On Jan 7, 2006, at 5:10 PM, David W. Fenton wrote:
While it would certainly be nice to have user-definable keyboard shortcuts beyond the existing metatools, such a feature could never solve problems of bad UI design. In fact, it would only solve one UI problem, and that's giving quick access to those features that are several menu commands deep into the UI. Finale is already much better about that than it used to be, and most of the remaining such nooks and crannies couldn't be short-circuited, anyway (how, exactly, could you short circuit the path to the shape designer dialog, one of the most annoying of the features buried several layers deep in the UI?).
Hey, they were able to short-circuit the choice of Custom Smart Shapes, which was one of my little grudges! (on Mac, opt-click the Custom shape icon, in case you missed it when I joyfully trumpeted it around previously. Windows I don't know.)
If they can do that, then they can do more. Remember when they put all the Doc Option in the same box, and added an "Apply" button, so that you could make adjustments and see how they look without closing the box? That was fantastic! Now they COULD do a similar thing to the Chord Suffix designer, the Shape designer, etc... and hopefully they will in a not-too-distant future version.
But the kind of problem represented by doubling and "keep original notes" feature is not fixable by the mere layering on of keyboard shortcuts.
No, but in his defense, I think David B. was talking about UI in general, not your problem specifically.
Dennis B-K had some great things to say about interface a couple of months ago, to the effect that a properly-designed interface wouldn't require individual re-organisation of menus, shortcuts and the like, so one could just use it right out of the box. I have noticed this effect myself with new versions of Finale. They have obviously spent a lot of time choosing where options should live and how to invoke them, and except for a few mild stumbles along the way, just about everything they have looked at has improved immensely. (Obviously, the things they HAVEN'T gotten to yet still need some attention!) I am always amazed at new metatool assignments, staff styles, and the like that show up in recent upgrades that I never would have thought of myself, but turn out to be so useful.
As to the nomenclature, I am actually happy that Finale has some invented terms (SOME, I said, not all!) like "tuplets", "note expressions" as opposed to "measure expression", "layers" and the like, which help keep these things grouped in my brain when I use Finale. I was less happy about EVPUs, though I see the utility of them now, and I seem to remember some odd terms ("TCB Watershed bits" is one that comes to mind. Was that really Finale?) that were just obtuse. In these cases you are absolutely right, better indexing would help everyone out much more. In fact, your particular case seems to be one that indexing could help even without any rewrites of the program at all.
Christopher _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
