Time Doesn't Stop

Revisiting a corner of the undo machinery this week, I noticed something I'd never thought about. A user may well see the Undo menu item change while the menu is open in front of them: the text rewrites itself as they read it.

​I like that. It says that time in Ooloi carries on rather than waiting to be asked.

My first thought was that only people working together on the same piece would ever see it. Somebody else edits, and the menu keeps you honest about whose action you're about to reverse. Then I remembered the rule the whole interface is built on, which is that Ooloi never freezes and never boxes you in.

Which means it will happen to people working alone. A plugin importing a large Finale score exported as MusicXML works away in the background while you carry on with something else; when it finishes, a great deal has entered the piece, and the undo chain changes accordingly. If the menu is open, you watch it change.

​Saving is the same: a large score writes itself out without the machine going away from you while it does. That's also what makes autosave worth having rather than something you switch off in irritation, since it needn't interrupt you, whatever the size of the piece. So are preferences, application and piece alike, where there's no modal box and no OK button, the change taking effect as you make it and everything displaying it following suit.

Which set me wondering what all this will be like for an engraver who has spent twenty years with programs built the other way.

A modal dialogue box stops your time. While one is up, the rest of the program isn't somewhere you can act: there's the question in front of you and nothing else, and the moment you come back to is the moment you left. Almost everything any of us has ever used is built out of these small suspensions, and a working day becomes a sequence of them with work in the gaps. Not that anybody chose it. It was the only thing on offer, and for the most part it was honest, since nothing was going on behind the dialogue anyway.

What interests me is the question underneath. If a tool can attend to one thing at a time, you learn to bring it one thing at a time, and composing or engraving isn't like that. You defer the expensive operation until the passage is finished, because starting it would cost you the room to work in. So what becomes of those habits when the technology stops requiring them, and time simply doesn't stop?