NoteWorthy Composer Forum

Forums => General Discussion => Topic started by: babryanton on 2009-10-12 05:01 pm

Title: Goodbye Old Friend
Post by: babryanton on 2009-10-12 05:01 pm
For years I have lovingly used NWC and recommended it to many others. It's a very simple, yet effective, tool. I was a beta tester for the new 2.0 version & consider myself a power-user.

However, I have just transferred out of PC land and into Mac land, and I'm very sorry to find out that NWC is not available for the Mac operating system (well, without loading the windows os). 

So all those many charts I have as .nwc files and all that time effort to get them just right is now out the window. It's a very sad day for me. I"m not sure what I'm going to do with my existing files but going forward, I may have to abandon NWC altogether.

A real shame there's not a Mac version of NWC.

Title: Re: Goodbye Old Friend
Post by: Lawrie Pardy on 2009-10-13 02:26 am
There's always Parallels
Title: Re: Goodbye Old Friend
Post by: tony smedley on 2009-10-13 04:10 pm
VMFusion is also highly spoken of for running Windows programs on Mac; and it is a litle cheaper than Parallels.
Tony
Title: Re: Goodbye Old Friend
Post by: Rick G. on 2009-10-14 08:49 pm
A real shame there's not a Mac version of NWC.
A blessing, rather than a shame, I think.

If NoteWorthy had evolved as cross platform (Windows/Mac OS/Linux), it would look far different than it does today. IMO, the chances of it being as user friendly under Windows would be just about nil.
A philisophical discussion: https://forum.noteworthycomposer.com/?topic=1838.0

Perhaps a cross platform nwctxt to pdf console application would be feasable. Then, the Mac and Linux gurus out there might develop a GUI Editor for nwctxt in the platform they know best.
Title: Re: Goodbye Old Friend
Post by: Steele on 2009-10-15 09:54 pm
Well there are already other apps (I avoid "better" here because this should not end in a flamewar) in Linux.
Title: Re: Goodbye Old Friend
Post by: lasconic on 2009-10-26 05:21 pm
You can migrate your scores with http://nwc2musicxml.appspot.com/ to MusicXML. It's not perfect but might save you some times.
If you miss some features let me know...
On Mac, you can try MuseScore: http://musescore.org
It's free and open source. The Mac version is still young but is improving every day.
Title: Re: Goodbye Old Friend
Post by: William Ashworth on 2009-10-30 04:11 pm
MuseScore is a project worth watching, but it's still in version 0.x (Windows, Linux and Mac alike). One thing lovers of NWC will notice immediately is that MuseScore takes up way, way more space on your hard drive and in operating memory. MuseScore is a 20-meg download. NWC is still less than a meg. I dunno how Eric does it, but I love it.

Bill
Title: Re: Goodbye Old Friend
Post by: Steele on 2009-10-31 10:16 am
If there is one thing that is not a problem anymore today then its diskspace.
Title: Re: Goodbye Old Friend
Post by: William Ashworth on 2009-10-31 10:33 pm
If there is one thing that is not a problem anymore today then its diskspace.

Assuming disc space is unlimited leads to sloppy programming. It is also untrue. People with older computers (believe it or not, there are some folks who are still running Win98....and even Win95!) have trouble with larger programs. And folks on dialup will have a really bad time with a 20-meg download.

Please don't say they should just upgrade. Many are lucky to have a computer at all. And sometimes dialup is the only option available.

So I would say disc space is a serious problem. Not just because some computers still lack it, but also because programmers no longer seem to understand that it matters.

Just my grumpy 2 cents worth....

Bill
Title: Re: Goodbye Old Friend
Post by: Lawrie Pardy on 2009-11-01 01:18 am
Actually Bill, I agree with you.  With all due respect to Steele's intentions in his statement, while it is true that disk space is cheaper that its ever been, it is also true that programmers are getting less and less interested in tight, efficient code.  This in turn results in the kind of reliability and performance problems we see all the time.

Faster CPU's and faster, larger hard drives should result in faster and faster boxes, but the reverse somehow seems to be true.  The current crop of programmers seem to just use up all those clock cycles to cope with their sloppy coding and depend on the hardware to make up for the lack of efficiency in their code.

Boot a modern machine with DOS 5 or windows 3.11 and see just how fast these things are - they are so fast you can't see 'em booting.  Yet a modern install of windoze, linux or MacOs is as slow as a wet week.  Yes, I know they are doing much more than the older OS's, but that is no excuse for poor coding practices or poor architechture.  They should be faster and faster - not barely holding their own or even getting slower.

Case in point - windoze vista: XP (which is too slow itself IMHO) is way faster than vista or win7, at least until you have 2 GB installed, then the other 2 catch up.  How ridiculous is that - ya gotta have more RAM than whole hard disks used to be (I still own 2 working 5 MB HDD's) just to keep pace with the previous version - but only if you have a processor with twice as many cores and a faster clock.

/rant
Title: Re: Goodbye Old Friend
Post by: William Ashworth on 2009-11-01 02:20 am
Amen to everything you've said, Lawrie.

Bill
Title: Re: Goodbye Old Friend
Post by: Flurmy on 2009-11-02 08:01 am
So I'm not alone still using "obsolete" stuff! ;-)
Title: Re: Goodbye Old Friend
Post by: NoteWorthy Online on 2009-11-06 09:59 am
The easiest way to verify this phenomenon is via a virtual machine. You can use an old Windows OS, even the XP precursor Windows 2000, and experience near immediate boots on newer hardware. If you are on a new Intel Mac and want to run NWC2 in a VM, I would recommend virtualizing an older Windows OS, for just this reason (it is fast, and cheaper). You might even have an old Windows OS CD laying around. I would not recommend using that OS to connect directly to the Internet, though. As it stands now, you also will not be able to use the latest User Tool Starter Kit (https://forum.noteworthycomposer.com/?topic=6975).

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