Palmas 1.0.0

Palmas is a flamenco metronome: the compás of more than fifty palos, played
with real palmas, cajón and jaleos, and drawn as you listen.

This is its first release. Palmas is derived from A Compás 4.2.4 by Olivier Ricordeau and
Jérémie Sieffert, under the same AGPL-3.0 licence, and carries its own name,
identifiers and version numbering because the changes here are not theirs to
answer for.

Downloads

System	File
macOS, Apple silicon	palmas-1.0.0.931-arm64.dmg
Windows	palmas-1.0.0.931-x64-setup.exe to install, or palmas-1.0.0.931-x64-portable.exe to run without installing
Linux	palmas-1.0.0.931-x86_64.AppImage to run without installing, palmas-1.0.0.931-amd64.deb for Debian and Ubuntu, palmas-1.0.0.931-x86_64.rpm for Fedora and openSUSE
Android	palmas-1.0.0.931.apk

The macOS build is signed and notarized by Apple, and the Windows build is
signed. Palmas does not update itself: new versions are announced here, and you
install them the same way you installed this one.

Android: open the .apk on your phone. The first time, Android asks you to
allow installs from your browser or file manager; allow it, and switch it off
again afterwards if you like. Linux: the AppImage has to be marked
executable before it runs (chmod +x, or Properties → Allow executing as a
program).

There is also a web version that installs and runs offline, and an iPhone and
iPad version.

What's in it

• Silence individual beats. Tap a beat to silence it, tap it again to bring
  it back. Nothing sounds on a silenced beat — not the palmas, not the cajón,
  not the jaleos — while the compás goes on showing where it falls, so you can
  count through the gap. Silences are kept per pattern. Asked for by a flamenco
  master in Spain, who wanted to hear whether a student still arrives on 12.
• The visualization says which strikes are accented. A red disc marks an
  accented beat of the compás, a blue ring an accented strike by the instrument
  being drawn. Strength used to be one, two or three pixels of line weight,
  which nobody could see.
• New identity: a script P inside a ring of twelve dots, and a wordmark
  set in Playball, the face A Compás used through its 2.x releases.
• The palo descriptions are translated. They were a Wikipedia extract in
  four languages and English in the other five. They are now the app's own text
  in all nine, with Wikipedia as a link rather than the body.
• New help covering what the display shows, the eighth-note column, choosing
  which instrument is drawn, and the audio/visual delay setting — in all nine
  languages.
• Nine languages are reachable: Arabic, German, English, Spanish, Persian,
  French, Italian, Japanese and Chinese. Four of them were present but never
  offered. Locales load on demand, which took the main bundle from 230 KB to
  190 KB gzipped.
• All analytics removed. No accounts, no tracking, no cookies. The only
  request the app makes to anyone else is a Wikipedia lookup when you open the
  help for a palo.
• The accents in the non-flamenco rhythms fall on the beats that are
  played. Fourteen patterns — the four Afro-Brazilian, cascara, mozambique,
  the four Fundamental Global and the four Ternary African — had their accents
  written on a grid half the size of their instruments', so the red discs fell
  between the counted beats, often where nothing played. Inherited from
  A Compás.
• The sound comes back after the app has been away. On some Android tablets
  the audio stopped for good once Palmas had been in the background: the dots
  stood still and only restarting the app helped. Play now checks that the
  audio clock is actually moving and rebuilds the audio if it is not. On phones
  and tablets, leaving the app stops the metronome, so you come back to a Play
  button rather than a Stop button over silence; on the desktop it keeps
  playing in the background.
• Content Security Policy on every production build.
• The web build runs from any subfolder, so it can be hosted anywhere rather
  than only at a domain root.

For anyone building it

• Python is no longer needed. The audio pipeline, the setup and the desktop
  packaging are Node scripts that run on macOS, Windows and Linux alike, and the
  iOS asset step no longer needs a Mac.
• Setup is setup.ps1 or setup.sh, which check for Node, install it if it is
  missing, and hand over to a shared Node script that asks before it changes
  anything.
• The documentation is organised by build target rather than by host operating
  system, and was verified step by step on a machine with no toolchain.

Palmas is free software under the AGPL-3.0. The source is this repository;
problems and requests go to the issue tracker.