The Stick® is a 10 or 12 string tapping fretboard instrument invented by Emmett Chapman. It can be setup in a variety of tunings, the most common being similar to a five string bass, 5 string guitar combination. The guitar in 4ths, the bass in 5ths. The common tunings are built into the program, setting it up for either a 10 string standard model or the 12 string Grand. Custom tunings can also be added by editing the ini file.
XStick(TM) has its roots in a number of programs and hopefully has some things that are unique for players of the Stick® and other tapping fretboard instruments. Many of the midi/music notation programs under Windows have guitar fretboards, and my original inspiration for XStick was a program called xfretboard for the XWindow GUI under Linux. which I modified to display my Stick's® fretboard. I wanted to share this tool with other players, so I rewrote the whole thing from scratch in Tcl/Tk which can run on a number of platforms.
This iteration of XStick has integrated Greg Howard and Emmett Chapman's 'Staff Tab(TM)' notation system which combines standard musical notation with tablature style encoding that indicates the finger, fret, and string encoding for a given note. The package allows composing, saving, loading and printing the 'Staff Tab', enabling users to be able to share their work with other players either in native format or as an EPS or graphic file. If you don't already have tools to manipulate/print EPS files, Ghostview will do the task quite nicely.