On Tue, Sep 30, 2014 at 5:32 PM, Len Ovens <len(a)ovenwerks.net> wrote:
My take on this is much more practical. I make software to fill my needs
and expected experience.
Your expected experience is shaped by the software experiences you've
already had. This is why the first users of touch surfaces were so blown
away by it - an experience completely unpredicted and unanticipated by
previous experience.
Likewise, your needs are defined in part by the capabilities we currently
understand software to have. Before anyone understood how to do timestretch
in a way that preserved pitch, nobody saw that as a "need" in an audio
application. Now it is a very common feature, and among a very sizable
fraction of the people who use DAWs, it is a "need". Once upon a time, text
editors had no undo feature. Once upon a time, editing video on a computer
was impossible. Once upon another time, realtime audio synthesis was
impossible. The Len of those times, I am certain, would have defined his
needs differently than the Len of today.