I live in Portland, so it's pretty cool to see this--couple of comments:
As far as immediate usability goes, the trip planner at http://trimet.org/ is better right now, since you can enter very terse search terms and names of landmarks instead of whole complete addresses for start and end points.
Example--try this in TriMet's page:
STARTING: washington square
GOING: pioneer square
No bothering with addresses, even though this is taking you from a mall way out in Beaverton to the core of downtown Portland. A link to google transit from a google map zoomed to a specific location will fix this issue mostly.
But, this definitely fits a huge need for transit users, because if you don't have a car, it's super annoying to have the only directions to the business/location you are looking for be driving directions. Or, to be looking at a bus route not a map, and vice versa.
As a developer of audio for free/open source games, I totally go to freesound first. No squeaky doors in the immediate vicinity to make field recordings of--no problem! Somebody's already made their field recording available. It can be a great complement to your own recordings or commercial samples. I also love the clear licensing terms, unlike many other free audio content websites.
I love Audacity as a basic WAV editor/format conversion tool.
I love the concept of open source, and I wish I could do audio on Linux. I would even try some tinkering and developing to move it forward.
But, the competitive environment in proprietary audio software is so great, that some truly _amazing_ apps have been created in the past couple of years for Mac and Windows, like the realtime audio/midi sequencer Ableton Live, and hundreds of very good freeware/donationware VST/VSTi plugins being produced by the electronic music community. A lot of people have very good reasons to be enthusiastic about what they are already using (and what they have already paid to license).
But musicians are known to be occasionally a) poor and b) anti-authoritarian do-it-yourself-ers, so I see no reason why kids shouldn't be using some amazing LADSPA and DSSI hosting realtime open source sequencer instead of trying to crack the demo of Ableton to do their mash-ups and crazy masterpieces. It's just that from what I've read, that kind of all-in-one OSS sequencer hasn't come into existence yet (I'm echoing the previous poster who talked about the difficulty of setting up and saving sessions).
Now, if any sequencer using LADSPA and DSSI plugins were available on Mac or Windows, it would be great because some current VST developers might start making stuff in OSS formats. On top of that, there could be something like SynthEdit, only for LADSPA/DSSI, that would let people more easily use a graphical programming environment to create a plug-in.
Slashdot Mirror
I live in Portland, so it's pretty cool to see this--couple of comments:
As far as immediate usability goes, the trip planner at http://trimet.org/ is better right now, since you can enter very terse search terms and names of landmarks instead of whole complete addresses for start and end points.
Example--try this in TriMet's page:
STARTING: washington square
GOING: pioneer square
No bothering with addresses, even though this is taking you from a mall way out in Beaverton to the core of downtown Portland. A link to google transit from a google map zoomed to a specific location will fix this issue mostly.
But, this definitely fits a huge need for transit users, because if you don't have a car, it's super annoying to have the only directions to the business/location you are looking for be driving directions. Or, to be looking at a bus route not a map, and vice versa.
As a developer of audio for free/open source games, I totally go to freesound first. No squeaky doors in the immediate vicinity to make field recordings of--no problem! Somebody's already made their field recording available. It can be a great complement to your own recordings or commercial samples. I also love the clear licensing terms, unlike many other free audio content websites.
I love Audacity as a basic WAV editor/format conversion tool.
I love the concept of open source, and I wish I could do audio on Linux. I would even try some tinkering and developing to move it forward.
But, the competitive environment in proprietary audio software is so great, that some truly _amazing_ apps have been created in the past couple of years for Mac and Windows, like the realtime audio/midi sequencer Ableton Live, and hundreds of very good freeware/donationware VST/VSTi plugins being produced by the electronic music community. A lot of people have very good reasons to be enthusiastic about what they are already using (and what they have already paid to license).
But musicians are known to be occasionally a) poor and b) anti-authoritarian do-it-yourself-ers, so I see no reason why kids shouldn't be using some amazing LADSPA and DSSI hosting realtime open source sequencer instead of trying to crack the demo of Ableton to do their mash-ups and crazy masterpieces. It's just that from what I've read, that kind of all-in-one OSS sequencer hasn't come into existence yet (I'm echoing the previous poster who talked about the difficulty of setting up and saving sessions).
Now, if any sequencer using LADSPA and DSSI plugins were available on Mac or Windows, it would be great because some current VST developers might start making stuff in OSS formats. On top of that, there could be something like SynthEdit, only for LADSPA/DSSI, that would let people more easily use a graphical programming environment to create a plug-in.