On 6 Jan 2006 at 20:08, Christopher Smith wrote: > On Jan 6, 2006, at 6:59 PM, Owain Sutton wrote:
[] > > If your comment was intended to say "there's a limit to how > > intuitive an interface such as that of Finale can be", then that's a > > different matter. > > I honestly don't see the difference. Finale is one of the most > powerful notation programs on the planet, and its interface reflects > that. Balancing off getting things right without our input against > giving us the power to change things is VERY complex! Sibelius maybe > takes things out of our hands a bit more in return for a simpler > interface (which I don't think I could live with as easily) while > Score, by all reports, let you do almost ANYTHING while doing almost > nothing for you, and was beastly difficult to learn and use. That's not what Score users used to tell me -- they said it was tough to LEARN but very easy to USE. > To use an example I gave in the original post - what is the most > "intuitive" keystroke for toggling between Page and Scroll View? To > answer my own question, there is none. That is one of the limits one > comes up against rather quickly. Not everything is intuitive -- keystroke definitions would be one of those that I don't think should ever be discussed under that rubric. Indeed, there's almost nothing that is intuitive about using a computer program, unless you've already built of a store of expectations about the way things work in computer programs. There's nothing intuitive about pointing and clicking (if you've ever trained someone in using a mouse who's never done it before, you've been shown that fairly clearly), but it *feels* intuitive because we've become accustomed to it. So, defining "intuitive" is very complex. I think it's useful to use the term, even though it almost always depends on some degree of prior knowledge, because users of Finale will, of necessity, have a certain type of prior knowledge -- of MUSIC. And musical ideas ought to be translated as closely as possible into programmatic analogs in the design of the user interface. > Or my other example - Staff tool, Smart Shape tool and Speedy Entry - > all start with S, so which one gets assigned to the S key? Whoops! > That key is not available. Neither are the second letters. Maybe a > bigger keyboard... > > Limits. Not much to do about some of them. They aren't brick walls > (which I think was your point) but there are diminishing returns. Keystroke definition is purely arbitrary. But how you organize your software program can be more or less "musical" -- your menus and your dialog boxes should be designed, as much as possible (and there's a limit it to how far this can go) around the *musical* concepts and processes involved. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
