So, with that band-aid pulled off quickly, let's talk about what is coming instead...
Hand-Splitting / Joining / Note Removal
The Advanced / Simple Song View paradigm is changing. I think I've come up with a neat way to combine a lot of ideas that never really worked on their own into something much simpler. The notion of "Played by Me/Synthesia" and of "Left/Right/Both Hands" will be merging. And the new splitting interface will give you incredibly fine-grained control over all of it.
In addition to all that, you'll be getting an editor-like feature (suggested by jimhenry, I believe) that will let you mark a note as "forget this ever existed". I'll have more to share once it's not just a few pencil sketches on my desk.
Free Play (aka Chord Library)
This is another long-promised feature that will finally see the light of day. I've decided to rebrand it a bit. "Chord Library" felt like it might be some kind of music theory panacea. To align expectations a little better, I like the idea of a Free Play area where you can fiddle around with MIDI instruments with a cool visualization and, hey... what's that? Are those the names of the chords I'm playing? Cool.
I feel like it will work better as a bonus than as the focus. It doesn't hurt that I've typed "oh, you'll be able to use the upcoming Chord Library as a sort of free play area..." in response to feature requests more times than someone has actually asked for a chord identification engine. In Apple fashion, I'm deciding to focus more on the user experience than trying to sell the idea of some new piece of tech.
Title Screen Updates
That tiny line at the bottom of the title screen isn't great for disseminating news. Now that I've got more content to share on a regular basis (weekly Music Store songs and the upcoming Video Help series), having someplace to show more makes sense.
Near the news box I'm also hoping to add a "Recently Played" list so you can jump back to any of the last few songs you'd played in one click, circumventing the library altogether.
A bunch of small things...
These are actually already finished and will be in the first development preview (along with those title screen changes). These are things I've wanted to do for years and years.
- Multi-touch on the desktop. Windows 7 and 8 users that have a touchscreen can now do things like play lots of keys at once and pinch/zoom the keyboard just like iPad users.
- The Windows uninstaller now breaks things down into options, including the (new) ability to wipe the data directory.
- Automatic crash reporting. Windows crash report mini-dumps are uploaded automatically now. My response time to critical bugs should be much faster now.
Synthesia 10 is a big, meaty, feature-filled release. There have been lots of distractions in the last year and a half (the iPad release and the Music Store) and it feels incredible to finally dig back into cool things you guys have been asking for (and I've been promising) for years. I'm a little sad that MusicXML has to be put off for now, but I'll pick back up on it when I can next year.