Craig Parmerlee wrote:
I wonder if we should be giving them some benefit of the doubt on this subject. As a professional software designer for 35 years, it seems entirely plausible to me that they may have faced a point where preserving unlimited staff names, in combination with other new features. would have taken significant extra programming and testing effort.
At no point has anyone from MM ever claimed that the artificial limit was imposed by a technical constraint. Furthermore, speaking as one who knows something of Finale internals, including in particular Fin09 internals, I see no technical constraint.
If you have 35 years of experience in IT, you'll understand this analogy. It's as if they have a relational table for staff lists which they are programatically (through the UI) forcing to have exactly 4 rows. At the data level, though, everything appears to be designed so that it could have any number of rows.
Some of the other artificial limits in Finale (4 layers, 12 notes, etc.) are imposed by severe technical constraints. I do not believe that any such constraint currently exists for staff lists. The problem is, the longer we have the limit the more severe the technical constraint becomes, because as new code gets added that limit becomes an assumption that permeates all future development. (Which is why, for example, it is so hard to contemplate changing the number of layers now.) This is one of my biggest reasons for having pushed so hard on the staff list issue now. It is still fresh.
I hasten to add that I am gleaning my impressions from having worked with the PDK, which since Fin06 has become progressively more wrapped and isolated from the true internals. But MM could easily shut this noise up by claiming there was a technical constraint, yet they have not. I basically trust them to be truthful, and a lot of my noise both here and on the forums is "tough love."
-- Robert Patterson http://RobertGPatterson.com _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
