What Now?

I'm sure there are a good handful of you out there wondering what I'm planning to add to future releases of FuzzMeasure. To tell you the truth, I'm not quite sure what will actually make it into my 1.2 release, because there are so many ideas rushing through my head! Below are a few things I'm concentrating on in the meantime. First and foremost, I'm constantly looking for ways to beef up the measurement accuracy and presentation. Looking at my acoustic measurement graphs, I'm a little bit unhappy with the fact that I don't yet support 1/3, 1/6, 1/12, or 1/24th octave displays. For those not familliar with “1/nth” octave displays, that basically means “smoothing” the display by a specified amount. Higher values of n mean smaller bins of smoothing, but because this is based on octaves (which are logarithmic), you have much finer bins at the low frequencies and larger bins at the higher frequencies. This is all based on how our hearing works. The middle C of a piano is half the frequency of the C above it, and each subsequent note above the middle C is 2^(1/12) times the frequency of the note before it. It's all really neat theory. :) Getting FuzzMeasure to work in this manner is not as easy as you may think. Vastly different analysis algorithms must be used to beef up the resolution in the lower frequencies. I have been spending a lot of my time this past week on researching a method for doing this very accurately, and quickly. Thankfully, I have no realtime constraints to adhere to here, so I can afford to sacrifice speed for accuracy in this case. The other area of improvement I'm working on is workflow. I want FuzzMeasure to work as a professional tool for people actually producing speakers. I have customers involved with producing speakers, and they'd love to see the ability to load a “known good” curve to compare others against. This is a large undertaking, believe it or not. While Cocoa gives me a big hand in creating this sort of interface, I have to do a lot of work to manage all the data that is recorded and presented. If you're registered in the forum, you can see the beta discussion where I have posted a teaser shot to show how work has been progressing on that so far. As a result of this professional focus, I am considering splitting FuzzMeasure into a standard and professional version. My main reason for doing this has very much to do with usability. For the hobbyist, FuzzMeasure in its current form works perfectly well for most scenarios. It works like any tool in your electronics workbench. You pull it out, run a measurement, and see the results right away. If you want to do further analysis in Octave later on, go right ahead! I don't require the user to think about the measurements, and organizing them, or saving them. FuzzMeasure in its current form works very well so that “what you see is what you hear” (thanks, Dan!). I plan to keep it that way. The needs of the professional are very different. They need to manage their products, run comparisons, and do QA. The professional must have a full grasp of what measurements have been done, when they were performed, etc. I feel that I have a compelling story to tell them with what I'm imagining FuzzMeasure Pro will be like. Alright. Time for me to resume the coding. Continue to enjoy 1.1! :)