after a few days, I am in many respects already beginning to feel more comfortable using Dorico than Sibelius (which I have been using for almost 15 years). I think it shows tremendous potential and promise, and it’s easy to see that this is going to be a better composition tool than Sibelius ever could be. Meterless input: YES! Insert mode: Finally! The ease of writing multiple voices? Great!
There is, however, one thing that I found a little annoying on my (granted- it’s not up to the required spec) 15 inch 2011 MacBook Pro’s screen with 1440x900 resolution: The UI, as clean and good-looking as it is, takes up too much screen real estate for my tastes. I seem to have read somewhere that Dorico uses some kind of engine that makes scaling of the UI possible, but that the developers chose to go with a fixed size. I’d be really happy to be able to resize the UI, so it better fits smaller screen resolutions.
And, I can only guess that this is going to come sooner or later: The ability to easily build your own templates for the ensembles you normally write for. I’m sure that is easily implemented, since the templates are most likely stored in an XML or JSON file. I don’t know if this has been covered in other comments, but all the other things I could wish for have been written about by others or are in the pipeline, so there’s lots to look forward to…
Your screen resolution is towards the lower end of what we thought would be usable.
If you haven’t already, it’s probably worth memorising the key commands to hide and show the panels to give you as much room as possible for the music. Cmd-0 is the best one, as it hides all the panels (except the toolbar at the top, which you can hide manually).
Yes, we do plan to allow users to create their own templates in the not-to-distant future. They are indeed in a file called “templates.xml” which inside the Application bundle, but I’m hesitant to encourage you to play around with it.
Thanks for the suggestion about making it possible to change the size of the UI. Although we have indeed built the UI using a scalable technology (everything is drawn using font characters and primitives, with no bitmap graphics of any kind used anywhere), it’s decidedly non-trivial to allow the UI to be scaled to arbitrary sizes. What we might be able to do is introduce an additional, smaller preset size. It’s unlikely to be something we can do in the immediate future, though.
As Ben says, templates and ensembles are indeed specified in a JSON format, but it’s again non-trivial for you to write your own at this point as you don’t have access to all of the internals you would need to know in order to write one. Hopefully we will be able to add options to e.g. save the current player setup as a template in the relatively near future.
Yes, we do plan to allow users to create their own templates in the not-to-distant future. They are indeed in a file called “templates.xml” which inside the Application bundle, but I’m hesitant to encourage you to play around with it.
Oh, ups- I have, in the meantime. In my mentality of “What can possibly go wrong in a world of backups?” And it actually worked out fine, I had to dig a little in the instruments catalog, but I simply copied one template and adapted it to what I need, and sha-boom, there it is. Am I voiding warranty here?
I notice that the items in Dynamics, Ornaments and Playing Techniques are a little pixelated (on an iMac 5K). Trivial, I know - but is it possible to render it at a higher resolution?
And it actually worked out fine, I had to dig a little in the instruments catalog, but I simply copied one template and adapted it to what I need, and sha-boom, there it is. Am I voiding warranty here?