On 9 Jul 2005 at 8:35, dhbailey wrote: > Unfortunately, Sibelius tries to make that "gorgeous output and easy > to use right out of the box" claim which leads to frustration in many > beginners. > > Equally unfortunately, Finale has a known history of a steep learning > curve (which has gotten to be far less steep as the years have passed) > which it seems unable to shake. > > They're both equally complex to learn if a person wants to reach a > professional engraving level.
I've tried very hard to edit out of my comments anything that I knew was just my trying to put a Finale paradigm on Sibelius. But I also think that the Sibelius reputation for having an intuitive UI is not deserved. Aside from the problems with the concept of "intuitive interface" (nothing on the computer is truly intuitive unless you've already got a huge base of knowledge behind it), I don't think Sibelius's UI is any more intuitive than Finale's. Indeed, there are many cases where Finale implements an easier UI of operating directly on what you're editing, whereas Sibelius gives you a dialog box with lots of settings to adjust. If I took out the names and replaced them with "ProgramA" and "ProgramB" I'd bet that just about every Finale and Sibelius user would guess wrong precisely because of the respective reputations of the two programs. I don't think Sibelius's "intuitive" or "easy-to- learn" reputation is deserved, and I don't think Finale's "non- intuitive" and "hard to learn" reputation is deserved, either. As you say, both programs are complex and difficult to learn. But somehow Sibelius has magically gained a reputation that I simply don't believe is warranted, at least not from my experiences with the demo. And my objections here are not about *how* things are done, since that's obviously going to be different from Finale -- my objections are in how the UI is designed and how functionality is implemented. The key difference seems to me to be in discoverability -- Sibelius makes it harder to find answers than Finale does, it seems to me, partly because Sibelius doesn't give as easy access to the properties of objects. This is not a criticism based on my inexperience with Sibelius, but based on observation of how things are done in Sibelius. There are also a number of areas that Sibelius doesn't feel like a professional program to me (the edit boxes in the dictionary edit were one of those), and the visual feedback seems very, very poor to me (I can't tell from looking at the screen what in the word is going on, since I can't always clearly see what's selected, or can't tell where my typing is going to appear onscreen). And performance on my PC is abysmal compared to Finale. I've never been a fan of Finale's screen redraw, but it seems much better than Sibelius's. My PC is not new, and not fast, but it's also not a laggard in the field of all the other applications that I use. Sibelius is markedly slower than any other application I've got installed. So, I don't believe I'm being unfair here. I'm trying to bend over backwards to avoid the kind of temper tantrums that come from simply not having absorbed the paradigms and organization of a different program. Maybe I'm not very successful at 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
