Jim's Depository

I’ve been working on a musical instrument tuner for the iPhone. Sadly, I was not one of the lucky 500 first round of developers accepted by Apple, and have been excluded from the market.

At some point when Apple decides my \$100 bill is good enough to let me into the market my application would be starting far back in the pack, behind whichever one of these first, blessed three gains the title as “the tuner you use on an iPhone”.

Given that handicap, I’ll probably not release the application, but it was interesting writing it. Among the things I discovered:

• Pitch is subjective for some sounds. There are notes on the concertina I was using for some of the testing for which the human testers disagreed about the octave of the note. (And my algorithms were also having trouble making a decision.)
  
• For many instruments, the fundamental is not strongly present in the spectrum. Going in, I had assumed it would be large, if not the largest component.

femtoblogger has reached that odd state for software. It works well enough that I am happy using it. There are rough edges, but not rough enough that I will fix them.

The only thing I have changed recently is to add a meta robots tag to suggest the aggregate pages, like the front page and archive months, not be indexed. That should help keep the clicks on target. I already had robot tags to deter indexing of all the non-content pages.

There remain two rough points:

1. The WYSIWYG editing: This is still a bit awkward. Sometimes I get stuck in bold and have to pop into HTML mode to get out. Pasting in code ends up double spaced. I could make lots of elaborate workarounds, but I consider these to be browser bugs and hope they will shake themselves out over time. I could also switch to one of the giant WYSIWYG javascript editors, but then I wouldn’t be very femto, would I.
2. I keep having a nagging desire to have images. I could do it now by attaching the image and making my own IMG tag, but I’m too lazy for that. I’ve been holding off coding proper image support (with resizing for display and full resolution click through) on the grounds that if I’m too lazy to type my own image tag then surely I shouldn’t spend a couple hours making full image support.

I suppose since femtoblogger has become stable it is time to move it into a public subversion repository.