Novation Digital Music Systems Ltd. is a British musical equipment manufacturer, founded in 1992 by Ian Jannaway and Mark Thompson as Novation Electronic Music Systems. Today the company specialises in MIDI controllers with and without keyboards, both analogue and virtual analogue performance synthesizers, grid-based performance controllers, and DJ controllers and interfaces. At present, Novation products are primarily manufactured in China.
Novation's first commercial product, released in 1992, was the Novation MM10, a portable battery-operated keyboard controller with full-sized keys, designed to operate with the Yamaha QY10 music workstation. It was based on a device called the MidiCon, which was never released and was the first hardware controller the company made. The MM10 combined with the QY10 arguably constituted the first completely portable modern music workstation.
In 1993 the company released the Novation Bass Station (also known as the Bass Station Keyboard), today regarded as a classic synthesiser. Influenced by the Roland TB-303 Bassline, a portable compact synthesiser designed for instrumental accompaniment, Bass Station used digitally controlled analogue oscillators (DCOs), LFO and filter to replicate the sound of a traditional monophonic twin-oscillator analogue synth.
A launch pad is an above-ground platform from which rocket- missiles or space launch vehicles take off vertically.Launch pad may also refer to something
Launchpad is an application launcher developed by Apple Inc., and introduced in Mac OS X Lion. A labeled icon represents each application listed in Launchpad. The user starts an application by single-clicking its icon. Launchpad's fullscreen graphical user interface provides an alternative way to start applications in OS X, compared with other options such as the Dock (toolbar launcher), Finder (file manager), or Spotlight (desktop search).
Launchpad is designed to resemble the SpringBoard interface in iOS.
Initially, the Launchpad screen is populated with the computer programs listed in the "Applications" folder in OS X. The user can add application icons to Launchpad. The user can also remove an application's icon, but the application itself might not be deleted if it was not originally downloaded from the Mac App Store. Apps can be arranged in named folders much like iOS. The user can then remove apps downloaded from the Mac App Store. In Mac OS X Lion, Launchpad had eight icons per row; this was changed in OS X Mountain Lion to seven icons per row.However, with proper root permission, by adjusting some settings users can change the number of icon rows and columns in launchpad.
Launchpad is a web application and website that allows users to develop and maintain software, particularly open-source software. It is developed and maintained by Canonical Ltd.
On 21 July 2009, the source code was released publicly under the GNU Affero General Public License.As of January 2013, the Launchpad repository hosts more than 30,000 projects. The domain launchpad.net attracted 1 million visitors by August 2009 according to a Compete.com survey.
It has several parts:
A significant but less visible component is Soyuz, "the distribution management portion of Launchpad." Launchpad is currently primarily used in the development of Ubuntu, an operating system. Launchpad uses the FOSS (free/open source) Zope 3 application server.