The Meta programming environment
Last update: Thursday, March 18, 3:20pm

This is an alpha-test version of the Meta development environment.

System requirements

In principle, Meta will run on any Windows machine running Windows 98 or later.

• You must have the Microsoft .NET system installed.  At this point, pretty much every machine should have it installed anyway.  If your computer is less than 2 years or and/or you're running Internet Explorer 5 or later and/or you're running a recent version of Microsoft Office, you should have it already.  If not, you can download it here.
• You also want to have Windows Media Player installed, at least, if you want to use Meta to manipulate MIDI streams.
• Speed: I've developed the system on a 1.5GHz laptop, so it should run fine on any desktop machine made in the last 4 years.  It really ought to run okay on any laptop faster than 300MHz or so, but I haven't tried.  If it runs slow, use the "Speed up editor" option in the "Advanced" menu to turn off some of the bells and whistles.
• Memory: My machine has 512MB or RAM, but I'm typically running 1-3 other programming environments at the same time I'm running Meta without having any performance problems, so that suggests that 128MB ought to be enough.

Installation instructions

It is very likely that if you download the Meta installer (right click the link and choose Save Target As).  Then double-click the file to install Meta.

• However, if it doesn't let you open it from its current location and when you save it to disk and click on it, it won't run it, then you probably don't have the Microsoft Installer software installed on you machine.  In that case, download the full installer, extract the files from it, and click the Setup icon.
• If you don't have a copy of WinZip on your machine, you may not be able to extract the files from the full installer.  In that case, manually copy each file over from this directory.  And then run Setup.
• If you manage to run the installer, but it complains that you don't have the .NET runtime, let me know and I'll find it for you.
• If anything else goes wrong, write down the error message it produces and send me email with the error message and the step of the process you were in when it generated the error message.  I'll see what I can do.

Running it

Having installed, it you can run Meta by choosing Meta from the Northwestern University directory in the Start menu or by clicking on a file that has Meta code in it.

Bug reports

Should go to ian@northwestern.edu.  Thanks.

Why the cat?

I needed something for an icon.  It was there.  His name is Puck.  He is an mischievous imp.