Every release of Finale I have used has supported slurs, 8va and practically all the SmartShapes that are used today. Granted the SmartShapes changed the way these are manipulated (and presumably stored). But in an object-oriented environment a successful strategy would store the objects BOTH ways and therefore allow the older program to find the version of the shapes it can recognize.
It is a moot point because that change is beyond the n-2 range. In other words, if you are introducing Widget2004, then a typical requirement will be to be able to save the data in a format that can be read by Widget2002 and Widget2003, and to assure users that Widget2004 will be able to read files created by Widget2005 and Widget2006.
This is the way the rest of the world works. I get the point that Finale is playing by a different set of rules and isn't likely to change. But it is absurd to try to argue that inter-release compatibility is not an established expectation throughout the rest of the software universe. Marketing organizations everywhere realize it is not a good idea to fragment your user base or to place obstacles in the way of upgrades.
My 2 cents. CP
At 05:53 AM 6/7/2003 -0400, "David H. Bailey" wrote:
So if a client had only version 3 we would have to avoid using smart shapes?
I have a suggestion for your backwards compatibility -- keep all the previous versions on your computer and simply work in the version that works for your client.
I find your suggestion that in order for finale to have backward compatibility I would have to remember what new features have been added since the version I wish to save to, and then to avoid using the features that make Finale much easier to use, to be pretty silly.
You want the end user to have to emasculate the program and revert to working using techniques we all used to complain about, simply so the program can advertise backward compatibility? Somehow the logic escapes me -- in that case it isn't the program which is backwards compatible, but rather the end-user which is backwards compatible.
I don't consider the use of smart shapes to insert 8va lines, slurs, arpeggio lines, hairpins, etc., to be "making the score look pretty." I find those to be inherent to the very music itself, and to be items that many people ended up adding by hand in the earlier versions because they were either impossible or extremely difficult.
Are you really suggesting that in order to have backward compatibility we have to revert to all that?
Wow!
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