> <rant begin> > > Seeing other software's ease, speed, and contemporaneity reminds me of how > very tired I am of fighting with Finale's prehistoric functionality. > > I hate the requirement for plugins.
[snip] > Finale has been an increasing mess for years, and unless something has > dramatically changed in its organization between 2K3 and 2K4, it still > continues to be, and has become dependent upon third-party developers like > Tobias, Robert, Jari, and Philip to repair its lamentable condition. A lot of the extra features of 2K4 do seem to have been provided by Plugin developers. Mind you, I think that the array of plugins available to Finale users is one of its great strengths. It's allowed a lot of development outside of Makemusic, leaving them (in theory) to further develop the application itself. And the plugin programmers have all been incredibly responsive to taking up suggestions and implementing them very quickly, much more than Makemusic (or its competitors) could ever be. [snip] > Even basic interface functions were still debilitated as of 2K3, in the > Windows UI at least. The problem with scrolling remained (i.e., not > respecting the up/down/left/right arrows for page motion, no proper wheel > functions, and no continuous redraw when dragging a scroll bar), the > ridiculous lack of context menus except when on a handle, the inability to > recognize shift-click and control-click selections in standard usage, the > trail of shadows produced when dragging elements that required redraws, and > on and on. I also agree that adding some functionality in these areas would be a tremendous improvement. The Option-Drag = copy paradigm has been around since at least the 80s on the Mac - not in Finale. Apparently the "trail of shadows" phenomenon has been fixed in F2K4. I haven't yet used it enough to find out. > Getting rid of tools, folding them in to each other, and providing proper > context menus would go a long way to help. It's time to dump the scroll > view as a separate entity -- every view should be a page view, with a > 'scroll emulation' (that is, an infinite page width combined with > functional scrolling). In other words, scroll view is easier to use in many > ways, but its non-WYSIWYG nature should have been repaired long ago. Scroll view is one of the main reasons why I continue to stick with Finale, in spite of its getting slower (on the Mac) with every incarnation. It's great for entering the music without worrying about page layout though I agree that its non-WYSIWYG nature is annoying at times. Sibelius doesn't have scroll view, and you get the situation where entering material in the last bar of a page will suddenly cause that bar to disappear - it's been pushed automatically to the next page. Frustrating and annoying as hell: give me Finale Scroll View any day. > > Stacking objects is long overdue (bring to front/top, bring > forward/backward, etc.). The Selection tool does seem to be OK at cycling through overlapping items to get what you want. [snip] > I don't really care how hard it is to re-program these features, or what > the underlying data structure is, or for any other excuses from the > company. It'll be even harder to program if Finale can't pay its > programmers when the company folds. I'm seriously looking again, now that > all the major software is copy protected anyway. Here in Vermont, they > adopted Sibelius for all the schools -- at the urging of one of my own > students who was in charge of the statewide program! She learned to despise > Finale. The big winner for Finale at the moment in the school and education market is Finale Notepad. I've just come from a school where every student has a laptop - and most of them have installed Finale Notepad, all for free. Similarly I'm now working at Sydney University and the students are going to be required to download assignments that I've created in Finale and work on them in Notepad. Brilliant! However, if it wasn't for Finale Notepad, Sibelius would totally own the education market here in Australia - it pretty much does right now. I wonder how long Finale is going to be around for, given Makemusic's dire financials and the growing market strength of Sibelius. Personally I think that Finale is still the more powerful and flexible application, even with its current flaws (some of which I suspect may never be fixed as they've been around since at least Finale 2.0). Mind you, there are many extremely irritating things around in Sibelius too, such as slur behaviour and the RSI-inducing lack of handles. By the time Sibelius gets to version 5, however... Matthew _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
