From Music Whiteboard to Riffboard

For most of its life this project was called “the music whiteboard.” That name was useful because it was honest: the working prototype really is a large dark canvas where short pieces of written music can be placed, moved, and connected. But a description is not a name, and as the prototype stabilized, the missing vocabulary started to hurt. It is hard to design a feature you cannot refer to.

So this note records the naming pass.

Riffboard is the product and the workspace. The word keeps the whiteboard idea — a board you put things on — and anchors it to the musical unit the product cares about most.

RiffCatch is the capture feature and the focused recording state. When you want to play something before it disappears, you enter RiffCatch, play, and stop. The name is meant to feel like a verb you perform, not a mode you configure.

Rifflet is a short captured musical idea, represented as standard notation and guitar tablature on a movable card. The diminutive is intentional. A Rifflet is not a song, a track, or a project. It is a few seconds of music that deserved to be written down.

Music View is the read-and-play projection for selected Rifflets and sequences — the place where arranged material becomes something you can read like a page and play back as a whole.

None of these names change what the software does. What they change is how precisely we can think about it. “The card should re-render after capture” becomes “the Rifflet renders when RiffCatch commits,” and suddenly the sentence contains a design decision instead of a vague hope.