 Ooloi is now a running desktop application on macOS, Windows, and Linux. It opens, it responds, it remembers where you left it. A concrete thing, like any other program. But that's not enough. The next step is teaching it to talk. Ooloi's frontend and backend have always been separate components communicating through a defined protocol; in standalone mode, they simply appear as one and the user needn't think about it. But this disciplined split personality was designed that way for a reason, and it's now time to act on it. ADR-0036 lets the two halves run apart — so one Ooloi can connect to another, or to a centralised server. You invite a collaborator; a secure connection opens. They disconnect; the application returns to working alone. No restart, no mode switching. The separation was always there. Now it becomes visible. 
10 Comments
Magnus Johansson
17/2/2026 11:38:32
This seems to become a great feature of Ooloi, and it will be very interesting to try it out when there is music on the screen. A little thing I am not fond of is that the three dots in the menus follow directly after the last word which in common text signifies an unfinished word, e.g. "unfin...", but this is the norm in graphical user interface menus, I have been told.
Peter Bengtson
17/2/2026 11:44:54
Thank you, Magnus – and only a few minutes after publication! The ellipsis convention is one of those places where GUI design and typographic tradition genuinely collide. You're absolutely right that in running text it signals truncation, but in menus it dates back to Apple's 1984 Human Interface Guidelines: the three dots promise that a dialog will appear before the action completes. "Save" acts immediately; "Save As..." consults you first. It's a continuation marker: you'll be asked before anything happens. A small courtesy, typographically expressed.
Magnus Johansson
17/2/2026 11:58:13
You're welcome, Peter. The Apple authors in 1984 should have been a little more learned (like Fridolin) when it came to writing conventions.
Peter Bengtson
17/2/2026 12:34:37
Well, I think back in 1984 the Apple symbol was still a multicoloured 70s thing someone could have designed at Woodstock whilst high on LSD. They've learnt since, but they did establish a few conventions that still are with us. ;)
Magnus Johansson
17/2/2026 13:46:31
"Well, I think back in 1984 the Apple symbol was still a multicoloured 70s thing someone could have designed at Woodstock whilst high on LSD."
Magnus Johansson
18/2/2026 16:48:55
There is only one menu in Ooloi that differs from the menus of Igor Engraver and that is View which is Layouts in Igor Engraver. Will the contents of those two menus be similar?
Peter Bengtson
18/2/2026 17:11:35
There's no attempt to reconstruct Igor Engraver's menu bar, and these are very early days, so you can expect things to change as the GUI develops. Right now it's the standard plain vanilla menus of any new app.
Magnus Johansson
18/2/2026 18:03:54
OK, I see. What about Ooloi having a separate piece window apart from the layout windows like Igor Engraver has?
Peter Bengtson
18/2/2026 21:43:36
The first version of that window already exists on screen today. ;)
Peter Bengtson
19/2/2026 09:07:34
In fact, your question is important in another way. There’ll be a blog post on “The Piece Window” and its role — and why re-implementing it isn’t nostalgia, but something the ontology requires. (And yes, I’ll explain what ontology means in this context.) The fact that you’re asking about it is telling. This is structural, and I’ll explain why. Leave a Reply. |
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February 2026
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