Owain Sutton wrote:
Christopher Smith wrote:
Really, though, there IS a limit to how intuitive a complex program
like Finale could be.
Why?
No, I don't think it's an antagonistic comment. I think it's a valid
question. Music notation, while complex, isn't *that* complex. The
arrangement of the notation on the page, with as little effort as can be
achieved, is the difficult task. I don't see that there's an obvious
limit to how far this process can go.
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.
As the discussion has been centered around the program's interface,
that's how I understood Christopher's comment to be referring to.
One interesting potential approach to the original thing which started
this thread is that David Fenton thought the
"doubling-at-a-specified-interval-on-the-same-staff" issue would
logically be included in the canonic utilities, while others jumped into
the fray with "no, it would logically be considered transposition" and
then the gloves were off and the argument was in full swing.
How about the equally valid musical concept of "thickening of the
texture?" Doubling a line is often used to thicken the texture of a
passage, so why don't we include that as yet a third way to arrive at
the same program feature?
Discussion has included putting more than one way to arrive at the same
program feature into the menus. But the discussion only considered the
two that we have discussed, but "thickening of texture" is yet a third
way to consider the same item. So now we have THREE potential menu
items to get to the same point. I'm sure we can arrive at one or two
additional ways that some end-user somewhere might consider as the
proper way to get to the same feature.
My point is that we don't need bloated menu structures which would
include every possible manner of thinking about a particular feature,
because that would be a real problem for everybody using the program.
But the INDEX of the FM is an ideal place to include ALL those potential
ways of thinking about any of the features. Adding as many as can be
thought of does nothing but add pages to the FM. Everybody could still
find their hobby-horse terms because it would still be in alphabetical
order, additional terms could be added as they were requested with no
increase in menu complexity.
But before we go considering additional menu paths, we have to realize
that we are but a small microcosm of Finale users and that if we only
come up with 2 or 3 ways of labeling a feature, or 2 or 3 menu paths
that might help us consider the program's interface more intuitive,
there is much larger world of Finale users who might have their own
suggestions which would dwarf ours, so we might end up with 5 or 6
different menu paths to the same feature.
--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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