Ooloi Flow Mode Revelations

Research for Ooloi’s input system turned up something I hadn’t expected. Igor Engraver’s Flow Mode – the modal, stateful keyboard entry that defined its way of working – has never been recreated. Not by Dorico, not by Sibelius, not by Finale, nor by any of the open-source projects. Twenty-three years on, the idea has simply vanished.

Flow Mode was straightforward. You pressed “.” once and staccato stayed active; crescendo and diminuendo wedges and slurs extended naturally as you continued writing. The commands mapped directly to the symbols – intuitive, fast, and oddly satisfying. When Igor died of business failure in 2001, the method died with it. There is no academic record, no terminology, no sign that anyone even remembered it existed. I had fully expected other programs to have copied this feature; it gives a five- to ten-fold increase in music-entry speed.

Web forums on notation are full of people asking for faster, more fluent keyboard entry, yet without the vocabulary to describe what they want. They are looking for something they have never seen.

So this part of Ooloi isn’t innovation; it’s recovery. The system worked. It was lost for reasons that had nothing to do with design. The decision to re-implement it, and the details, are now recorded in ADR-0032: Ooloi Flow Mode.
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What remains is to implement it – and to find Magnus Johansson, who just might still have the user manual.