At 08:45 AM 6/20/2007 -0400, Christopher Smith wrote: >Part of the problem with "wish lists" of features is how to implement >them, because implementation IS the feature. >As you have mentioned so often, the UI is so much of the program that >a LOT of time and planning have to be spent to make it usable. Your >idea about the beaming over barlines is an excellent example of >something that would be SO simple in UI, rather than the plugin we >presently have to use (or heaven forbid, manually! Thanks Robert >Patterson!)
Robert's plugins have save so much time (though the scrapbook doesn't always work), as have Tobias's (though his fonts plugin almost always crashes and a few others lock up), as does Finale's native canonical utilities (which crash more often than not). And that's a failure point -- not the crashing, but rather the scatteredness of Finale's features that have made it nuts to use (if your needs are all over the map, as mine are). What's a plugin? What's a mass edit? What's a staff style? What's a document option? Where's the button to reset any given feature to its default throughout the score? (For that matter, where the heck is a decent font search, replace, or remove function?) There's no comprehensive index and no way to know where these are short of memorizing them if you use them enough. Yes, those are UI issues. (And though nobody had any positive comment for the feature bar that I suggested last year, as the Finale features grow and scatter, it's increasingly more fluid than the present where's-waldo dialog box method.) Over the years, I've pushed Finale into doing a lot; jef has done far more that I could ever imagine. And look, I'm the first to admit that Finale is the only notation program that developed and continues to support "legacy" niche features that we all know they would *not* include if they were asked to do so today -- special scales and microtonality options in particular, the shape designer, unusual meters (most of which are pretty much unchanged since before I started using the program years ago). Lilypond (and the erstwhile Score) can do lots more of the graphical kinds of things I'm asking for, of course, but it really is crazymaking to think: oh, yes, this score has to be done in X because Finale doesn't have the features. (Like the intermeshed tuplet pieces that were popped right into Lilypond and spaced correctly.) A score is a score is a score. Beyond that, it seems the Finale team has never harmonized their data 'atomization' with their vector capabilities. There's a really powerful graphical system lurking in there, very much hobbled by the measure-based structure and the lack of a good library of models to develop the program. The Stockhausen "Refrain" mentioned in my last most was written in 1961, more than a quarter century before Finale's first version, and part of it appeared on the back cover of the first edition of Gardner Read's notation book! They couldn't have missed it, so how did they make it impossible (not difficult, but impossible) to do? Were I a programmer back in the early Finale days, I would have used it along with the Cage "Notations" book, the whole panoply of 20th century notation, plus the 19th century notation that is Finale's basis, and extending back into historical techniques, plainchant, etc. By using a broad musical library, Finale programmers would never have chosen the structures they did. On the other hand, the great choice was all that vector stuff -- which is weakly exploited. So why shouldn't *every* item be malleable? Turn, rotate, stretch, be in color? Use publicly accessible graphical layers (instead of whatever order Finale embeds in ther scores now)? The $100 graphics program that I did the June score of the "Lunar Cascade" series had no trouble with curving lines and having the musical font characters follow the vectors. In Finale, why not have everything smart? Such as making "make horizontal" feature available for all items and be able to release it as needed, and then have multiple nodes for every item -- including staves and font characters. For that matter, why not have the vector fonts' own nodes exposed? That's all. My frustration level just builds up after doing a score outside Finale because it can't do it inside -- and I wouldn't have said a thing if David hadn't asserted that there's wasn't much room for notational improvement. Aaaaaaaaaaaaargh! Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
