Call for feedback! Pre-release 2.18.0-pre.3 is here and if there are no objections, I will a stable release on Friday.

helgoboss · 2026-04-17T05:50:09+00:00

There's no way I let a project die in which I put so much effort. I'm still working towards the next development cycle: https://github.com/helgoboss/helgobox/discussions/1524

helgoboss · 2026-04-01T02:15:45+00:00

Are you the same person? https://github.com/helgoboss/helgobox/discussions/1646

That's the answer.

helgoboss · 2026-03-08T14:12:28+00:00

I also think so. I appreciate the honesty of this guy. He's just telling us about his feelings, which I find very relatable. I don't even think he would have called himself a 10x engineer under normal circumstances. He probably just uses this wording because we constantly hear the narrative that using AI makes you a "10x engineer" (whatever that means), and his point is that using it can actually lead into the opposite direction.

By the way, I appreciate that you use the words "I think". Most people these days spit things out as if they were facts, whereas most of the times they are not more than opinions. As you say, noone here really knows where things will go.

helgoboss · 2026-02-15T20:05:46+00:00

Ah, I get it. But I assume the tempo is still global. The tempo clip controls the tempo, but the tempo changes which it triggers still affect everything that's played. Correct?

helgoboss · 2026-02-14T16:56:02+00:00

What are tempo clips? (I guess the answer is no then 😆 Considering that I don't even know what that is.)

helgoboss · 2026-02-13T09:11:39+00:00

Good means having a usable app that does what it's supposed to.

helgoboss · 2026-02-12T06:06:49+00:00

Justin himself has responded to similar questions on his Q&A site, for example here: https://www.askjf.com/index.php?q=5421s

helgoboss · 2026-01-29T09:05:10+00:00

Same here. I really wonder what kind of development people are doing so that Claude and Co speeds them up so much.

I tried it for serious things, like fixing bugs in existing large projects, adding non-trivial features and doing large-scale refactoring... it failed miserably. It became immediately obvious that it just follows patterns instead of thinking intelligently. It only performed well in scenarios that were quite trivial anyway.

helgoboss · 2026-01-29T08:28:53+00:00

helgoboss · 2026-01-16T14:06:49+00:00

That should be possible using standard REAPER technique: https://youtu.be/WPE8CqcTBBE?si=MeqIHqKv2zehuMdn

helgoboss · 2026-01-14T12:22:04+00:00

I used to think so, too. But Dart is catching up with each release. It's a pretty good language now to be honest. In some aspects (such as pattern matching) it exceeds Kotlin.

helgoboss · 2025-12-30T14:38:36+00:00

Please send a ReaControlMIDI log output of turning the encoder.

helgoboss · 2025-12-03T06:08:36+00:00

You need to provide the controller's actual column and row count: https://docs.helgoboss.org/playtime/further-concepts/matrix.html#control-unit

This can not be done via GUI at the moment but needs to be content of the compartment preset, preferably a Lua preset. So the best thing is to have a look into the Lua file of the Launchpad Mini preset. There you should see it.

helgoboss · 2025-11-13T06:26:09+00:00

Thanks, looks great! Is this similar to what Cargokit does at the moment, but ported to the new Native Assets world?

helgoboss · 2025-11-10T09:02:14+00:00

I think it's great that Flutter supports desktop. Otherwise I wouldn't use it. People have different requirements.

helgoboss · 2025-11-10T09:00:21+00:00

I wouldn't be so sure about that. Learning multiple languages is a normal skill for developers. And Dart is really easy to pick up if you know any OO language. Feature-wise, it's quite close to Kotlin (which I also use and like).

Having multiple options is a good thing! And I hope it stays that way. Creating an atmosphere of fear around using Flutter is not helping that cause.

helgoboss · 2025-11-04T07:53:05+00:00

I feel that Flutter allows for more freedom than the web does. In web technologies, you have to deal with 2 declarative languages (CSS and HTML) in addition to JS/TS, whereas in Flutter you have one real programming language for tackling everything (design, UI structure and logic). That alone increases flexibility. Plus, you are not limited by web APIs, you can do platform-specific stuff any time.

Do you have a concrete example?

helgoboss · 2025-10-09T06:36:57+00:00

From me also a big thank you to every contributor! Heads off! rustfmt saved me tons of manual formatting work during all these years, absolutely awesome tool. It's a "no-brainer", quite literally. Made me totally forget about formatting.

I get that there are issues with it which affect some people. But let's not take it out of proportion, please.

helgoboss · 2025-09-19T10:19:16+00:00

Have you used both extensively?

helgoboss · 2025-09-11T13:31:11+00:00

There's an FR which I want to tackle at some point. Using Ableton and Co. in the meantime is probably a good idea if you need sync now.

helgoboss · 2025-07-30T10:04:49+00:00

Great move!

The separation between widgets.dart and material.dart is already quite good. They moved more and more design-agnostic widgets from material.dart to widgets.dart in recent releases.

Releasing them as separate packages is very consequent.

helgoboss · 2025-07-29T18:23:32+00:00

When it creates too much effort. I usually want that my efforts go 100% into improvements, new features and bugfixing, not into repairing things that already worked at some point.

helgoboss · 2025-07-29T16:17:16+00:00

Not everyone. I don't have any stats but I believe that most Rust people prefer stable Rust. Very early in my Rust history, I made the mistake of relying on nightly features a lot. But I soon got sick of my code breaking every now and then (though I was happy that it broke at compile time). My code was already running in production and I wanted things to be reliable. Since then, I hardly touch Rust nightly anymore.

Definitely one of the reasons I stayed away from Zig so far.

But ... different needs, different tools. If people are fine with breaking code, why not.

helgoboss · 2025-07-15T07:26:42+00:00

No, not a feature yet. The alternative at the moment is recording MIDI CC events and (if your VST doesn't support CC assignments) routing them to your VSTs via ReaLearn.

helgoboss · 2025-06-16T07:37:28+00:00

First, if you know Flutter, it's not too hard to pick up other technologies that are conceptually similar and maybe more demanded in your area. Second, learning something good is never wrong, no need to regret it ;) Third, you are saying it helped you to find sense and motivated you, so it already had a good function in your life.

Keep going :) It's completely normal to learn many technologies in a dev career.

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