Mine finally did come this afternoon, and I've spent a couple of hours playing with it; herewith a few observations. I preface all of this by saying that the Group Optimization feature is worth the price of the upgrade for me, regardless of other features or irritations.
I actually kind of like the new icons and all, although there are only one or two that aren't too garish for my taste. Jari's review mentioned that the little icons that appeared on the menus a version or two back are now gone, which is a good thing on the whole. (I think this is actually only because Coda didn't want to have to include all of those colored icons in yet *another* size.) The downside is that the toolbar icons no longer correspond to icons next to the appropriate menu item. For most of us, this isn't a problem for the main tool icons at any rate, but for new users (or those who like to keep lots of optional toolbars open) I think that visual correlation will be missed. Speaking of palettes and backgrounds, these all now reside in a folder called resources, and they take up 25MB of disk space. Once you have settled on one or maybe two different icon selections you like, I recommend deleting the rest of the icon palettes; you can always reinstall them later (and the "classic" icons are built into the application anyway). I also deleted all of the background images, which are pretty terrible, in favor of a neutral color. I still don't understand why Finale doesn't give you at least the option of using the Windows application background color that goes with your selected color scheme, but at least now I can go in and choose that color by hand. There's a small bug, by the way, in that if there are no background images in the folder and you have a color selected for a background, the first time Finale needs to display a background you'll get an error saying that Frost.bmp could not be found. Finale then happily displays your chosen color and goes about its business. I created a blank file called Frost.bmp, and Finale hasn't complained since. The new Document Options window is better than the old setup, on the whole, but there are still some problems. First of all, they seemed to have chosen the window size based on the largest of the old options windows and then just plopped all of the windows into this space. So most of the pages have huge amounts of blank space to the right or at the bottom. It would have taken them half an hour to rearrange items on each page so that they look nicer. Inexplicably, one page they did rearrange is the music spacing page. I'm not sure why, but the result is that the spacing widths settings are only accessible by pushing another button. Since this is one of the more often-used group of settings when you're massaging your layout, this makes no sense. There seems to be plenty of room on the existing page for these settings, or they might have been put on a separate page, but having to push a button to get there is a real pain. Jari points out that there are a couple of other items like this (like Tie Contour). The Font Annotation dialog has moved from where it was in Fin2002, under Options | Select Default Fonts, which never made much sense to me. It's now under Program Options, on the Edit page -- press another button to get there. Again, not very intuitive. Would it have been so difficult to put Font Annotation directly on the Options menu? Or at least to give it its own page under Program Options? Obviously, I haven't gotten around to doing much actual work yet. <g> But since the new interface is one of the big things in this release, I thought I'd look at that first. Aaron. _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
