SummaDigita blog

One of the fun things about building something all by yourself is the ‘proud father’ side of it. You get to choose the name of the product, the way it looks, how it behaves and so on. Actually, that is a lot more than real fathers get to do, but lets not digress. As any real father can tell you, your baby will not only make you proud, it will also throw up over you every once in a while.

And so it is with Crescendo. I asked Laura, a friend of mine, to help me make a logo for Crescendo. I wanted it to be a picture of musical notation of a little piece of music that contains a crescendo (increase in volume or intensity). Together we picked out The Entertainer, by Scott Joplin. It’s a piece you’re bound to know. So when Crescendo starts up you see a splash page with a short fragment of a crescendo.

That was all well and good. Next I was grappling with creating bootstrapper packages for the Microsoft Synchronization Framework that gets installed with Crescendo. Crescendo depends on it, so it needs to be installed before Crescendo can run. Unfortunately, I could not find proper bootstrapper packages (which tell the OneClick setup executable how to install the prerequisite) so I had to create them by hand. Somewhere along this path I decided to use the same picture for the Crescendo icon (the little picture you see in the taskbar when an application is running) that I had used for the splashscreen. I added this, tested it and it worked.

Now, I use Windows 7 on my developer machine and later tested Crescendo on another machine running Windows XP. It crashed immediately with a message about a Win32 exception. It was very difficult to diagnose, because logging has so far not been a priority (a decision I now regret). In addition, I was confused about all the work I had done on the deployment of the Synchronization Framework, figuring there had to be a dependency I had overlooked. Anyway, it turned out to be the icon that I had added: the color-depth of the image was not supported on Windows XP. The ironic thing is that I actually added the icon in two places: in the resources of the application and in the main WPF window of the application. It was the latter that was causing trouble. Simply removing it caused it to fall back on the resources icon, and everything worked well.

Its time to write some kind of introduction for this site and what it is all about. So that is what I’ll do in this post, and in subsequent posts I’ll be free to discuss whatever I want.

My name is Steven van Dijk and this site is the portal for my one-man company, SummaDigita. I am a professional software developer for some years now at ORTEC, where I help with the development of planning software. Starting this year, I work one day less each week at ORTEC and devote it to SummaDigita instead. My main motivation for doing this is that I wanted to tackle a sizable project alone and apply some of the latest .NET technologies in the progress, hopefully learning a lot about them. Another reason was that I had a great idea and it would have been a shame if I had not pursued it.

My great idea is Crescendo. To sum it up in one sentence: Crescendo is a content-sharing framework that is intended for anyone that has something special to share. You can take a look right now by visiting the installation page. That said, it is currently still very much a work in progress. One of the things about having a great idea, as I have discovered, is that is takes an incredible amount of plain work to see it fullfilled. Remember I can just work one day a week on this, and progress is sometimes frustratingly slow. Still, it is starting to become usable, and if I can get a community behind it then truly exiting things can happen.

My one-sentence summary mentioned ‘content-sharing‘ and ‘intended for anyone‘ and these key phrases I want to discuss some more. I’m talking about content sharing instead of file sharing because I want to make it clear that Crescendo is not the new Bittorrent, Emule, SoulSeek or Limewire. Those are all file-sharing solutions: they allow you to point to a file on your harddisk and have others copy that file to their harddisk in a more or less convoluted way. These file-sharing networks are technically often very sophisticated, but ultimately the user experience is rather poor. The regular user has to learn quite a lot of technical details before he or she can use it to share something with other people. Note that the file itself stores all the information about its contents in its filename. As a consequence, searching for the files you want is difficult. This is where I make the distinction between files and content: content is files combined with meta-data, that is attributes that describe what the files contain. Crescendo doesn’t give you a new file-sharing network, it builds on top of existing file-sharing networks to allow users to annotate their files with meta-data.

Let’s take an example. Suppose you like playing chess and you want to make a repository of chess games played at your club. With Crescendo you would create a new so-called Content Type which is really nothing more than a number of attributes that is used to describe your data. For example, we could create a Content Type named ‘ChessGames’ and give it the attributes ‘Black player’ and ‘White player’. Then you could enter a chess game into Crescendo by uploading a file that contains the moves played and specifying the black and white player. Crescendo then notifies anyone in your chess club about the new game (if they have subscribed to it, of course) and they can download it to view on their computer. Or they can search for all games played by someone specific. Add more attributes to the Content Type (location, date, time played, score, etc) and the option to search for specific data becomes ever more useful.

The second part I want to mention is the ‘intended for anyone’ part. It is my belief file-sharing is just much too hard for the average user. Sure, you can find anything you want but you have to know where to look. You have to know how to see which files shared actually contain viruses or will ask you for a password once downloaded (a phishing attack). You have to know how to decode the slang that described the quality of the media you want to download. You have to know which website to visit and which file-sharing application is suitable for the content you’re interested in. It just isn’t easy enough. So my goal with Crescendo is that is should be for anyone, not just the tech-savvy. The user experience should be frictionless. I’m currently still a long way from that goal, but I hope that eventually anyone will be able to just launch Crescendo and share whatever they want, with whom they want, however they want.

Added a link to a UserVoice forum so users can submit their own ideas or vote on the features they think are most worthy of developing. It is on the right of the page.

www.summadigita.com is now my domain!

’nuff said.