>> I can't see the point of taking up valuable space on the screen >> for something you aren't using all the time. > But for browsing several tunes it could be usefull. Maybe if this > subwindow would stay "on top" and doesn't disappear if we load a > tune (so we could move it at a corner of the screen), then we > could choose another tune and so on.
BarFly has a serious, fundamental, far-too-deeply-wired-in-to-change design mistake here, which you need to avoid repeating. It has two display modes, applied to open files: one allocates almost all the window to edit the ABC, much like any text editor. The other one splits the window into three panels; a staff notation display at the top, two panels under it showing the ABC source, and a list of X: field numbers and titles for all the tunes in the file. You can use the list to navigate the file (handy for large files); the source panel has the same functionality as when in single-pane mode. This is an infuriating waste of screen space. I normally use a very large monitor (21" greyscale) and even with that I find I don't have enough. I want to be able to see an entire A4 page of staff notation actual-size, and because of BarFly's multi-pane setup I can't, even on that monster. I think the Apple Cinema Display is the only screen that would allow it. (Where it gets silliest is with a multi-monitor setup: small screen for source, big one for staff notation - but the program won't let me). A recent change to BarFly creates the same problem in the lateral dimension: the panels used to be stacked vertically, but now the source and index panels are side by side, which makes very wide ABC source (like a lot of mine) impossible to view or edit in split- screen mode, particularly since linewrap scrambles alignment between lines and there's no unwrapped display option with horizontal scroll. And I would *hate* it if anything decided to float on top of either source or staff notation, getting in the way of reading and editing. The way to do this is with separate windows that can be shuffled like any others in the user interface. The mail program Eudora (at least for the Mac - I presume the PC version is basically similar) gets this right: the list of messages in a folder is in one window, and when you open a message from the list it's in a separate window. There are standard ways to shuffle windows depthwise in the Mac user interface: a "Windows" menu in the main menu bar for the application is the most common. Everybody understands how this works. Currently, if I click on the Window menu for Eudora, I get four items: a "Send to Back" command (with the keyboard shortcut displayed beside it), the addressee of this message (displayed in italic to indicate the message is open for writing), the sender of the other message I have open (the one I'm replying to), and the ABC folder. It lets you have any number of folders open, any number of messages within each folder, and edit any number of messages or text files at once. For most purposes that interface is a lot faster, more intuitive and more standard than the one BarFly provides. BarFly's split-screen model has also wasted hundreds of sheets of paper for me. The print command is mode-dependent: in split-screen mode it prints the contents of the staff notation panel only, in text mode it prints the source. Particularly with a single-tune file, it is far too easy to assume you'll always get staff-notation printout if you just select "Print" (printing ABC source is a rare operation for most people). If there were separate windows for each kind of display, the basic Mac model where "Print" prints your current window would operate. (And would allow direct printing of the tune list, which needs an intermediate step at present as there's no place to put it in the user interface). Pretty much every other application that offers alternative views on a single file does it by putting each view in a separate moveable window: spreadsheets use separate windows for charts, browsers use separate windows for displaying HTML source, databases offer list and form views. The only genre I can think of where single-window split-pane is the norm, and for good reason, is file comparison utilities. =================== <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> =================== To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
