Ooloi now does real-time multi-user collaboration. Two laptops on a local network, one hosting and one connected: an edit to the shared Instrument Library on the guest appears on the host, and an undo on the host reverts the guest's change across the wire. It Works, Dammit shows it – roughly, on two machines balanced on my lap.

The reason it matters is not the feature. Collaboration was designed into the core from the start, and proving it end-to-end exercises almost the whole machine at once: the dual-server transport, the invalidate/fetch/replace model that governs all shared state, coordinated undo and redo across machines with clock-offset correction, the event pipeline, the UI. With that horizontal layer proven, it can recede from active attention – which is the point. The project's centre of gravity will soon be able to move fully to music. Full picture in ADR-0036; a longer post will follow.

The lead-up is on the blog. To Undo or Not to Undo works through what undo even means once several people share a timeline (ADR-0015); Hailing Frequencies shows the connection interface, up to the threshold and no further.

The turn to music has already begun in the blog's other thread. I wrote that I needed Ted Ross's long-out-of-print engraving manual and couldn't buy it (Do We Still Need Ross?); a fortnight later Kim Bastin posted me a pristine 1987 copy from Melbourne (The Void Was Listening). A small thing, but it is the first time the work has felt like it has a community gathering around it, this early. Ross is invaluable – geometry as data – and French Beaming is a taste of where that leads.

Next: the Piece Window, then rendering.

— Peter Bengtson
ooloi.org