David W. Fenton wrote:
On 15 Aug 2006 at 14:14, dc wrote:
Tyler Turner écrit:
Is it [Unicode support] requested as much as any of the major
features implemented in Finale over the past few years? Not by a long
shot.
Textured paper springs to mind...
From a programming standpoint, textured paper was one of the very
easiest features that could be implemented. And my understanding is
that it actually is more pleasant to view your work onscreen with
these backgrounds than without them.
In other words, nice, subtle benefit to users with no major problems
implementing it.
Why would any competent programmer *not* implement such a feature?
I can see one reason: because annoyed users like you guys would
constantly bitch about it as though implementing it caused some major
feature/bug fix to be left out.
That's completely implausible for a feature like this as it's
something that is simply very easy to implement precisely because it
has very little overlap with anything else in the program. There are
probably no side effects from implementing it and it likely required
changing only one small block of code.
That's *exactly* the kinds of changes that you should *want* to go to
the top of the list, since they can be made quickly and easily. That
the benefit is relatively small and "merely" cosmetic is not really
relevant -- it's the cost/benefit ratio that matters, and in this
case, the decision was made that it was justified.
My bet is that leaving it out would not have gotten even one other
thing fixed in its place.
Agreed, totally.
But precisely because it was such an easy thing to implement, and
because the benefit to notation is zero and it is merely cosmetic and
only works in Page View, what grates is the big splash such a tiny
improvement made in the marketing hype. It was touted as a huge feature.
If it had barely received any mention, none of us would pick on it so
much. But it was touted as one of the major benefits of the upgrade it
was introduced with.
Reminds me of when my wife and I were looking around for a house to buy
-- we were considering room for our family to grow, as well as
considering if we would be able to teach music lessons in the house and
the stupid real estate agent kept remarking on how we should look at the
light fixtures, weren't they great, "and they come with the house!" We
wondered what major flaws she was trying to distract us from noticing --
light fixtures are the last thing anybody needs to consider when
purchasing a house, they're so easy to replace.
So it seemed that the marketers were trying to draw our attention away
from noticing something, which many of us feel was that there weren't
any major notational improvements and there weren't any longstanding
bugs or complaints fixed.
That's all -- it's purely a matter of perception. Marketing did a
terrific job since that single "feature" of textured paper sticks in
many people's minds.
--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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