Jason Tratta

“Messenger of the cue gods.”

MerQury

MerQury is my second application for use with Figure 53’s Qlab 2. MerQury was developed as a simple way to implement a redundant Qlab system over an easy to use network setup.

Admittedly, it’s not the best solution. There is a bit of latency between the pressing of “Go” on one system and the cue going on the second system. MerQury cheats by pushing the load time on the backup computer forward a fraction of a second to compensate until it’s called into show duty.

It is, however, the cheapest, fastest, easiest solution. No matter what hardware configuration you have on either machine, as long as they have the same Qlab 2 file and a network port, you’ll have a parachute.

MerQury is easy to setup. Simply make sure your Macs are on the same network, and MerQury will use Bonjour to automatically find copies of itself running online. After that, a few clicks on each computer and you’re set.

MerQury is currently in the alpha testing phase. The image below is an early build to test the underlying code.

Look mom, I’m ugly!

In the coming weeks, MerQury will be available for beta download and testing.

BUT WAIT!!!

..there’s more. It turns out the networking code will theoretically let many Qlab systems to talk to each other. Hot on the heels of the 1.0 release, I’ll be working to add a multitude of features.

Stay tuned!