Flash and the future

With pretty much every major company completely dropping Flash, major browsers ending Flash support or even blocking it permanently in the near future, and Adobe itself announcing the Flash end-of-life for 2020, are there any plans at all to make (remake?) Hookpad using some native HTML5 toolset?

If so, have you considered maintaining some kind of (presumably copyrighted) repository so that we could contribute features, fix bugs, make pull requests, and all that good stuff?

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It’s their top priority, apparently. I can sympathize with the devs – remaking a large application, probably from the ground up, in a completely different language and framework is pretty difficult.

That said, they haven’t said anything about open-sourcing Hookpad.

I very much agree. I’ve been waiting on the HTML5 update for a while now because of my less-than-stellar computer and the lagginess of Flash Hookpad in general.

I feel that if they get the HTML5 update correct, they would be able to expand Hookpad’s capabilities (inverted suspensions, more than 4 notes to a chord, etc).

I also agree on making the Hookpad code (and possibly the TheoryTab code) open-source. It could help fix some oddities, such as how song/author names/titles can only have a small subset of ASCII when it should be a much larger subset of Unicode, and perhaps giving albums to TheoryTab entries.

I’m still waiting patiently, even though it’s at the “top” of their priorities and we’ve been waiting for who-knows-how-long for it to be launched.

Definitely agree but obviously it’s not a simple task to rework the application from Flash to HTML 5.

Yeah sorry for the delay all. As has been noted, it’s a ton of work to rewrite everything from scratch (and we’re adding a lot more capability as well ), but we’re making great progress.

We’ll discuss internally some of the thoughts here regarding making certain areas open source and whether that can work.

Dave

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Sounds good, excited to see what new functionality there is. So far, on the top of the list of the things I’d like to see in a new version of Hookpad are:

  1. Copypasting between tabs. Shouldn’t be too hard to just serialize a chord/note and store it on the clipboard, and it would really improve certain workflows.
  2. Some way to view ALL possible chords of a certain root note/color and insert/swap them.
  3. The ability to move notes forward and backward freely along the arrangement without having to insert rest notes in between, like any modern MIDI sequencer.
  4. A toggle-able metronome. Composing melodies first without backing chords is a pain because if you want to keep track of the rhythm you must insert “placeholder” backing chords/notes.
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@CDEFGAB

Thanks for the suggestions! As @Dave mentioned, we’re hard at work on the next version of Hookpad. In addition to being completely off of Flash, we’ve taken all of your feedback seriously and will continue incorporate many of your ideas that we think are a good fit for Hookpad.

[quote]
Copypasting between tabs. Shouldn’t be too hard to just serialize a chord/note and store it on the clipboard, and it would really improve certain workflows.
[/quote] We are definitely planning on doing this.

[quote]
Some way to view ALL possible chords of a certain root note/color and insert/swap them.
[/quote] This is a really interesting idea that we hadn’t thought of before, but I could see how this could be very useful (and cool).

This is also planned. When we originally made Hookpad, we prioritized the “text editor” metaphor. This is great for providing an intuitive feel, but lacks some functionality when composing melody since, unlike text, notes depend heavily on the context of their position in time. We think we’ve come up with a good way to preserve the intuitive nature of Hookpad while adding new edit operations that allow for moving notes without needing to enter rests.

[quote]
A toggle-able metronome. Composing melodies first without backing chords is a pain because if you want to keep track of the rhythm you must insert “placeholder” backing chords/notes.
[/quote] Also a good idea! I think this would be very useful.

Ultimately, we’re trying to build you guys the best tool for composing and analyzing music with functional harmony. Not all of the decisions are easy, and often times the goals of “allowing chord X” or “allowing feature Y” are at odds with the role we see Hookpad playing in the larger Hooktheory system. That being said, you have given us a lot of excellent ideas over the years and we’re doing our best to address as much as we can. As we move closer to launch, we’ll provide a more comprehensive feature list, but here’s a sample of some of the things that we’re planning:

Improved editing
You have given us a lot of ideas on this front and we are adding a host of new edit operations that will make it much easier to layout your music.

Expanded chord palette
While the original aim of Hookpad’s chord palette was to promote the use of simple, functional chords, we plan on expanding access to extended and altered chords, both as compositional devices but also to flesh out the TheoryTab database with songs that use these chords.

Dynamic key/tempo/mix changes
Being able to analyze key modulation would be a nice/instructive addition to the TheoryTab database as well as for your own songs. We’re committed to prioritizing the functional nature of these modulations, so we’re looking into various ways of keeping with this spirit.

Voicing options
We’re looking into allowing more customizability of Hookpad’s voicing algorithms.

New scales
We’re experimenting with scales that are not strictly modes of the major scale. Such scales, (such as harmonic minor) would organically provide access to some new chords from a functional perspective (such as vii˚7).

Improved MIDI export options
This ended up being a pretty popular feature, and we’re working on making the workflow of sending music to DAWs via MIDI more useful.

And much more!
Thanks again for all the feedback, we really appreciate your support!

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That’s very exciting, can’t wait! If you’re planning to do any kind of beta testing, count me in! Thanks a lot for the detailed reply.

I would also like to be in for beta testing.

Hello,

when will this new release be available?

Have there been any news in this regard?

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@CDEFGAB, Hookpad 2 is getting very close. Right now we’re working on the I/O features (save/load, export, etc.) The core is done. Our goal (when we started in Jan 2017) was to launch before 2018. We may miss that date a little, but we’re not far off. Thank you (and everyone!) for hanging in there. You will 100% be in for any pre-release / beta if we decide to do a limited rollout.

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Will you guys send out a proper form for that, if you guys do decide to do a closed beta?

Nice, thanks for replying. Keep us posted! I’d be very interested to test things out.

anticipation intensifies

I’m also interested in a beta test.

Hi, i’m very excited to hear that and really waiting for it. Interested for beta as well!

I second the open source idea. It would allow people all over the world to translate it into their native language.

Oh yeh, and as you are rewriting it, PLEASE PLEASE factor in the structure for future multilingual support (ie: all text should go in variables, unicode character set…)

PLEASE :smile:

Just so you can port it to other languages in the future (open source or not). Your stuff is way too good to be only available to english speakers.

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Any news…? An updated ETA, maybe?

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I swear I keep a tab open and refresh this thread every other day just to see if there’s any news. Updates?

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