Another interesting market that Cincom Smalltalk™ has seen involvement in is Music. Below are the stories from a few of our successful customers in this field:
Georg Heeg, a consultant who works on Smalltalk projects throughout central Europe, tells a story about a unique and interesting use of Cincom VisualWorks integrated with Seaside and GemStone – two Smalltalk technologies that work well with VisualWorks.
The goal of the project was to determine the house in which composer Johann Sebastian Bach had lived during his time in Cöthen, Germany. Heeg – a Cöthen resident – found several innovative uses of VisualWorks as part of the effort to discover which house it was.
Bach, whose celebrated work during the Baroque era includes “The Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” and the Brandenburg concertos, lived in Cöthen from 1717 until 1723, where Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen hired him to serve as Kapellmeister, the director of music for chapel. The town of Cöthen was interested in finding out where Bach had lived, to promote locations related to one of the town’s most famous residents in support of tourism. The problem was that no one knew exactly where Bach had lived.
Bach-Gesellschaft, a Bach society, initiated a project to find out everything they could about Bach’s life when he lived in Cöthen. More specifically, the project, which was funded by the European Commission and the State of Saxony, was charged with locating the house in which Bach lived at that time. Realizing that this study would not only require research but also some sophisticated technology, the project leaders hired Georg Heeg to use whatever applications were necessary to support the research.
Cincom VisualWorks is well known for its ability to create seamlessly portable applications. What it’s less well known for is its ability to integrate with a host platform. On Windows, developers can embed arbitrary ActiveX components into their applications – but what about the Mac? Can a Smalltalk application look and feel like a native OS X app?
Andre Schnoor, the man behind Cognitone’s Harmony Navigator has shown that you can. To see what navigator looks like, just browse his site for a few minutes and take a look at his screencaptures – they show a beautiful application that integrates right into the OS X desktop. Navigator shows just how broad the reach of VisualWorks can be. Here’s a brief description of (some) of what it does:
Leverage the comprehensive knowledge base of Harmony Navigator to find a sound harmonic foundation for your song. Palette “surfing” is fun and always gives rise to fresh ideas and new insights. This way you easily and intuitively find new approaches to your song. Even experienced professionals do benefit from this
Whether you want to build a completely portable application, or one that ties into the host platform, Smalltalk is the solution you need. Take the legendary productivity benefits of Smalltalk, and apply them to any problem you have – whether it’s a standard business issue, or something more exotic, like finding the right harmonics.
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