Let me step away from Reaktor for a moment and put out a couple of general thoughts. Since my early ages I was quite a computer-geek person. I started to harvest my first programming skills with BASIC on my first ZX-Spectrum 48k machine. It was something like 13-14 years ago, I was truly shocked that you get a programming language a moment after you turn the computer’s power on. It was so simple to begin. I was a 11 years boy, I didn’t have a clue about a programming theory or even English language. But I did see a flashing [K] cursor and 40-keys keyboard. And I had one of most powerful tools to get a result – “method of a scientific guess”, in other words I’ve just tried all of the commands and operands combinations to comprehend Basic, my first programming language The key of my success on learning BASIC is ZX-Spectrum’s usability: 1. BASIC “flashed” in ROM (Read Only Memory, no need to load anything); 2. Few commands per key (no need to type commands letter by letter). So, these simple tricks of sir Clive Sinclair have created my ideology and vectored my biography path.

My next small discovery with huge consequences was Zilog Z80 CPU [the heart of ZX-Spectrum] , an absolutely ingenious CPU. Simple, optimal, effective – aren’t these words convertible terms for “usability”? So, by the age 14 I continued my programming affairs with Z80′s assembler. I’m not going to bother you with details of the CPU specifications, but the thing behind this story is that site is a very small piece of these huge consequences. Consequences of usability. It’s important to keep in mind that an usability is like a life power for a seed. No matter how small your seed, your contribution to the world, if the thing you done contain a piece of your human nature – there are huge consequences to occur. The world is full of bad and good connections. The bad ones have no barriers on the way, the masses love to copy crap information. The good ones do the magic quietly, almost insensibly. Usability is a key to the door in front of inspiration. Usability is a sister of Sincerity. It’s not hard to feel when they come both.

And there is a cause of the post – Triple Cheese VSTi by Urs Heckmann

As some of you may know this synth has won KVR developer challenge. But the reason I’m writing the post is that the synth is full of great and usable sounds. The synth ain’t gonna be thrown to another big “vstplugins” folder and forgotten a day later. The brilliant synth with fabulous creative_sound_quality/cpu_usage ratio. And finally let’s mention the price in the formula and produce another division by zero – it’s freeware!

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