Hey guys. My name is Blake West. I'm the co-inventor of Hummingbird. First, thanks for all the discussion. There really is no such thing as bad publicity. You'v

Hey guys. My name is Blake West. I'm the co-inventor of Hummingbird. First, thanks for all the discussion. There really is no such thing as bad publicity. You've helped us crack 13k downloads in under 48 hrs. 2nd, I thought I'd just quickly respond here to some of the main points... 1.) "Traditional is fine. it's not broken": Neither were text-only command line interfaces. But GUI's are just easier to learn for most people. 2.) I am indeed a professional keyboardist, have been playing and reading traditional notation since age 7, and I also teach 25 students a week still. I know theory like the back of my hand, and can talk modes, b9 chords, and 12-tone rows all day long if you like. Jazz and pop are my thing and I play to lead sheets more often than not now a days. So I know this fro m both angles. 3.) We do have key signatures. They're at the start of each song in plain english. no need to be cryptic with symbols. 4.) Relative pitch notations seem like a good idea, but they really aren't. The function of a pitch is honestly pretty subjective and changes frequently in a song. Not to mention, they'd be much harder to learn, especially for young students. Relative pitch is an abstraction, and abstraction is the luxury of experts. 5.) Why not use a chromatic staff or other such layout? Because we actually wanted some adoption. Most other alternate systems have failed because they're SO different that they are completely alien. Ours is "backwards compatible", and also if you did want to switch over to traditional from Hummingbird, you could, and it's not that crazy. 6.) Why not use colors? Because music still gets printed and photo copied vey often, and will for at least another 5-10 yrs. And color printing is still 7x more expensive. 7.) "You can't hand-write the symbols". Yes, you can. It is slower, but our point is that most music is printed off of notation programs today, so hand-writing is usually reserved for small edits, or writing fragments from scratch. This is still completely fine even with an unsharpened pencil with Hummingbird. I have done it with my students many times. 8.) "Picking out lines and spaces isn't that hard" - If you spent time around kids you would be SHOCKED at how bad their spatial reasoning is before about 9-11 yrs old. It is really hard for them without a ton of frustration. That frustration often leads to them thinking they're "bad at music". That turns them away, and it shouldn't have to. I know there's other stuff, but just not enough time... Thanks.