At 09:45 AM 2/27/04 +0100, Johannes Gebauer wrote: >I am not sure whether you are joking or being serious. Whatever the case, >cross staffing is much easier than that in Fin2k4. Select the notes, select >the plugin, click GO and you are done.
I wasn't joking. One of the things I like about Graphire is that most tool actions are one click away, with few cumbersome dialogs. Unlike Finale, it is a true production-oriented interface (with excellent defaults, by the way) that speeds right along without going in and out of frames, choosing multiple levels of tools, and looking for workarounds. The example I point to, drag-enclosing to beam/unbeam (one stroke, not plugins or lots of rat-a-tat-tat going into Speedy and using the / key), is just a better idea. Graphire is full of flaws (I still don't know if it has a future), not least of which that it was dongle-protected. I fought bitterly to have that removed, and it was among the reasons our relationship ultimately broke down. It is also very hard to make revisions once material is entered; it's definitely not a composer's creative scoring program. At the time I worked on it, its Midi was rudimentary, with input but no output. Except for production houses, I wouldn't recommend Graphire over Finale (even with Graphire's more attractive output). But Finale can learn a lot from it. A whole lot. Warning: Moving from Finale to Graphire is very difficult, as Graphire's method of working shares nothing with Finale's. Of all scoring programs, Finale users find the move most frustrating. <rant begin> Seeing other software's ease, speed, and contemporaneity reminds me of how very tired I am of fighting with Finale's prehistoric functionality. I hate the requirement for plugins. I just looked, and found that more than half of the Patterson, TGTools, Forza (where are you Jari?) and JW plugins don't actually add to Finale's features -- instead, they repair deficiencies in Finale that should be basic functions and options, not add-ons or post-fixes. Is this any way to run a program? The idea of having to select a third-party plugin to perform *basic* engraving tasks -- where's this plugin? where's that one? what's it called? how does this author's UI work (especially the TGTools UI, which I dislike immensely)? -- is nonsense, and reveals Finale's "house of cards" condition. Beaming, scrapbooks, articulation sorting, search/replace, separators, booklets, and on and on. Dolet and Braille, yes. Beams and system separation, no. Finale has been an increasing mess for years, and unless something has dramatically changed in its organization between 2K3 and 2K4, it still continues to be, and has become dependent upon third-party developers like Tobias, Robert, Jari, and Philip to repair its lamentable condition. Despite claims to the contrary, Finale is inflexible. What I mean is that although many things are possible in Finale, 'possible' does not equal the combination of basic features and advanced functionality that really define flexibility. Working outside a certain limited repertoire (to achieve basic functions like beaming across barlines) becomes a workaround, requires a plugin, is (after years of development) still within deeply nested dialog systems (such as the shape tool), or is flat-out impossible (curved staves). What I just learned from Liudas, for example, about having to apply an articulation within the measure's frame if the figure goes outside the beat limit ... that's crazy. Whoever it was wanted one of the myriad contemporary symbols not only missing but nearly impossible to create in Finale -- the varying shape glissando. Where are the control points on these supposed smart shapes? How do I even get a tuplet across a system break without resorting to bits and pieces of other shapes? By comparison to other software, Finale is growing stupider. And the measure-bound nature of Finale continues to undermine it (no staggered barlines, no cross-system beaming with one note on either side, no falling outside the measure limit without contortions, no correct out-of-measure spacing, crashing and overlapping objects, missing break-and-drawthrough, etc.), and the whole measure-bar-frame methodology and its consequences are just plain feeble. Lyrics difficulties are legion (as I was about to send this, Johannes is having a problem with placing punctuation where it belongs). There's no way to select all of a certain kind of object in a measure, staff, system, or document. A little problem that has just cost me hours of work is that articulations can't have a staff-fixed position; a score that should have taken about 4 hours has taken me close to 3 days because Finale is ignorant of cross-bar/system tuplets, fixed-position articulations, and objects that shouldn't touch/overlap. Even basic interface functions were still debilitated as of 2K3, in the Windows UI at least. The problem with scrolling remained (i.e., not respecting the up/down/left/right arrows for page motion, no proper wheel functions, and no continuous redraw when dragging a scroll bar), the ridiculous lack of context menus except when on a handle, the inability to recognize shift-click and control-click selections in standard usage, the trail of shadows produced when dragging elements that required redraws, and on and on. Getting rid of tools, folding them in to each other, and providing proper context menus would go a long way to help. It's time to dump the scroll view as a separate entity -- every view should be a page view, with a 'scroll emulation' (that is, an infinite page width combined with functional scrolling). In other words, scroll view is easier to use in many ways, but its non-WYSIWYG nature should have been repaired long ago. Stacking objects is long overdue (bring to front/top, bring forward/backward, etc.). Structural layers (template, page, staves, notes, other objects, etc.) are long overdue. Clues to object ownership are long overdue (and here again, Graphire's UI excels in that the connection of objects can be seen; and such an ownership scheme would make it possible to attach anything to anything). Color printing, consolidated page layout, curved staves, and vector text on the page (not shape designer) should be here; any $50 graphics program can do on-page vector text. There is no excuse whatsoever for the constantly, infuriatingly broken PostScript implementation. Most of all, it's time for the barline as a determiner of data to be put to rest; this was *never* a good idea except for a "toy" program. And it's still here, 10 generations of computer hardware and software later. Where other programs have made enormous leaps (just look at the difference between Sonar today and Cakewalk in 1992, Word, Photoshop, FrameMaker vs. PageMaker, etc., and full-feature browsers that didn't even exist when I started using Finale), Finale has become frozen. When software is frozen, it is friable. With each revision of Finale I hope for a truly essential rebuilding, and with each iteration, although its functions continue to be wide-ranging and more scattershot plugins get written, I am disappointed that it falls increasingly behind other contemporary software in ease of use, feature access, and true, inherent flexibility. (The only thing Finale seems to have adopted enthusiastically from others was copy-protection. That's hardly a step forward, and why I've skipped 2K4.) Finale reminds me of living in my old house. It's a nice old place, but everything is constantly in need of fixing and never quite works right, with kludges everywhere and little cracks and leaks that suck time and energy. I get tired of fighting it, of dumping more money and time into it. I don't really care how hard it is to re-program these features, or what the underlying data structure is, or for any other excuses from the company. It'll be even harder to program if Finale can't pay its programmers when the company folds. I'm seriously looking again, now that all the major software is copy protected anyway. Here in Vermont, they adopted Sibelius for all the schools -- at the urging of one of my own students who was in charge of the statewide program! She learned to despise Finale. Yes, I have 12 years invested in learning Finale. Am I still learning new things about how to accomplish things? Yes to that as well -- but I shouldn't be. I shouldn't be learning what in Finale remains badly organized internally and externally. It still takes too many steps to accomplish basic score design -- and remember how you did it "last time". I shouldn't have to be learning and relearning to do anything more detailed than pop charts and church hymns. <rant end> Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
