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Q1 18 Update

10th May 2018 by Tim Cole

Forum Being Retired, Wotja X Feature Parity

We are a little bit behind with our Q1 update, sorry. We released Wotja 5 on Jan 1st 2018 and since then have been beavering away like crazy on completing the Wotja X port so that we had a Wotja solution to run on all of macOS, Windows, iOS and Android. That work is now done and Wotja (AKA Wotja A) and Wotja X are now feature comparable (see below), too.

You can easily see some of the major changes that have arrived in V5 in the Wotja Key Features table.

Anyhow, so much as happened in the last few months that it is actually now all a bit of a blur so let's just press on, and keep it brief!

The Intermorphic Forum is being retired

Important notice for our Forum members

HEADS UP: We will deactivate/decommission the Intermorphic Forum on or before 24th May (and it may well be before then). If there is any information on it you wish to refer to then you will only be able to access that whilst it is there, so don’t delay. When it is gone, it is gone.

We have some momentous and sad news for you concerning the Intermorphic Forum.

Intermorphic develops generative music and creativity software and has done so for many years - and we hope and plan to continue doing so for many more years yet (so don’t worry about that); this is about the Forum.

The world of software is changing ever faster and to keep our software moving forwards requires us to give every second we can to it. Our PHPBB3 Forum has just about managed to keep working over the years and has required little by way of maintenance (it has gone wrong a few times and by some miracle we were able to get it going again)! However, as sometimes happens in life, things are about to change in a big way.

Data Protection law is changing 25th May 2018 and new regulations coming into force then. These are referred to as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

GDPR is a very complex piece of legislation with enormous ramifications for businesses of all sizes. Small businesses do not have the resources of larger businesses so it hits them much harder. We are not even a small business; we are a micro business with very meagre resources at our disposal. We are not lawyers, SQL database specialists, PHP specialists or admin junkies - we are a 2 man team working our socks off to make useful and rewarding creativity apps for a small niche audience, and just doing that and managing to survive is plenty hard enough.

A Forum is a complex, multi-faceted thing. Because of what the Forum is and the way it works then to modify it to be GDPR compliant (were that to be even possible) is simply way beyond our capabilities or the time we have available and we simply could not afford to bear the costs we would need to incur to do it (i.e. legal advice). The only thing we can do, therefore, is to remove it all together - so, with a sad and heavy heart, that is what we are going to do.

We will keep an eye out in the future for some new kind of GDPR-compliant ‘watering hole’ that is sufficiently admin free and economical to deploy. However, that would mean a fresh start and we might never find one. We may even be able to use YouTube videos as a kind of hybrid; we just don’t know yet.

We know it may be little by way of consolation, but we are at least relieved that GDPR is coming into force only after we have finally made the transition to Wotja / Wotja X - the future for all our older, now retired apps, e.g. Noatikl, Mixtikl, Liptikl, Tiklbox and the older Partikl Sound Engine.

As a quasi-replacement for the forum we will therefore be working to find a way to improve our Wotja FAQs and we will still retain information on our website for our now retired apps.

Thank you for being forum members, and for your contributions and mutual support over the years. We wish you all the best in your creative endeavours.

Wotja X

Having a version of our apps that could run on all major platforms has been a long held goal for us and we've been working towards that for years. For an idea of how long a road this has been see this FAQ entry: Help! I am confused about 'Wotja A' and 'Wotja X'. What should I get? What is the difference?.

With the February 2018 release of Wotja X 5.2.5, which we had been actively working on for many, many months, we were finally closing in on that goal. A few weeks later on April 28th we got to major feature parity between 'Wotja A' and 'Wotja X'.

Reaching that feature parity was a major milestone for us as it meant that we were at last in position where we could start adding NEW features to Wotja, rather than porting them over from other apps. A case in point being the V5.5.0 release where we added a new feature to allow video export. This is fun, see an example below (see also: How do I share a video recording?)

Finishing up...

As you can see from the above this is already turning out to be a very major year for us with lots and lots of changes - some of them tough ones. We hope the above gives you a useful overview of where we are at and provides a context that helps to explain why those changes are happening and necessary.

We hope you enjoy how we are taking Wotja forward and we look forward to seeing what you can do with it. Do let us know via social media etc. as it is now easy to create and share recordings!

Best wishes

Tim and Pete