[ANN] LilyPad Preview 1

[Ed Baskerville]

Fellow LilyPutians,

As promised a long, long time ago, I'm releasing a preview version of  
LilyPad, a simple editor/previewer for LilyPond. It's still a rough  
work in progress--what you see represents a very small amount of work  
spread over a long period of time--but it's pretty usable in its  
current form for editing and previewing simple single-file LilyPond  
projects.

Features include:
- A simple code editor with indent preservation
- "Almost live" previewing as you type
- Previews of typeset music (PDF) and audio (MIDI)
- "Point-and-click" links between typeset music and the source code,  
all within the same application

To get it, go here:

http://edbaskerville.com/software/lilypad/

Right now, it requires Mac OS X version 10.4 ("Tiger"), and requires  
that LilyPond 2.6 for Mac OS X be installed in your /Applications  
directory. Documentation is nonexistent, but it should be pretty  
straightforward--if you have any questions about how to use it, just  
ask me, on or off the list.

Since I wrote the initial code, LilyPond itself has acquired some of  
the features LilyPad was supposed to bring: a Mac OS X graphical  
interface for LilyPond, point-and-click in PDFs on Mac OS X, etc.  
LilyPad takes a slightly different approach, with background  
previewing, etc., but the goals are one and the same. As such, I'd  
like to work with the LilyPond development team to bring this code  
into LilyPond itself, hopefully in time for the 2.8 release. So you  
can think of LilyPad not so much as a thing unto itself, but more as  
the direction I'd like to see LilyPond take on the Mac OS X platform.  
(I will follow this message with one to the development list with  
more detailed questions and suggestions.)

Please send me any feedback on this work, again, here or off-list.  
I'm aware of many limitations (most notably, that things probably  
won't work right for multi-file projects), but I'm sure there are  
others I haven't thought of, as well as bugs.

Happy LilyPonding,
Ed