My oft-neglected utility for mastering musical intervals, Clarion, received a bit of renewed attention recently. I have been planning a fairly major revision to this application for more than a year, but various other responsibilities have repeatedly put it on the back burner.

Motivated in part by a desire to show off the spiffy new icon, pictured here and designed by Steven Ansell, I have finally put in the lion’s share of finishing touches on Clarion 2.0.

For those of you familiar with Clarion 1.4, the major change in 2.0 (aside from the icon) is a complete redesign of the Preferences interface and underlying structure. Prior to 2.0, Clarion offered users the ability to define and save custom “interval sets” (like a scale), but other settings such as interval direction, consonance, instrument, etc., all had to be changed by hand if you wanted to mix up your practice. In Clarion 2.0, all of these preferences are contained in a new “Configuration,” any number of which can be defined and easily switched between by the user in the main quiz window.

Clarion, like my other main product, FastScripts appeals to a niche audience. Some of you are wondering what the heck a music interval even is. Although the niche products don’t make anybody zillions of dollars, they are perhaps more appreciated than others because they connect so directly with the user’s specific interests and needs.

So if you need to learn your intervals, or you just want to brush up, give the Clarion 2.0 Beta a try. This sucker is dang-near done (he says with dangerous confidence), so if you’ve got feedback, be sure to let me know ASAP!

A special note for developers: if you have been putting off investing in a professional icon designer, wait no longer! I put it off for years, partly thinking that one day I’d just “get good at it,” or afraid that the costs would be unmanageable. Steven Ansell makes it easy and affordable to add panache to your technical creations. In addition to designing the Clarion icon for me, he also gave the FastScripts icon a modest makeover, and designed a third icon for an as yet unreleased product. Take advantage of his generously reasonable rates while the getting is good! And thanks again, Steven.

Update I accidentally posted a release of Clarion with artificially strict “trial period” controls in place. If you happened to download within the first 5 minutes of this post appearing, please download again to see the more generous side of the Clarion trial period :)

I’ve decided to make a slimmed-down version of FastScripts available, starting immediately in conjunction with a minor 2.2.7 upgrade of FastScripts. FastScripts Lite [d/l] offers much of the same organizational and performance functionality of FastScripts, at an infinitely lower price.

What you don’t get in FastScripts Lite is best summed up by what you do get with the “standard” edition of FastScripts:

• Unlimited Keyboard Shortcuts
• Recent Scripts support
• Customizable Script Editor settings
• Numerous fine-tuning options for menu presentation and behavior.
• Built-in support for “On Screen Display” messages.

For the most part, everything not specifically mentioned above is included in FastScripts Lite. Now you can recommend it to your cheap friends without reservation!

I’ve recently installed Mint, a statistics gathering package, on my web site. It’s basically a souped up referral/hit recording package, similar to what Google is now offering for free. Why pay for Mint when I can get the Julep for free? Several reasons. First, Google is not accepting new users for the service right now. And while I have it on good authority that I could weasel my way in through a personal contact, I am more troubled by what is described as a “six hour delay” in the time it takes for statistical information to show up for your page.

Mint is instantaneous. Furthermore, the Mint package hits some (small) nails right on the head. The “recent referrer” list comes with an option to subscribe as an RSS feed. This means that every time a click comes through from a new referrer, I see it pop up in my NetNewsWire subscription. This is even better than the Egorati and EGO-ogle searches I used to do, because a substantial number of sites that link to me do not ever show up in Technorati and/or Google.

By seeing exactly who has linked to me I not only get a warm fuzzy feeling that people are reading the blog, but I also get enchanted by the knowledge that readers all around the world are tuning in. I especially like foreign language links with native (to them) preambles. Today this one popped up on the Radar, a link to my Dell/Apple analysis from Sweden. A quick trip to Systran, yields a translation including this choice introduction:

My point exactly.

A nifty and not-so-obvious feature of the Shark tool that comes with Apple’s CHUD performance tools, is the “instruction set reference” that you can pull up for either PowerPC or Intel ISAs.

The feature is hidden away in Shark’s Help menu:

Selecting either reference item brings up a floating window giving you easy access to the entire instruction set reference. What’s nice about the floating window is it stays visible no matter what application you’re working in. So if it’s convenient for you to have the instruction reference at your fingertips from gdb in the Terminal, you can bring it there.

The Shark interface to these references is just a lightweight PDF reader. If you’d rather read or search the document with a more conventional application like Preview or Acrobat Reader, you can access the underlying documents directly:

"/Library/Application Support/Shark/Helpers/PowerPC Help.app/Contents/Resources/PPCISA.pdf"
"/Library/Application Support/Shark/Helpers/IA32 Help.app/Contents/Resources/IA32ISA.pdf"

Transitioning from a PowerPC world to an Intel one is full of mystery and intrigue. Browsing the Intel reference I discovered an instruction “MASKMOVDQU.” Geez! That’s a long instruction mnemonic. Prior to Windows 95, you couldn’t even name files that long on most Intel-based machines!