Boris Smus

In the midst of my graduate studies, I somehow found the time to write a simple prototype for a mobile Guitar Unleashed client. It’s more of a proof-of-concept for some cool new technologies that I’ve been meaning to play with. Two things led me down this path:

1. Since I’m no longer bound by corporate affiliation, I feel compelled to finally develop an interesting application for iPhone.
2. I’m very bad at remembering guitar chords and lyrics, but never bother making a cheat sheet to take to the campfire. I nearly always have my phone in my pocket, though.

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I’ve been collaborating with my dad on an experimental web-based guitar chord editing service. It’s still a work in progress, but we are ready to launch a beta version. Please visit http://www.guitarunleashed.com/ to check it out and provide feedback.

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When I want to learn a new song on guitar, I often search for chords online. There are many sites that provide chords and tabs, and Google indexes them nicely. But the quality of chords is often poor, and there’s no way to submit corrections. When I ran a MoinMoin wiki, I kept my fixed versions of songs there. Even making modifications to existing chords was painful though, since it involved hand-editing a plain text file and ensuring that the chords were properly aligned with the lyrics. My preferred solution to this problem is to write a web application to facilitate easy collaborative editing of simple folk/rock/pop songs.

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