David W. Fenton wrote:
On 13 Jun 2009 at 7:33, dhbailey wrote:
What's up with this? Didn't enough of us complain before (I
thought many of us had complained)? Or does MakeMusic get
some sort of kickback from Microsoft for forcing us to use
IE when we open the manual from within Finale? I really
don't feel like opening the manual manually in Firefox
before starting a Finale2010 session, and I wish they
wouldn't force us to use IE.
As I've pointed out in the past when this issue came up, it's far
easier to use the default browser than it is to hardwire it to IE.
The OS offers a simple API call, ShellExecute, that uses your default
settings for file associations to determine which program to open for
a particular file extension. It's one line of code.
Perhaps the Finale help files don't have the HTML extension? If so,
you might be able to set the association for that extension manually.
Otherwise, it's pretty inexplicable.
I can come up with an explanation of why developers might choose to
do this, but it's not one that is convincing. The main reason is that
MM is using a set of tools to produce the help files that is itself
hardwired to IE, usually because it uses IE-only coding practices
(which is a really bad thing to do, and has been something that
professional HTML developers have been avoiding for many, many years
now -- code to standards, not to a particular browser; IE is the only
major browser that has major issues with standards support; the
unfortunate IE8, which is breaking systems worldwide as people
accidentally install it via Windows Update).
But IE is obviously not available no the Mac, so the files produced
have to be compatible with Mac browsers, so this really makes very
little sense at all.
As I said, despite there being a possible way to explain it away, it
is still inexplicable that MM would make such a choice in the face of
the obvious inadequacy of IE.
The help files have the .htm extension, and in Windows
Explorer they exhibit the default browser (firefox) icon and
in the "type" column they are labeled "Firefox Document" and
when I double click on the files from within Windows
Explorer they open in Firefox by default since that's my
default browser.
So it's just laziness on MakeMusic's part, or there may be
some under-the-table dealings which make it profitable for
MakeMusic to force people to use IE, who knows.
In any event it's totally annoying and serves no purpose and
is just another instance of where MakeMusic hasn't listened
to its end-users. Those who like it opening in IE probably
have IE as their default browser and so even if MakeMusic
issued the API call that you mention they could still view
the files in IE, but for those of use who prefer different
browsers (it shouldn't matter which one as long as it
conforms to standards) we ought to be able to have the files
open automatically from within Finale2010 using whatever
browser we wish.
Oh, well. Now to see what other things have been improved
-- that percussion-map thingy is something I'll be playing
around with later. In the Preferences, there is an
interesting new addition whereby we can choose how things
are copied from pitched-staves to percussion-staves. The
options are to copy maintaining the midi-note-numbers (so
the position in the playback would stay where we want it but
it might make the notation look weird) or copy maintaining
the staff positions, so if we have created a drum staff with
the notes where we want them for a typical drum part, they
should stay looking the same when copied to a non-pitched
percussion staff. That sounds very good!
--
David H. Bailey
dhbai...@davidbaileymusicstudio.com
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