build out before the end of the month.
After the build is ready, my next steps will be to refresh the website and then to start production on a long-awaited series of video tutorials to walk everyone through Chordious and all of its powerful features.
The end is in sight! Stay tuned!
/jon
It’s here. It’s finally here. The long-awaited style editor.
Well… at least the first half of it anyways.
In the last post, I talked about how the style editor was one of the biggest remaining undertakings for Chordious 2. It’s taken a lot of experimentation, testing, and just plain brute-force typing, but now you can set the default styling at various levels of Chordious.
In the last preview build you may have noticed a small little pen icon with a blue “s” doodle in the Diagram Library when you selected one of your collections. Opening it let you set the orientation of your diagrams (up-down or left-right). See, I began work on the style editor over a month ago, and I was just starting on the UI, when I unexpectedly found a nasty bug in Chordious that threw an error the first time you ran the app. So I ended up rushing out a fix, which meant revealing that barely started UI.
Now, weeks later, I’m ready to reveal the style editor in a more fleshed out form, starting with version 1.9.16145.449. As of now, you can set your default styling for the diagram (layout, colors, borders), the grid (spacing, margins, colors, etc.) and the title text (font, color, etc.). Everything uses translatable labels and helpful tool-tips. I’ve also updated the regular diagram editor to re-use those same labels and tool-tips.
As you’ll see, I’ve still got three more areas to complete: letting you configure the default styling for marks, fret labels, and barres. Those will come in the next update, as they’re a little trickier and will take more time to work out. I could have waited before revealing anything, but I thought it better to get what I have done out now so that I can gather feedback and fix bugs sooner.
I’ve tried to make the style editor as user-friendly as possible. You can get to it in one of three places:
I’ll write a proper tutorial after Chordious 2 is official, but for now the basic idea is as follows:
As for the style levels themselves:
Remember, each level inherits from its parent level (and so on, and so on), only overriding the settings that you choose. For example, maybe you want the default title text color for all of your diagrams to be green. So you pick “User Style”, check the box next to the Title Color, and set the value to Green. Great, now every diagram will have a green title!
Then later, let’s say, you decide that for a certain collection you actually want the titles to default to blue. So, you select that collection and its “Collection Style”, check the box next to the Title Color, and set the value to Blue. Now all of the diagrams in that collection will have blue titles instead of green. But only in that collection! Since your User Style still specifies green titles, all of the other diagrams in your library will still have green titles.
Last of all, let’s say that for a particular individual diagram in that collection, you want to make the title black. So you double click on that diagram, and in the Diagram Editor you now have the option to check the box and choose Black for Title Color.
Now, each child overrides its parent. So, if you set an individual diagram to have a black title, and change the collection style from blue to something different, that particular diagram will keep its black title. In this way, you can easily change the look and feel of all of your diagrams, while making sure that some diagrams maintain their own little tweaks.
For example, maybe you set the title font size to be larger in your User Style. It looks great in general, but maybe you have a whole collection of jazzy minor 9th no 3rd flat 5th sharp 7th chords that now the title is too long and gets cut off. Now you can override the title font size just for that collection to be just a little smaller. Voila, the titles now fit! Or maybe it’s only one particular diagram that’s giving you trouble. so you override the font size for just that one diagram.
The combinations are endless!
I’m convinced it’s not that hard once you play around with it. If you’ve ever done kind of styling with HTML and CSS this will seem very familiar. For all my long-time users, update and give the style editor a whirl. Let me know what you think.
And as always, if you haven’t yet, download and try out the latest Chordious 2 Preview today!
/jon