Many of the arguments in that thread against a consolidated UI were built on incorrect perceptions of being “locked” into something or other or not being able to float windows. With the irony being that in Cubase you’re locked into one windowing method and in some of the other you have 2 options. It’s the dilemma developers face when people discuss potential things that they (in some cases) haven’t actually used, and use incorrect views of the thing in the discussion.
The entire DAW industry is going that way, with consolidated UI’s. They all can’t be wrong. There’s only a few products who haven’t yet moved that way, they are the minority, Cubase and FLStudio probably being the two most obvious.
Again, see Sequel, and imagine that all of it’s docked windows detach and float. Now, try using GA1 and BeatDesigner along with MediaBay on a single laptop screen in both Cubase and Sequel and tell me which has the better workflow for creativity. (same tools)
I’m pretty sure the discussion is moot and that Steiny will eventually make that decision for us all.
The custom dock interface has been around for a long time … Visual Studio, Photshop etc…
The problem is that they require you to flip your programming concepts on their head. In the old models the window either creates an edit object or gains exclusive control of an edit object. In the new model, the edit object are independent of the editors. Editors are just views into the object world which has no actual interface. This none exclusive access model is screwy in its own way and causes just as many programming problems as it solves. But, it is definitely a better UI environment for the user.
EDIT: I have no real knowledge of how Wavelab 7 was done, but it seems to me that PG tried to keep a foot in both models, which led to that goofey interface.
And in complete fairness to Steinberg, flipping all of that 15+ year old “SX” UI C++ code (or whatever it’s coded with) into a new consolidated UI without breaking a lot of stuff is likely a monumental task. The discussion of it’s potential benefit to the user and the discussion of how easy it is for developers to do it from scratch as opposed to converting a ton of existing code over, are two different discussions.
In that regard, I do understand why it’s taking them so long to make that change. Chances are, if they do change it, it will be incremental.
If (and I say “if”) they made any error there it might have been waiting so long to make that decision to start to change over from an MDI interface, if they’ve actually have even made that decision, which I suspect they have. Cubase 4 would have been (imo, with hindsight) a good time to start that change.
Apple saw it all coming and just re-wrote the Logic UI quite a few years ago.
Just as a general FYI, you don’t have to do that there, dock the mixer first so it won’t be off screen if you open a song that was created on an extended desktop on a laptop or a single screen system. It has a (logical?) menu function that will move / center all floating windows over to screen 1.
I think the menu is “Locate Windows” or something.
Coincidentally, I asked for that same function in Cubase about 7 years ago. No clue if they ever added it or not.
