Perpetual Groove

While looking through old photos I came across these assets for an application I did a while ago. I thought it might be fun to write a guide on how one might go about throwing a whole lot of work at something and never actually finish it. The name I gave this application was Perpetual Groove, and the first thing on the agenda is to go nuts creating an icon for it.

Next, ponder the scale of your project. It should clearly be bigger than any one person should consider. Maintaining your application should not be a consideration.

Now, waste a shit ton of time on icons. I mean … don’t worry that all that detail is undetectable at application scale.

Once the basics have been established, we can begin adding complicated and unnecessary functionality such as MIDI file import and export capability, a transport complete with jog dial, and full editing capabilities.

And if you are parsing MIDI files … just build the parser yourself. Hex code is fun, right?

Definitely support both portrait and landscape. So necessary.

Go f$&king bonkers on the notes while working out the geometry.

And be sure to get extra fancy when considering animations.

Like, wouldn’t it be cool if the horizontal scrolling felt three dimensional? Make that sh$t happen.

Did I already mention the notes?

Okay, good. Moving on. Now that your application is practically out the f$&king door, this is the perfect time to relocate. This will give you 2-4 weeks away from the project entirely. The goal here, of course, is to lose track of all that unnecessary complexity you have thrown into your application.

But let’s stick with the previous screenshot. Did anybody notice the appearance of still more icons in the editor? You never want to stop injecting unnecessary complexity into your application

Once relocated and finished unpacking, revisit your application. Notice how all that complexity leaves you with no real feel for where you were or how to jump back in. The perfect time to start a new project, am I right?

And if anyone takes an interest in this guide, I will make another for Chord Finder. The complexity only goes up folks. We are talking signal processing, neural networks, low level graphics, Swift frameworks that are themselves wrappers for C++ frameworks, etc., etc.

Update: I could actually tell you about how I finished it and moved on

to rebuilding Perpetual Groove for shits and giggles.