Sunday, March 17, 2013

Writing a new library: Wavy

I have two proposals for this Spring Break.
  • Release the version 3.5 of HaTeX.
  • End up the first layer of my new library: Wavy.

HaTeX 3.5

HaTeX has been in stand-by for a while now and I want to upload a version of HaTeX that at least contains the changes I have made so far. Hopefully, I will add some new features. I am thinking about a matrix writer, since is a pain to write matrices right now. If you take a look to the last changes on github, better support for math typesetting has been added thanks to leftaroundabout. He is (or has been) also writing an extension for HaTeX to make math typesetting more sophisticated. Also, toschoo has improved the parser and now it uses attoparsec. These are good news for HaTeX.

Wavy

In the other hand, I am writing a new library. Its name is Wavy. It is a super kool library that read, writes and manipulates sounds very nicely. Yes, I know, lot of libraries have been written doing exactly the same. Exactly the same? Well, I think they are all different in some sense, and this is just another new approach. If it is going to be a better or worse approach is something I don't care, as long as is useful to somebody. And I already find it useful for myself! Although, of course, it would be great if somebody else find it interesting, so I will do my best to make of Wavy a nice library. To begin with, I started writing a user manual. I think is looking pretty good, but that is something that Haskell users should decide in my place. As an extension, I wrote a library that writes sound waves in PDFs. So yes, I am having a lot of fun! And it's everything written in Haskell!

I hope to have something more mature to show after the Spring Break, but I think is moment to start sharing this thoughts with the community. Below is a code example that shows Wavy in action writing a sine wave in a .wav file.

import Data.Sound
import Data.Sound.WAVE

main :: IO ()
main = encodeFile "sine.wav" $ fromSound 16 s
 where
  s = sine 5 1 100 0

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