The Chocopoolp story
At the beginning was HB++
Olivier Gillet, the developer of all the Chocopoolp applications, entered the World of PalmOS development in 2001 as an intern at Peter Holmes Consulting - an IT consulting company developing vertical applications for Palm powered handheld computers. At this time, the company was switching from expensive and complex development environments (RAD and C) to HB++ - a clean and efficient PalmOS programming language developed in-house. Olivier was over-enthusiastic about the possibilities of HB++, and joined the core development team of this product - where he learned a lot of PalmOS programming tips and tricks, and an in-depth knowledge of HB++ programming.
Give me some Bhajis!
In 2003, Olivier got a Tungsten T and became instantly fascinated by the voice memo and sound output features - for the first time, a cheap, portable, versatile and easily programmable audio platform was available! A few weeks later, he started experimenting with PalmOS 5 sound API and took the decision to write a complete music application. He had the intuition that a well-developed piece of software running on his Tungsten T could do the same job as his Roland MC-303. The Groovebox was a cool piece of hardware, but it did not run on batteries and was too heavy - If you ever had to carry one in your backpack, you will surely understand this! However, the project remained at the v0.01 stage for a long time and seemed to suffer from ADHD - it evolved from a multichannel recorder to a game music engine, and was, at an intermediary stage, not unlike pd. Finally, Olivier started writing the core of what would become Bhajis Loops in october 2003, while he was staying in Pune. An almost vegetarian diet and culinary-musical experiments account for the name of the program.
The first releases
In january 2004, many questions about Bhajis Loops remained unanswered, and the alpha version was hardly functional. Olivier decided to release a smaller, lighter music application to get more insight on what the users would want, and what they would do with the software. This application, Microbe, became an instant success, and cleared many doubts! Moreover, several Microbe fans participated in the development of Bhajis Loops by suggesting features or providing an essential feedback. Within 4 months, Bhajis Loops was finished. Many updates subsequently appeared, introducing features such as automation, the live mode, MIDI export/import or new synthesis parameters...
Chocopoolp
Because pet octopuses are cute, pink pet octopuses are cuter, and chocolate-eating pink pet octopuses are the cutest, Chocopoolp was created to market Microbe and Bhajis Loops. Chocopoolp's vision is to provide innovative, high-quality music applications for PalmOS handhelds, without any compromise on two essential factors:
- Human values. Music is all about respect, listening and understanding. Music software users and developers should follow these values too! Be assured that you won't be treated as a customer or a record in a database, but as a member of the community of Palm musicians.
- The fun factor. The world of modern technology can sometimes be boring, with its love for rational processes and formalism. Humour and fantasy are the best way of staying innovative - it's great to work when there is no border between hacks, challenges, jokes and innovation.
Background
Olivier Gillet earned an engineering degree in Computer Science from the ENST, Paris, and a Master's Degree in Artificial Intelligence and Pattern Recognition from the Pierre & Marie Curie University.
He is currently a Ph.D. student in Computer Science and Signal Processing. His researches focus on content-based indexing and retrieval systems for music signals.
He plans to apply his knowledge of software development and his theoretical background to develop large-scale, intelligent, music systems.