Ooloi: An Organism Evolved

My Life Right Now

13/7/2026

What you're looking at is a test. It sets up a Full Score with two players, Violin I and Viola, then deletes Violin I from inside that score, and checks that Violin I is gone from the score but still present in the piece. That distinction, remove from this layout versus remove from the piece, is one of the many things the Piece Window has to get exactly right.

The whole idea is to let the engraver set up and manipulate scores and parts with intuitive gestures alone. No modes. No dialog boxes. And every change propagates to collaborators as it happens.

6 Comments

Magnus Johansson

13/7/2026 08:34:20

Great, Peter. You seem to have wind in the sails.

The advice at the bottom of the image about not touching the mouse and keyboard until it finishes was what I had to give my students when we worked in Igor Engraver on low end computers, otherwise a program crash could occur.

Peter Bengtson

13/7/2026 11:19:33

That warning belongs to the test harness, not the program. It's there because a robot is driving the real interface, clicking real buttons and pressing real keys, so a stray human hand would confuse it. Running Ooloi itself, you can touch whatever you like.

The robot tests mean the 24,400 tests cover the user interface too, not just the data underneath, so gestures like drag-and-drop are verified end to end, on every platform.

Your Igor memory is apt, though, and the reason is worth spelling out. Igor ran a different Lisp on Windows than on Mac, because in the 90s there was no single Lisp that ran everywhere; I gather that's exactly what made it fragile on Windows. Ooloi doesn't have that seam. Clojure is the same on Mac, Windows and Linux, and the data structures are immutable, so there's no per-platform behaviour to go wrong. Same code, same result, everywhere.

So: hands off only while the robot works. The rest of the time, Ooloi can take it.

Magnus Johansson

13/7/2026 11:51:43

Thanks for the explanation of LISP on Windows. Igor was quite unstable in Windows. Do you have an idea about why it is better via Crossover on Linux, except for crashes immediately at program start?

Peter Bengtson

13/7/2026 12:09:19

No idea, I'd left the company by then. Whoever inherited it didn't have the expertise for that deeper cross-platform integration, and it shows in exactly the way you're describing.

This time, at least, the expertise isn't going anywhere.

Ulrik Bodén

13/7/2026 13:31:28

Peter Bengtson said:
"This time, at least, the expertise isn't going anywhere."
👍

Peter Bengtson

14/7/2026 09:34:07

;)

OOLOI

OVERVIEW

DOCUMENTATION

NEWSLETTER

My Life Right Now

Leave a Reply.

Author

Search

Archives

Categories