Dear developers,
I would like to make a few suggestions regarding the user interface in future versions of Dorico. They will mainly cover the aspects scaling, spacing and transparency, all of which could use an option for user customization to some extent, as well as the options libraries. Before I begin describing my thoughts in detail, I would like to point out that I absolutely both understand and respect the dev team’s reluctance regarding rearrangement of the UI’s items themselves, for which there are very good reasons. My suggestions will therefore mainly regard look and feel, aiming at keeping the structural design philosophy behind Dorico intact.
Scaling
Right now, Dorico scales along the OS’s desktop scaling settings, which in itself is fine and the way it should be. (I remember earlier days when restrictions of the underlying Qt framework tended to blow up the interface when Windows was set to rational, non-integer desktop scaling, such as 125% or 225% - fortunately, those days are long gone by now.) Nevertheless, the interface still takes up a huge amount of screen space. Of course one can collapse the left, right and bottom panels, but this can turn out to be quite cumbersome, as there can be situations in which one might want to switch between note input and editing in the bottom panel in quick succession.
It would therefore be quite helpful if the interface itself could be scaled somewhat independently from the OS’s regular desktop scaling. For example, if the OS is set to 125%, because this is how a given user feels comfortable with in any other application, Dorico’s UI could then be set to 80% to neutralize this scaling, if that user is happier with just Dorico if it looks like the OS would scale to 100%. I hope you can forgive me for mentioning a competitor to Cubase here, but this is how Ableton Live’s UI can be adjusted, which is wonderful. (Don’t know about Cubase’s capabilities in that regard though, as I did not find the time to warm up with it yet.)
Spacing
This goes into a similar direction as scaling. Looking at the interface I often feel as if the columns, lines and boxes for every item are a bit large for their content, so I see a lot of empty space in the panels that somehow appears wasted at the expense of the music displayed.
Transparency
Adding an option for the UI’s background to appear transparent, making the music covered by it partially visible, would be another way to reduce the UI’s visual weight, making it less obtrusive.
Options libraries
At the moment, the option libraries can only be accessed in a separate window, which is quite large and covers much of the screen. Moreover, this window is sometimes so large that its boundaries exceed the screen, which may sometimes make clicking the Apply and Close buttons impossible. I can imagine that this might be remnants of the underlying Qt framework still arguing with Windows about desktop scaling, but generally this is something that shouldn’t happen.
Anyway, I would love to see an option to have an options library and the music displayed side by side - or partially transparent -, so I can conveniently monitor the effect of applying a certain option on a whole page of music without having to exit the library. Adding the closing cross in the top right corner of a library window would also be welcome (as already hinted at earlier, yes, I’m working on Windows).
These are my main thoughts regarding welcome (at least for me) tweaks to the UI. I want to stress that I intend to have these understood as options, not as a hardcoded complete overhaul of the whole UI, with which many other users may be already quite happy the way it is now.
There is one more little suggestion I would like to add, as I just came across it while working: The popovers could use a little transparency too. I was just typing in figured bass and thought how convenient it might be if the melody in this particular example could be visible through the popover without having to zoom in to generate enough space between the staves for the popover:
But this is something minor. It just came to my mind just now, but the general ideas regarding the UI have been on my mind for some weeks now.
Thank you very much for considering!
Yours, Sebastian
P.S. I do want to point out that I do know about your limited resources and huge backlog, which is why I named these ideas “suggestions” instead of “requests” - despite the “feature-request” tag.