Music Publisher

One of the earliest big MacApp projects. The coding started in 1987 and was maintained up until sometime in 1992.

The application was a professional music typesetting package for the Macintosh. A small typesetting bureau in Adelaide, South Australia fairly quickly became a software development house as well. MP went through versions 1.0, 2.0 and 2.5. The last version could be used as a rudimentary sequencer as well as a type setting package, having MIDI output, and realtime MIDI input.

The strategy for achieving fast and efficient notation input to meet the demands of professional production revolved around simplifying the spatial layout for the keyboard into rhythm, special symbols and pitch information. It was deemed impossible to get all of this mapping onto a conventional keyboard, so an extra keyboard was designed with the same asthetics as the mac keyboards of the time, so that the whole issue of pitch input was taken away from the main keyboard, allowing the simplification of rhythm on the left, special symbols on the right for the main keyboard. Because the keycaps are designed so that the names of the letters are in the bottom left hand corner, little stickers could be designed for the keys to show which symbols would be input upon pressing the option and shift modifier keys.

The MIDI quantization and interpretation into conventional notation, as well as realtime automatic page layout, presented some fairly serious difficulties.

Some of the people who worked on the project include PhilipCraig?, PeterDavey?, IanJoyner, CaryDreelan?, FrankFalco?, RichardCollins, AntonyBlakey?, MarkHobba?, SteveSteinitz?.