FT2 was how I discovered anything about music making - I loved the euro dance music I heard on the radio as a 12 year old but had no idea about the scene or how electronic music was was made.
PC Format had FT2 plus hundreds of modules on its cover CD one month, I used to love exploring all the random stuff on there and opened it up and my mind was blown when I realised that there was music like I heard on the radio, but you could see all the individual bits that made it up.
It took a loooot of messing around to figure out how to do anything of value with it, pretty sure this was before we had internet at home, but it was the start of a life long fascination with electronic music making.
So thank you to the author for resurrecting this amazing and somewhat esoteric bit of software!
Ha I know the exact ones you mean well, going to the train from terminal 5? I couldn’t have told you what was up with them but they seem very inefficient and there’s always a queue! Thanks for explaining
Audiogalaxy was awesome. I loved how you could browse every file that had ever been online, rather than just what was online now, and queue them up for when they came online again. I’d just leave it running on our dial up connection when everyone went out of the house (no dedicated line so you’d clog up the phone, the good old days haha) and then come back to some exciting downloads I’d totally forgotten that I ever queued
Audiogalaxy dev here. That was my favorite part of the design.
One of my other favorite parts was that prioritized matches based on how similar their domain name was to yours, so a lot of times you would end up grabbing files from someone in the same dorm or city (cable modem IPs had hostnames back then had the city in the name).
oh man I’ll never forget that site. I remember my dad and I trying to find the name of a song to download (Endless summer nights), none of us knew any english at the time, but we loved that song. So he was listening to a recording of that song, we knew the band name but we didn’t know the song name. And by some magnificent chance I was reading the tracks in the AG ui and that part of the track played and I said to my father (in spanish) “that’s the one. download this one”. “you sure?” “yes, do it!”. downloading took so long in our dial up modem, but when we could play the track it was so amazing. the audio quality, no radio voice on top. absolute bliss. thank you
And to think that if I want to publish an app I need to submit to Google for retinal scanning and anal probing to prove my identity (which wouldn't help because my identity is banned from submitting apps, but still).
I'm right with you on how companies can hide behind layers in ways individuals can't, I'm still salty my address is public for on the Play Store, but the text you quoted "com.companyname.andriodapp1" is just the bundle ID. It can be anything, it doesn't have to have any connection to your company or your app at all, it's just a unique string. It's only convention that most people use a reverse domain name.
It's fun sometimes to see what that app was called before a pivot or what the internal name was since you can't change it (once published) without losing your users.
Yeah I’m surprised by what a design misstep it was. The shiny corners of icons on iOS look so tacky and on macOS the corner radius mismatch is crazy. Also not a fan of the “bulbous” shapes of things with excessive rounded corners.
Whenever I use my personal Mac or iPad, still on the old OS, I wonder what they were thinking - I would guess it was rushed to hit the annual release, as it does have potential in parts.
That said, it looks from the few screenshots in this like you’re able to pare it back to something much closer to how it used to look, which is great and I’m glad they’re taking feedback on board.
The screenshots are generous. I just spent a few hours in macOS 27 and while yes, some of the absolutely galling and baffling errors have been rolled back, it's still bad.
I cannot help but think: they are such cowards, so afraid of anything that stands out after years of flat design. Like, you can almost feel like there is someone trying to sneak it in, only for it to get squeegeed at the last minute. The buttons could look like classic Aqua ( if they are allowed a background color that is), if it got slammed with a belt sander. Everything has to be too subtle, too toned down, too pale, and too faint, only noticable blown up to 4x on an OLED screen. It's like all they are allowed is "mimiminalizm", just remove, remove, remove, tone down, remove, slavishly, without thought. I'm supposed to cheer they added color back to in-focus window sidebars? First: good lord, what were they thinking? Of course they rolled such an utterly stupid decision back. Second: what color? Some single accent color applied to some whisper thin monochrome squiggles they call icons?
Its still more of the same. In the Installer app, there are windows where the dividing line between toolbar and content is like a 1px 30% grey line on same old bland 20% grey background, and that's with the new "Draw Borders" Accessibility setting turned on.
They can dress it up. Fix the worst issues. I'm thankful for it. Hell, I might not skip this one. But the problem still remains: Liquid Glass was a *bad, flawed* design from the start, whose central principle is contradictory (we'll get out of the way of your content by floating directly in front of your content all the time, in the way). There is no salvaging it.
FWIW you can bypass quite a lot of the Max visual stuff by using the JS support, which now finally supports modern JS (the v8 object). A lot of the LOM (Live API) is exposed there though you will no doubt need to use Max objects for some stuff. They also have web UI support with jweb.
I get the frustration coming to Max as a regular developer, but actually when I bothered to learn it was one of the most rewarding uses of time and I find it really quite fun to work in (and frustrating sometimes of course! But the JS support helps). You just need to forget everything you know about programming lol
FT2 was how I discovered anything about music making - I loved the euro dance music I heard on the radio as a 12 year old but had no idea about the scene or how electronic music was was made.
PC Format had FT2 plus hundreds of modules on its cover CD one month, I used to love exploring all the random stuff on there and opened it up and my mind was blown when I realised that there was music like I heard on the radio, but you could see all the individual bits that made it up.
It took a loooot of messing around to figure out how to do anything of value with it, pretty sure this was before we had internet at home, but it was the start of a life long fascination with electronic music making.
So thank you to the author for resurrecting this amazing and somewhat esoteric bit of software!
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