Once upon a time, there was a project called Jade. There were a lot of good things about Jade, and of course there were some bad things. Out of Jade came Jamoma. Jamoma has been torn apart and put back together a number of times, and Jade (which was difficult to maintain anyway) became harder to maintain and fell way behind.

Eventually Jade was open sourced. The hope was that Jade, like Jamoma, would pick up some interest and some dedicated developers and it could get up to speed. Jade would still make the idea reference environment for hosting Jamoma modules. However, in the time since Jade has been open sourced (about 18 months ago) I have not received a single email about it. I tell people about it and they say “oh”. Which seems odd because it seems like a lot of people know about Jade.

What does this mean? No one has the time to even think about it? That seems plausible, as it has been one of my problems. The project seems overwhelming? That seems plausible too, though if the person was just using Jamoma instead of developing it as well it shouldn’t be to bad.

Personally, I have a lot of baggage associated with Jade too – good and bad. When I think ‘Jade’ I think of specific ways of doing things in Max patches and such. Even to re-write Jade from scratch, I get stuck in the same routines and the same ruts—and caught thinking about all of these various unresolved issues in Jade, which has nothing to do with anything.

If I were really interested in a clean start on a Jamoma host application, I think it would need to called something else—even if it ended up being called Jade again at some point in the future. Of course, perhaps the whole world (or that extremely small slice that would care at all about Jade) would need a similar fresh start. Especially given how different such a host might be.

So I’m going to call this new application, whatever it might be, something new. In the case of Jade, it had several names before it was Jade. It entered beta testing with the name Silicon Performer. At some point I grew to be disgusted by the number of syllables in the name and the lack of imagery invoked by the name—so I started looking at various rocks, minerals, and stones for names.

The current working name of this new entity is ‘Cog’. The pronunciation according to the Oxford dictionary is Käg, and I like umlauts, so I could use that. The word is believed to be of Scandinavian origin: Kug, or Kugge. I think I just like Cog though. It seems clear.

Cog is a carpentry term, which seems apropos. It gives a sense of gears and wheels and motion and machines and energy. It isn’t the most important dominating force in what is going on – that would be the art work or musical performance or interaction or underlying philosophies. Rather, it is simply a gear in the larger system of the artwork “that transfers motion by engaging with projections on another wheel or bar” [from the Oxford dictionary].