On Sunday 13 September 2009, Julie S wrote:

> * On playback, the cursor in should move smoothly in notation view, like it
> does in classic.  Specially with multiple staffs on a page, the playback
> appears choppy and inconsistent.

Chris did that on purpose.  We have to have the cursor stop at meaningful 
points in notation if it is to serve as the insertion cursor. (Because that's 
what the old insertion cursor did, for good reason.)  I don't like the 
choppiness either, but I'm afraid his reasoning is sound.

> * Since Matrix editor now shows multiple segments in one view just as
> notation editor does, we should have similar methods to navigating among
> the segments (keystrokes, buttons, and mouse actions).

I agree 100% on this.  There are currently a lot of actions that appear only 
in notation, and whatever we yield in the end should be the same for both.

> Two alternatives for cursor support in notation view
> * Take the leave from matrix view and gray out the "non-active" staffs. 
> Then as the cursor up and down is moved, the active staff is restored to
> black.
>
> This is probably not the best method.

You think not?  It would be involved to do, and also "graying" wouldn't work, 
because that already has a semantic meaning of "invisible."  We'd have to 
change "invisible" to something else.  Factoring into this are future plans 
for having fixed rests as opposed to calculated rests.  That's after Thorn, 
but I want to have fixed rests appear solid black like notes, and calculated 
rests appear less permanent, but not "invisible."  There are only so many 
color choices that look decent in our scheme, so all of this gets complicated.  
Especially if we try to avoid using opacity as a color property, because it's 
supposed to be expensive or even unreliable in situations where hardware 
graphics acceleration is not available.

> * Create a Hybrid cursor, a dark colored cursor that spans the length of
> the notation view.  On that cursor is the "purple cursor" overlaid on top
> of the dark cursor.  This cursor will span the height of the active staff. 
> So moving from staff.
>
> I like this idea better, and the purple cursor still has a life in Thorn,
> but in a more intuitive form.
>
> Well, those are my thoughts.

Well that's an interesting idea, and probably a lot less expensive to draw.  
With the idea you were talking about above, which is basically the same as I 
was getting at in the last brainstorm I threw out there, one thing to consider 
is that if you click on the staff at the bottom and it becomes active and 
accepts a note (all of this is pretty easy to control clicking with the mouse 
to say where you want to do something; harder with the keyboard) then you've 
got all those redraw operations while everything on the screen has to figure 
out its new color and change how it presents itself when the active 
destination for events changes.

I'm not sure how this already works. It may well be the redraws are already 
happening, and introducing some color changes would be extremely trivial with 
practically no new overhead. Or maybe not at all.

So anyway, taking away from all that, I said "all of this is pretty easy to 
control clicking with the mouse to say where you want to do something."  There 
is one big exception to that, and that is the case of overlapping segments on 
the same staff.  It's still really hard to control that effectively, even in 
Classic, to the point where I usually wind up...

Say I've got to split the bass notes in, oh, "Hey There Delilah" into a 
separate voice, what I usually wind up doing is putting the segments on 
different tracks so they wind up on different staffs for more sane and 
controllable editing, and then I put them together on one staff afterwards to 
get them to come out right.  Expanding height tracks make it possible for me 
to pick out the "ringing bass notes" segment separately from the "melodic 
notes" segment, but since they're on the same track, if I want to edit them on 
discrete staffs, I have to do it with two separate edit views.

I'm not even sure exactly where I'm going with that in terms of proposing a 
solution, but while we're in here getting ready to rip things up anyway, this 
is worth solving once and for all.
-- 
D. Michael McIntyre

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