On Monday 02 Aug 2004 7:56 am, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote: > The trick is whether you want to make a sound studio app that will > be competitive with proprietary solutions like > Logic/Cubase/Cakewalk. See, they have proved their existence for > 10-15 years or even more at commercial market. They have solutions > noone else has. Developers of all those apps have invested money in > different surveys (technologies, usability etc.).
I think you overestimate them. Cubase is a powerful program and its designers have done a reasonable job of (for example) keeping the menus fairly orderly, but nonetheless its GUI is by and large a big mess. Dialogs don't work consistently, functions are not in places you would expect from using other modern apps (e.g. the right-button menus are inconsistent and often useless), eyecandy is wasted on fancy buttons while the piano roll and notation displays are hard to read and inelegant. The only reason people think of Cubase as usable is because so many people are actively taught how to use it. And for notation use Rosegarden craps all over Cubase. As I said, I have no experience with Logic. But my impression from other users (friends as well as people I've talked to in the industry) is that it's a powerful and very satisfying application to use, but only once you've learned it. I don't think anyone has ever told me that they found Logic intuitive or easy to pick up, only that once they'd got the hang of it they found they could do a lot with it. And it has vast amounts of stuff in it that few of its users even understand, let alone use. As for Sonar, I'm told that it is actually a very well designed program from the GUI point of view, so I won't complain there. It's no looker though -- big mass of meaningless icons shoved in your face, text everywhere, ugly grey widgets. (Not quite fair -- it looks fantastic when you've got a big project going on, and the visibility tools are excellent, and the boring flat widgets are very well designed for use of space.) I'm being excessively harsh here, but really the overriding theme with all of these applications is of cramming a huge number of features into as small a space as possible -- not of an architectural elegance that leads inevitably to graceful, immediate usability. Of course they all do far more than Rosegarden -- we don't have any automation support at all (and that's tricky to get right in the GUI), we don't do send effects, we don't have drum maps etc, so all credit there, but even so. The fact that in recent versions (Logic 5, Sonar etc) a bit of order has finally been imposed on these GUIs is all very well, but these are applications, as you say, with ten or fifteen years of history as commercial concerns: they damn well should be able to get something right by now. To be honest, to a great extent I feel that it's been a mistake for us to base our GUI so much on these programs in the first place. > for now I see different > approaches to solution of one problem within Rosegarden in several > places This is certainly true. Part of the problem is that we've often changed our minds about the best way to do things, so the older and newer parts of the GUI don't always match! Without the resources to do work actively tidying things up and connecting the loose ends, that obviously leads to bad results. Also, I think it is harder to design things if you are a team of developers who never (or seldom) actually meet. This internet thing isn't the be-all and end-all. Besides, there are many good things about the Rosegarden GUI as well. > To clarify the last thing about my attitude to Rosegarden's > development --- whether I like the way it goes: I wish Rosegarden > team would go the way Inkscape's team goes and I wish Rosegarden > had same amount of attention Inkscape has. I'd never even heard of Inkscape. From the website it looks like a nice program, but it's not apparent what it is about it that makes it a role model for you? What's the magic thing about it? (I will say that IMHO a drawing program is an easier thing to reason about the design of than a music program.) Chris ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by OSTG. Have you noticed the changes on Linux.com, ITManagersJournal and NewsForge in the past few weeks? Now, one more big change to announce. We are now OSTG- Open Source Technology Group. Come see the changes on the new OSTG site. www.ostg.com _______________________________________________ Rosegarden-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] - use the link below to unsubscribe https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rosegarden-devel
