April 12, 2019
Xentone, the xenharmonic ear trainer, was launched a decade ago, when Macs were running Snow Leopard for the first time, and most Windows users were still running XP (although Windows 7 was just being released). Needless to say, a few changes have taken place since then.
Although conventional ear training software is not so uncommon, there is in fact no other software available which does what Xentone does. Even so, the user base for this software is quite small – so small that over the past decade updates have been few and far between. Some new features were requested during its first couple of years, and since then updates have been standard maintenance. With each new OS version, some unexpected issue may appear. A familiar sequence of events then follows. Users report the problem, I reproduce it, figure out how to fix it, and issue an update.
So it is in this case. I received a report that Xentone was displaying incorrectly on OSX Mojave. This didn't surprise me, since Dark Mode wreaks havoc on older applications that do not support it, and I am not using Mojave yet myself. To my horror, the image at right appeared in my in-box when I requested a screenshot of the problem.
In fact I found that the problem did not have to do with Dark Mode at all, but rather with processing of transparency layers in png files. New png resources had to be produced and imported, and the code concerning these images had to be updated. While I was at it, I updated the compiling to 64-bit, fixed a few other display issues, as well as one performance issue. At some point Mac OS started displaying a spinning beachball when Xentone would serenade with a xenharmonic melody. So it doesn't do that any more, and it won't complain any more if you stop it in the middle of an ecstatic phrase.
There remain some known issues in Xentone, such as the hint arrows not working on Windows. Text will also appear a bit blurry on some systems because the application has not been updated for HiDPI screens (such as the now standard Retina screens on MacBooks). These are examples of deeper graphics issues which require more work. Still, with this release I did take some steps toward graphics modernisation, such as updating the app icon to a 1024x1024 png. Graphics updating of this sort can take a long time, because the resources used for the original application were simply smaller images, which can't be scaled up to larger images. So an updated version requires all the graphics to be completely remade from scratch. For now updates will continue to focus on functionality, and I hope to have time to address the deeper issues later in 2019.
Please download the update from the Xentone software page.
Regards,
Aaron
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