On 7 Jul 2005 at 11:46, Lon Price wrote: > I'm surprised that this dynamic part linking issue is suddenly such a > big deal to everybody. Like I said in an earlier post, MOTU's Mosaic > had that feature, and if MOTU hadn't completely abandoned that > program, I would never have bought Finale. I've always missed this > feature since coming to Finale. But until this announcement from > Sibelius, I don't remember anybody making much of a fuss about > dynamic parts on this list. Now all of a sudden almost everybody > wants this feature, and claim to have wanted it all along. I'll tell > you this. Since getting on the Finale bandwagon, I've tried to be a > loyal user, resisting the urge to jump ship and go with Sibelius, > even though I have clients who would like me to do so. But this > dynamic parts feature is awfully appealing to me--enough so that I > may just have to bite the bullet and make that jump to Sibelius.
You may not remember it, but *I* do. There have been at least a couple go-rounds of the discussion, hashing out how it should work and what the problems are. The Sibelius implementation pretty much follows exactly what was determined to be the best design here on this list. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the discussion here was a starting point (not the only one, though) for their implementation. Of course, from my point of view, dynamic parts in Finale is only a small part of my overall critique of the design of Finale, a critique I've been making on this list as long as I've been posting here. I've called for dynamic parts, cascading templates and subclassing of expressions/articulations. All of them have one thing in common: the elimination of the proliferation of copies of similar objects in favor of a single parent object with additional instances have their own properties. I have been saying this for years, that Finale needs to change basic things about the way it works in order to be easier to use. Dynamic parts would probably be the easiest to implement because of the existing Special Part Extraction as a starting point. But I still think that *all* of them need to be addressed if Finale is to survive (i.e., attract new users who can't be bothered with tweaking numeric settings in dialog boxes -- EVPUs? What's that). -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
