Commit graph

25 commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
William Carroll
39d084e493 Use elm2nix to (attempt to) deploy learnpianochords.app
After a few failed attempts at deploying my Elm application on NixOS, I'm trying
elm2nix, which some NixOS and Elm users created to attempt to solve some of the
issues that I ran into earlier today.

Elm tries to write to $HOME, which NixOS doesn't like. I typically prefer to
avoid things like cabal2nix, elm2nix, node2nix because I don't like the workflow
that they suggest, but I'm so eager to deploy this application, that I'm trying
it.
2020-04-18 00:10:39 +01:00
William Carroll
277ad983d4 Nixify build for Chord Drill Sergeant
Thankfully @tazjin builds Gemma (an Elm project) with Nix, so I could reference
Gemma's default.nix to help me with mine. Elm problematically attempts to
HTTP-fetch a list of packages to verify my project's dependencies. Because Nix
builds derivations in a sandbox without network access, I need to use some
escape hatches (i.e. NIX_REDIRECTS, LD_PRELOAD,
SYSTEM_CERTIFICATE_PATH). Welp... it's packaged now...

I'm also pointing learnpianochords.app to this project's index.html. It will be
live soon! :)

TODO(wpcarro): Rename "Chord Drill Sergeant" -> "Learn Piano Chords" (KISS)
2020-04-17 15:08:38 +01:00
William Carroll
bdb16c11ba Simplify preferences
I'd like to deploy an MVP version of this application today, so I'm dropping
support for a few features to focus my efforts. I may bring these features
back.

TL;DR:
- Temporarily drop support for "Fine Tune" tab of preferences
- Sort keys by the Circle of Fifths
2020-04-17 13:35:33 +01:00
William Carroll
5ca0fa2fcd Render a mobile-friendly piano
For now since I'm the only customer and I'm primarily making this for myself,
I'm styling the app specifically for my Google Pixel 4. If I find this app
useful, I will consider supporting other devices.

I'm using the Icons that I bought when I purchased the "Refactoring UI" book.

Other news:
- I bought the domain learnpianochords.app!

What's left:
- Style the "fine tune" tab of the preferences view
- Better support non-mobile devices like the browser and tablet devices
- Deploy the application to learnpianochords.app
- Redesign the "key" tab of the preferences view to sort the keys according to
  the circle of fifths
- Dogfood
- Simplify until I cannot simplify anymore
2020-04-17 13:35:29 +01:00
William Carroll
1d427c4921 Begin styling efforts
Start styling the Chord Drill Sergeant for mobile devices because that is that
device on which I will primarily use CDS.

I'm also deleting the debugger related code. I would like to support a debugger,
but I'm not currently using this one, so I am going to remove it to keep things
slender.

- Introduce TailwindCSS, which also introduced elm-live, index.html, index.css
- Add mobile-first styling for the preferences modal
- Remove unused code
2020-04-13 22:43:04 +01:00
William Carroll
a64601cc05 Support generating chords for a particular key
Generate chords for a given key.

I believe my Theory.allChords function is taking a long time to generate all of
the chord possibilities. I would like to profile this to verify this
assumption. I think I can create a "staging area" for changes and only
regenerate chords when "committing" the options from the "staging area". This
should stress the application less.

TODO: Profile application to find bottleneck.
2020-04-13 15:46:26 +01:00
William Carroll
6a3af6c9c6 Don't render the notes on the piano
I was using this to debug a feature that I no longer need to debug.
2020-04-13 15:06:35 +01:00
William Carroll
774c0ddf05 Rename NoteClass -> PitchClass
For the past two to three days, I've been searching for the name for the concept
of "C" or "A". From what I read, notes are specific things like C0 or C4, but I
wanted the name of the concept of a C. Thankfully today I discovered that this
is called a pitch class.
2020-04-13 10:02:03 +01:00
William Carroll
edc8f4ef6e Remodel model.selectedChord as Maybe Chord
Until the user presses play, we shouldn't display any chords.
2020-04-13 09:42:26 +01:00
William Carroll
6a91065677 Whitelist and blacklist note classes
Often I want to practice only C, F, and G-chords in all inversions. Next I'd
like to only support the chords for various keys.
2020-04-12 23:35:16 +01:00
William Carroll
083763f7f2 Only display chords that fit on the displayed piano
Only show the chords that we can fit on the piano.

TODO: Debug occasional instance where we render chords that do not fit. I am
unsure how to reproduce these states at the moment.
2020-04-12 23:33:56 +01:00
William Carroll
3ee1b1f670 Support suspended chords
I'm not sure how valuable it is to study all of the inversions of the suspended
chords. Maybe it is. I'll let the users decide.
2020-04-12 23:32:00 +01:00
William Carroll
bf460fe5ac Whitelist and blacklist chordTypes
Allow and disallow chords by the type of chords.
2020-04-12 19:32:54 +01:00
William Carroll
1298263629 Whitelist and blacklist chords by inversion type
Add checkboxes to support various chord positions.
2020-04-12 19:20:00 +01:00
William Carroll
24692ab465 Properly support chord inversions
While I did change a lot of functionality, I also ran `elm-format` across the
codebase, which makes these changes a bit noisy.

Here is the TL;DR:
- Properly support chord inversions
- Ensure that the piano styling changes dynamically when I change the variables
  like `naturalWidth`
- Add start and end notes to define the size of the piano and which chords we
  create
- Support elm-format and run it across entire project
- Debug Misc.comesBefore
- Introduce a ChordInspector and debugger

TODO: Ensure that we only generate chords where all of the notes can be rendered
on the displayed keys.

TODO: Add preferences panel, so that I can do things like "Practice blues chords
in C and E with chord substitutions."
2020-04-12 16:43:34 +01:00
William Carroll
730aecc076 Support NoteClass
Remodel application to support the scientific pitch notation for notes. Instead
of supporting simply "C", support "C4". This change created cascading
changes. After refactoring for around an hour, I restored the app to a working
state. The current state is not desirable, but it compiles. More changes on the
way.
2020-04-11 23:11:04 +01:00
William Carroll
808e6ee484 Support Misc module
Define two functions for attempting to return an element in a list that precedes
or succeeds another element.

I prefer having something like Utils.List. Perhaps I will refactor.
2020-04-11 23:10:14 +01:00
William Carroll
c24c9b7fb9 Support BPM for tempo
Using BPM as the unit for tempo.

TODO: Consider a higher-fidelity way to calculate BPM, although I'm not sure
this is critical functionality; an interesting problem is just seducing me, and
this app would be better off resisting the temptation.
2020-04-11 17:46:46 +01:00
William Carroll
93bdebf9b2 Track app ideas
Use an org file to track random ideas or features or improvements.
2020-04-11 17:44:20 +01:00
William Carroll
3c8bfe85c9 Prefer type alias to type
Elm reminds me of Haskell. In fact, I'm using `haskell-mode` (for now) in Emacs
to write my Elm code, and it works reliably. I'm not writing a Haskell app, but
if I were, I would define my application Model with the following Haskell code:

```haskell
data Model = Model { whitelistedChords :: [Theory.Chord]
                   , selectedChord :: Theory.Chord
                   , isPaused :: Bool
                   , tempo :: Int
                   }
```

When I first modelled my application state, I did something similar. After
reading more Elm examples of SPAs, I see that people prefer using type aliases
to define records. As far as I know, you cannot do this in Haskell; I believe
all types are "tagged" (something about "nominal typing" comes to mind). Anyhow,
Elm isn't Haskell; Haskell has cool features like type classes; Elm has cool
features like human-readable error messages and exhaustiveness checking for
cases. I love Haskell, and I love Elm, and you didn't ask.

Anyhow, this commit refactors my records as type aliases instead of types. I
think the resulting code is more readable and ergonomic.
2020-04-11 16:50:02 +01:00
William Carroll
52eb456a0f Support basic tempo
Supporting Play/Pause events, and Increase/Decrease tempo.

TODO: Convert milliseconds to BPM
2020-04-11 16:09:11 +01:00
William Carroll
2f446d0441 Improve the styling of the piano
Create a more convincing representation of the piano.

I would like to compute the left-offset based on the naturalWidth. That change
is probably forthcoming.
2020-04-11 11:36:37 +01:00
William Carroll
3562343c19 Generate all known chords and display randomly selected chords
First of all, Elm's purity is beautiful. I think every language should model
their error messages and develop experience after Elm. If I didn't have to
download packages, I don't think I would need an internet connection to
troubleshoot my program's errors. This is how helpful I find the compiler.

Now that that's out of the way, here's what I've changed since we've last
corresponded:
- Use Elm's Browser.element to create a reactive application with state
- Write a function to generate all of the chords about which CDS knows
- Move some code out of Main.elm into other modules
- Depend on List.Extra, Random, Random.Extra

What's left:
- Lots of work
- Instead of clicking a button to show a new chord, use a timer
- Add mobile-first styling (probably add TailwindCSS)
- Persist settings in LocalStorage (and then eventually create user accounts)
- Allow users to curate the list of chords they're interested in practicing
- Deploy the website and dogfood it

Unknowns:
- How can I handle tempo? I don't expect setInterval to be enough (maybe it
  is)...
2020-04-11 10:45:42 +01:00
William Carroll
b600f709b4 Model data and sketch ideas for Chord Drill Sergeant
Initialize an Elm application to build a MVP for the Chord Drill Sergeant
application. There isn't much to see at the moment. I'm just sketching
ideas. More forthcoming...
2020-04-10 23:03:01 +01:00
William Carroll
c350222fcc Create README for Chord Drill Sergeant
See the README for more information.

I've wanted to use an application like this for awhile. I would like to start
developing this soon.
2020-04-10 14:48:00 +01:00