Hi Daniel,
first of all congratulations for your new program that seems to be amazing, and a big thank to your team for your hard work over the last few years.
One of my questions is :
did you or will you consider handwriting recognition using the pen on Surface Pro ?
In the same way as the other amazing scoring app that you certainly know. 
No handwriting support in Dorico for the short- to medium-term, Iām afraid! The work that David and Matt at StaffPad have done to get handwriting recognition working so smoothly is an entire R&D project in itself. Weāve gone in something of a different direction.
What I think could be interesting ā and what we hope to be able to look into properly once we have Dorico out of the door and humming along ā is some kind of workflow that marries Dorico and StaffPad. Iām not sure what form this might take, but we keep in close touch with David from StaffPad and we are both interested in making this happen when it makes sense for both of us.
Really great to be in touch with them.
Thatās the kind of answer I was hoping to get from you.
Keep up the good work.
And thank you for taking the time to answer every question in detail !
We really appreciate.
Regards.
Very great news !!!
We could imagine that we write music with Dorico and then give the final touch with StaffPad during rehearsals for instance (great soft I already bought).
It would require an easy way to open Dorico files in StaffPad ā¦ and vice versa.
Surface Pro would become THE tool for musicians writing music.
Daniel,
Will Dorico support the Surface Pen and basic pen/touch gestures in v1?
Iām not talking about handwriting recognition. Just basics like pinch-to-zoom and getting use out of the penās abilities. I know not everything can happen in v1. I just want to know whether Dorico will be tablet-friendly from the start or if we should be looking at laptops for best-case usage to start with.
Cheers,
Sean
P.S. After Paul put my setup tediousness concerns to rest, I said my questions were over. Apparently I lied. Sorry.
We have certainly concentrated our development efforts on traditional Windows and macOS desktop and laptop computers rather than on the Surface, but I would hope that the basic gestures will work in the first version. We do have a Surface Pro 3 available to test on, so weāll see what can be done before the first release.
Thatās really great news Daniel !
Hi Daniel:
One follow up question on the Surface Pro ā as you know it does not have keyboard number pad. Is that going to be an impediment to the Dorico workflow (as it would be for Sibelius in terms of note entry)? I believe I read somewhere (maybe a blog, or the Helsinki presentation) that the note entry is different, using the āregularā qwerty keyboard ā¦ canāt find it back.
Thanks!
Dorico uses the top row number keys for note values.
Rather than specialize the question to the Surface line, Iād like to know if Dorico will be a UWP application (or at least converted to one)?
This will better indicate the path and the state of the application going forward. And yes, whether it will work (i.e. with bells and whistles) on the Surface.
Letās hope not. I see no purpose at all with the metro UI. This was arguably the biggest blunder in the entire history of Microsoft ā this notion that people wanted the āsame experienceā on the desktop as they do on the phone. It is a moot point now because the market decided they didnāt want ANY experience on the Microsoft phone. I avoid those metro apps as much as possible.
I am much more interested in seeing Dorico developed on a platform that will support Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Dorico does not the UWP framework; it uses the cross-platform Qt framework to allow us to build software for both Windows and macOS more quickly. If future versions of Qt allow the use of UWP, then it is possible that future versions of Dorico will use the common platform, but being able to run Dorico on e.g. phones running Windows is not a high priority for us.
