Dorico 1.0 - Design And Usability

Dorico
1

Video removed

Here is my take on Dorico. I’m really pumped about what Daniel and the team have created, but some things need to be addressed before I could use it professionally. Enjoy!!!

2

thank you for the video!
it does turn black at minute 24:46, while it is still interesting…

3

If you have a list of requests, it would be helpful if you could write them down rather than make a 20-plus minute video about them, as I can read a lot faster than I can listen to you talk. I appreciate the effort you have made and the time you have spent, but it’s asking a lot of us to watch your whole video if you could have summarised your points in a couple of hundred words.

To summarise the points in your video to save everybody else 20 minutes:

  1. You want to be able to run the program on more than one computer without a dongle. You and many other people. (But there’s no need to swear about it!)
  2. You want more documentation. Yup.
  3. You want a way to delete a bar without using the popover. We have plans for a new UI element called the system track that will allow you to easily insert and delete bars with the mouse, without needing to use the Shift+B popover.
  4. You don’t like the arrangement of buttons in the notes panel. Realistically, I don’t see us changing this. The note duration shortcuts are easy to learn, so if you don’t need to click them with the mouse, then you should just hide the panel. If you’re going to type them with the keyboard, there’s really no need for the buttons on the display to match the arrangement of keys on your keyboard, as you know which key to press anyway. And using two columns of large buttons is ergonomically much better for mouse users than a single column or row of smaller ones.
  5. You don’t like the panels, and you want to be able to scale them. We’ll consider whether we can make the panels scalable in future. Certainly a 13" display is going to be a little cramped for Dorico because we have done our best to make the panels commodious. If you have a Retina display, you could try changing the scale for your display in the meantime.
  6. You want the instrument names to be shown in the Mixer. This will be included in the forthcoming 1.0.10 update.
  7. You want to be able to play a single staff without soloing it in the Mixer. Yes, we agree, and we will address this in due course.
  8. You don’t like the fact that you can change page setup independently in Print mode. You should use the controls on the right-hand side in Print mode rather than the OS-provided Page Setup dialog; you need only use the OS-provided Page Setup dialog if you need to print using the OS-provided Print dialog: Dorico does not use the OS Page Setup dialog for its own printing.

Thanks for your feedback.

4

Hey man, my apologies. I would have happily summarized in text. Thanks for doing that for everyone. I’ll remove the video.

As far as printing. The confusing part is that you essentially have 3 places that can change a score to landscape, and none of them talk to each other (layout preferences, print mode, OS dialog) While I don’t mind that you can change print mode independently of the other modes, it would be a time saver if Dorico assumed that the orientation that all of the other modes have been using is the same one I want to print. Sibelius 7 has this same issue. It’s frustrating when you print something, then you have to print it all over again because one of the modes didn’t match the other.

(for those wondering why OS Dialog is sometimes useful, if you print at work to a copy machine, you often need to put in a special ID code which can only be done using system print)

5

This is a stellar point, but it would be nice to have it on the right side of the screen since the mouse is on the right. Most of the other notation suites have this as a movable panel.

6

There’s no need to take your video down. People will enjoy watching your video, I’m sure. I was also happy to watch it myself, but it just takes a lot longer than reading, and there’s only one of me and only 24 hours in the day, so it’s just helpful to me to be able to consume feedback from users faster than real time. It’s the only way I can hope to stay on top of it all!

I understand where you’re coming from with the Print mode stuff. Page setup has to be independent because you can do things like booklet and spreads printing, which means that if you were simply to change the orientation in Print mode when you change the orientation in Layout Options, you might mess up a carefully chosen print setup (which is saved in the project so that you can do the same job again later if you need to). We’ll definitely think about whether there’s something we can do to improve this in future.

Thanks again for your feedback, and by all means keep it coming.