I‘m a Sibelius user and am currently looking into switching to Dorico or staying with Sibelius. So far it’s looking good. I mainly do transcription of music, and for this I use iOS’ Stage Manager to split my screen to have both Dorico and a music player split in a 2/3 - 1/3 fashion (landscape mode), so I can easily listen to the original music and work on the score at the same time.
This layout, however, makes the horizontal toolbars (note duration and dynamics at the bottom, and the playback buttons at the top) really inefficient to use, because I’m constantly scrolling back and forth to reach the desired function, because about only 25%-30% of the toolbar’s width is visible at once. Spreading each toolbars over two rows instead of one would help improving the UX when using narrow layout like this. Moreover, there is plenty of unused white space above and below the staves in write mode, doing so wouldn’t remove any used space.
Depending on the note input method you’re using, you may find it more efficient to close the lower zone and show the left zone, where the full Notes panel appears: if you’re using a MIDI keyboard or an external Magic Keyboard or similar, this is probably the most efficient way to work.
Thank you for your reply. Interesting, is there a way to use both the left zone toolbar and the onscreen keyboard to input notes? I guess I can alternate between the two but having them both visible would make things simpler (using an external keyboard is not always possible depending on where I choose to work).
This, however, does not address the visibility issue with the playback/tempo toolbar. From an UX standpoint, the project mode menu, the parts menu and the project title are accessed less often than the playback buttons, and I would suggest they should be the ones that are minimized when space is short.