Jack Campin wrote: >BarFly has a serious, fundamental, far-too-deeply-wired-in-to-change >design mistake here, which you need to avoid repeating.
No, it's not too deeply wired in to change. The reason why I haven't changed it to work with separate windows in the way that you suggest is that it would lead to a very confusing interface. BarFly is a multiple document program, and opens one window for each file. It follows Apple's Human Interface Guidelines by keeping all the information pertaining to that file together in one window. If I were to do as you suggest and use three windows per file, anyone who had lots of files open (which I do all the time) would have difficulty keeping track of which staff display corresponds to which abc text, and to which index of tunes. If BarFly was a Windows program and I followed Microsoft's multiple document architecture it would be even worse, as the whole thing would run inside an outer frame window, with the menus at the top of that, and the existing windows appearing as child windows inside. One of these days it may happen. >A recent change to BarFly creates the same problem in the lateral >dimension: the panels used to be stacked vertically, but now the >source and index panels are side by side, which makes very wide ABC >source (like a lot of mine) impossible to view or edit in split- >screen mode, particularly since linewrap scrambles alignment between >lines and there's no unwrapped display option with horizontal scroll. I find the new layout gives me more space, as the index doesn't need much width. On my 14" Powerbook display I can get about 130 characters wide in the abc text pane (using 9pt Monaco font), which seems to be quite enough for all practical purposes. >And I would *hate* it if anything decided to float on top of either >source or staff notation, getting in the way of reading and editing. Me too - I hate floating palettes. >The way to do this is with separate windows that can be shuffled like >any others in the user interface. The mail program Eudora (at least >for the Mac - I presume the PC version is basically similar) gets this >right: the list of messages in a folder is in one window, and when you >open a message from the list it's in a separate window. The comparison with Eudora is invalid. Eudora is basically a single document program, in the sense that you can have only one email account open at a time. All the windows it opens (and it can have many) pertain to that same email account. If you switch to a different email account it closes all its existing windows before opening the new ones. >BarFly's split-screen model has also wasted hundreds of sheets of >paper for me. The print command is mode-dependent: in split-screen >mode it prints the contents of the staff notation panel only, in >text mode it prints the source. Particularly with a single-tune file, >it is far too easy to assume you'll always get staff-notation printout >if you just select "Print" (printing ABC source is a rare operation >for most people). If there were separate windows for each kind of >display, the basic Mac model where "Print" prints your current window >would operate. (And would allow direct printing of the tune list, >which needs an intermediate step at present as there's no place to >put it in the user interface). Yes, I appreciate the problem with printing. The other way to do it would be to have three separate Print commands, or to add a set of radiobuttons to the Print... dialog to let you select which pane is to be printed. >Pretty much every other application that offers alternative views >on a single file does it by putting each view in a separate moveable >window: spreadsheets use separate windows for charts, browsers use >separate windows for displaying HTML source, databases offer list >and form views. The only genre I can think of where single-window >split-pane is the norm, and for good reason, is file comparison >utilities. Try text editors and word processors, most of which offer split-screen views for looking at different parts of the text simultaneously, and all* of which work exactly like BarFly. * At least the ones which I have used, which include: MS-Word MacWrite Ready Set Go MPW Shell Editor Codewarrior IDE editor Phil Taylor To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
