MuseScore

Before I begin, I'd like to welcome Crazy2be to the small groups of writers. Sure, he has officially been on the staff almost since the beginning, but only just recently made his first post. Crazy2be, we look forward to reading your thoughts!

Down to business. I recently received an assignment in my instrumental music course to arrange a piece of music for a band. My options:

1. Do it by hand. 19 different instruments? I think not.
2. PAY for some software, and have to run it on my Windows pc
3. Opensource alternative

Any guesses? 

If you chose 2, you're wrong but if you chose 3, you are correct! It is true, even music notation software has an opensource alternative, and that is MuseScore. I will be giving my impressions on MuseScore in my next blog post but right now I will provide you with a little background on this piece of software.

MuseScore began it's life as MuseE, a MIDI/Audio sequencer which is still in existence. As MuseE grew, a decision was made to strip it of it's notation capabilities and create a designated scorewriter. This happened in 2002. in only 6 years MuseScore had achieved a yearly average of 180000 downloads! In 2008 their website, MuseScore.org, was launched. This new online presence on the web contributed to the feeding frenzy. The newest stable version (0.9.5) was released in 2009. The Beta (0.9.6), is already ready for download, and is included in the Lucid Ubuntu repositories under mscore.

Stay tuned for my impressions of MuseScore in the next blogpost.

-The Thoth-

Blender 2.5: Awesome

The other day i stumbled upon Blender 2.5, an update to blender that's been in the works since 2007, according to the release logs. I was so impressed by the much improved UI that i downloaded and read the entire pdf on it's design (granted, it's only a few pages). I can honestly say it is the most polished looking 3D program i have seen to date, with a wonderful workflow.
However, along with all the wondrous improvements, there are a few things that could still be improved. First of all, a library would be extremely useful for those of us who don't want to make every single model ourselves. There should be enough CC licensed work from the various blender movies to make at least a sizable library, and ideally you would allow people to submit their own creations quickly and easily... one of the best implementations of this i have seen is in sketchup, where you can browse and search a huge online repository. Materials should also have a repository, along with a moderated repository for scripts that do certain types of things (e.g. a script that generates a grass field, complete with flowers, based on supplied parameters).
One more thing it could use is a "quick start guide" or similar, although it needs it significantly less in 2.5.
Well, it's pretty darn awesome, but not quite perfect yet. Also crashes quite a bit on windows still, but that's not a problem for me most of the time ;).

Indie games

Well I just learned that the humble indie pack hit the 1 million dollar donation challenge. What this means is that the majority of the games in this pack are releasing there source code. Currently only Lugaru is available for download even if its rough. With in the next week Aquaria, Gish and Penumbra Overture will also release there source code. The most exciting thing about this is that the 1 million dollar challenge was reached 55 minutes before the deal ended. Lastly another thing I found cool was the fact that the average purchasing price for Linux was the highest and it held a third of the amount of purchases. While its not a conclusive study it does show that there is a market for selling games based in multiple OS's. If you want to check out the indie pack site for links to the source code of the games click here. I'll also be doing a review on each of the games and how they run in Ubuntu and Arch (Once I get it setup). I'll also try to do them as videos with game play giving me a chance to try out VLMC.

Oops.

Sorry guys, we dropped the ball again. In our defense school has been piling up, but of course there really is no excuse for the lack of post. We are sorry.

Anyways...

We would like to inform you of some possible upcoming features and hopefully distract you with a bunch of links:

• New WICMG from Mekapaedia or Inerg or The Thoth
• Fedora/Ubuntu/Slackware piece from the indecisive The Thoth
• VLMC review by Inerg

Again these are all just things that have been rattling around in our minds, perhaps all these will be published, perhaps none of them will, but at least it is something. If you have something you'd like to see on the blog please shoot us an email and we'll get right on it.

Thank you

-The Thoth-