April 2024 Update

Update Video

What’s changed?

A bunch of alignment features, page naming is error-proof, and music integration has started.

New UI Features

• Align marchers vertically and horizontally
• Evenly distribute marchers vertically and horizontally

Development Improvements

• Page naming got an absolute overhaul. That shouldn’t have taken as long as it did, but hopefully it’s done and I never need to touch it again. (famous last words)
• Created a “measure” class.
  • Trying to figure out how this will integrate with pages.
  • Will pages need measures? Are they optional?
  • What about for shows that don’t have sheet music? (like indoor guard?)

Goals accomplished this month

Must haves -

• Complete unit tests
  • Like 90%. All new classes get unit tests to accompany them now.
• Integration tests for most things
  • This will be so time consuming and I’m waiting for a bit to do it.
• Batch alignment

Nice to haves -

• Find a better default location for marchers?
• Start shape creation?
• Music??
  • Started, thought this was much more important for a minimum product.

Plans for May

I find that developing OpenMarch is also a game of me staying motivated. OpenMarch only makes progress when I’m enjoying doing it, which is most of the time luckily. I still get constant decision paralysis when making new features cause I try to plan for every possible use case. I need to keep it simple at this stage or I’m never going to get anything done.

Must haves -

• Finish music implementation with MusicXMLs
  • From sheet music, and then a generated wav file accompanying it
• Workflow for creating pages with MusicXML or just raw

Nice to haves -

• Create pages just on an audio file with no MusicXML
• Organize buttons in the UI
• Misc bugs (lots of old issues that need to be addressed)

Remember, you can always check the GitHub project to see what current issues are in the queue.