On 26 Jun 2009 at 15:30, Darcy James Argue wrote: > The Properties window does not open by default when you launch Sib. > It's not mentioned in any of the basic tutorials. It was a while > before I even realized it existed.
It seems obvious to me since the introduction of Windows 95 that if you want to manipulate the characteristics of anything at all on screen, you right click on it in hopes of getting a menu choice to view the object's properties. Perhaps this is a Windows thing, but it is bog standard UI on Windows that a properties dialog is a couple of clicks away for any clickable object. > It takes up a lot of screen real > estate so I tend to leave it closed when I work. It's context- > sensitive, so you can't see all the things it is capable of > controlling at a glance -- you have to select an object first to see > what properties are available for modification. I don't quite understand why you'd want it to work any other way. It's certainly the convention for properties dialogs as implemented in Windows applications for 15 years or so (and it was present before that in MS Office 4.3, and before that in Borland's products, though it was called the "object inspector"). > And when I am trying > to do something I don't know how to do in an application I'm not 100% > familiar with, I tend to look in the *menus* -- I don't think I'm that > unusual in that regard. Certainly one of the Windows UI rules is that any shortcut menu should be accessible from the standard menu without the requirement for a right click (or the neglected properties button on any standard Windows keyboard). Many applications (including MS's own), and particularly Finale, ignore this rule, in fact, so I'd say you're certainly correct to expect a menu option in Sibelius to give you access to the properties sheet for whatever is currently selected. > If a feature is not accessible via the menus, > but only appears in a separate, context-sensitive window when you have > precisely the right object selected, it's easy to overlook. It's > certainly a very different UI philosophy from Finale. I would not be stymied by the lack of a menu choice. Indeed, I'd much more likely right click than go hunting for a menu choice. I guess this UI convention has not been around long enough for it to be second nature to Mac users. And it's yet another of those things that the computer software makers slip into to their products in the interest of making things EASY!!! and INTUITIVE!!!!, yet nobody ever gets any training on these aspects of of user interface. It's been that way since the advent of GUIs, where you're supposed to be able to figure it out, but you're out of luck if nobody has ever clued you into the secrets. -- 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
