Agreed. But there’s nothing to be done about that, I’m afraid. Lillie does an outstanding job within the company-mandated house style.
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I have to admit that’s exactly why I rarely read the manual. A Google search usually leads directly to the second part: how things are done.
As a Newbie, I don’t find the manual very difficult to navigate once I found the index section and remember what page I was on when I found the possible answer to my questions. If what I click on doesn’t do what I hope, I type in the page # of the index section and try again.
What I find problematic is the software itself. For instance, when I hit the rewind button, the sheet music doesn’t also go back to the beginning. (I do know now that hitting the Ctrl + Home will do this quickly). It just seems to me that if you’re going to start at the beginning, that the sheet music should go there as well.
Anyway, Dorico is a very complex program and I know it will take time to learn all of its quirks as well as all of its functions. But it is not very intuitive. I think the programmers could do themselves a favor by getting a few newbies in and watch them enter some music with both computer keyboards as well as MIDI keyboards. I believe they would learn a lot and make some useful modifications to the program.
Doug 
I think this presumes that Dorico’s principal target audience is beginners. Not only do new users bring a variety of backgrounds to the table (both in music education and prior notation software experience) but beginners really interested in using the software would soon become familiar with it an not wish to be bogged down in an interface designed overwhelmingly for beginners.
My expectation is that Dorico does plenty of research into the needs of all kinds of users (witness the many excellent short help videos and the First Steps manual) and works hard to balance the needs of all its prospective users.
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Derrek,
Look at this forum, there are lots of questions about how do you accomplish something because the answers are not intuitive or obvious.
All I’m saying is that programs grow over time, but rarely revamped so that getting answers to some of the questions asked here become intuitive, not hidden away in some obscure menu somewhere. Having the programmers sitting down with newbies (to Dorico, not necessarily to music writing software) that they may find there are better ways to accomplish what should be simple tasks.
I would think that the programmers would want to have the best and most productive software out there, where productive means the least amount of time to get from start to completion without mistakes and ready to publish.
Doug
But these people would just bring their experiences from other software.
Most of the very basic questions in this forum you talk about are in the form of „how can I achieve sth in the way I am used to it from the old software? This would be the most intuitive to me!“
Little do these people know that the prior software they used trained them on how to do this things in its way in the first place.
The relevant parameter is: are new users getting to know the program and its logical structure faster than a competing product. In my experience as a user and educator, Dorico has a clear advantage.
Everything else is „monkey learn, monkey do“.
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Klafkid,
That may be true, but the only music writing software I’ve used is Guitar Pro ( a much cheaper software) and in some areas it runs circles around Dorico. For instance, when I hit rewind the music sheet jumps back to the beginning as well as the tracks. Also, when I select a note in any bar of the music and hit play, that’s where it starts. Plus it has a loop function which makes it easy to set up instrument sounds or learn to play the selected area.
Just saying… I don’t disapprove of Dorico as a whole, but certain features require more than one or two clicks to create (what I call work-arounds) or not available at all. A newbie to Dorico could show the programmers some of the difficulties of using their software so that they can make it more intuitive.
Doug
If you hit P, it starts from the selection in Dorico, too. If you hit alt-P, it only moves the playhead (and the window view) to the selected note. If you hit shift-P, it plays back from where it played back the last time. All Playback related things are controlled with the letter P. How is that not intuitive and logical? Even further: the addition of the Alt key consistently moves things throughout the program! (Sure the spacebar also works, but is a context dependent general purpose key).
Your other two points are more like feature requests instead of things that are currently unintuitive in Dorico (how can a missing loop function be unintuitive?).
(Edit: your Post is also proving my point. You stated expectations of Dorico which are derived from your previous experience. For me it wouldn’t be logical that the score jumps when you rewind. The score follows the playhead only during playback - or with the specific alt-P - it would therefore be inconsistent with the rest of the behavior).
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If you would prefer the play button in the mini-transport in the toolbar to play from the first selected item (i.e. equivalent to hitting P) instead of from the playhead position (i.e. equivalent to hitting Space), then there is an option for that on the Play page of Preferences, Play button in mini-transport plays from selection, if any.
Once again, Doug, I encourage you not to repeatedly make the same complaint over and over again. You’ve expressed your opinion clearly, you’ve received plenty of helpful replies from the community, and there’s no need to belabour the point. Please rest assured that we understand how you feel about the fact that Dorico does not follow the playhead if you move it while not playing back.
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Yes, once I learned that P plays from the selected note, I use it all of the time. Did not know about the shift-P or the alt-P, however.
The point I’m making here is that it is not intuitive. Finding the short cut keys to do something is not always readily available nor it’s not obvious there is such a feature or related short-cut available.
I’m sure, as I go along, I’ll stumble into other not so obvious short cuts. I was just using the play option as an example only.
Doug
I’m not sure how much clearer we can make it in the application than listing all of the commands for starting playback, together with their shortcuts, in the Play menu.
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So yes, it is in the play pull down menu, but not in the write pull down menu. And I’m in the write mode and hit the play button to hear what I’ve written from some selected note. And in the Play mode, I wouldn’t think I’d have to go to the Play menu to find out where the play would start from, because I’d have to go to the write page to select the note or bar from where I want to start from. Do you see why this is not intuitive?
As I’ve said, I’m still learning this software and I’ve got a long way to go…
Doug
… to you! And somehow you (and so so so many others) assume it therefore neither must be to anyone else. That’s really to me the most illogical thing: how many users are completely convinced that there is no other reality than their own. I see it so often here on the forum, but also in real life humans.
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I understand what you’re saying. Though, Dorico can’t have every possible menu option in every mode. I just had to learn the shortcuts.
By default, Dorico plays from the playhead position, regardless of whether you’re in Write or Play modes. The Play button in the mini-transport, by default, plays from the playhead (unless, as I’ve indicated, you edit your preferences so that it plays from the selection), which is the same as Space, and this is the same as practically every music and audio application you can think of. This isn’t about “intuitiveness” but rather about expectation and convention. Where it makes sense, and where it is practical to do so, we follow these conventions – even to the point of using the same shortcuts on the numeric keypad for the transport controls as are used in Cubase.
Our hope with things like learning how to use playback in Dorico is that you immediately see the transport controls on the toolbar, and understand that you can start playback by clicking the big green play button, and that if you have some familiarity with audio and music software more generally, you will try hitting Space to start and stop playback. Beyond that, we hope that users will take a few moments to try things out in the user interface, perhaps click through the modes, have a look at the items found in each menu, and maybe even consider taking a look at the documentation.
For example, if you go to Google and search for something like “dorico start stop playback” you will see this short tip as the very first result:
and this page from the Operation Manual as the second result:
So I think in this area we’ve got a pretty good balance between immediate discoverability of the basic functionality (a very obvious and prominent button available at all times, a whole mode of the application called Play mode with its own menu, with very clearly-named commands in that menu), following the established conventions of software with a similar purpose (e.g. starting and stopping playback from the playhead by hitting Space), and clear, easy-to-find documentation to cover more sophisticated requirements.
No, you can’t guess (or “intuit”, if you prefer) that Shift+Space will play again from the same place as last time, or that Shift+Opt+Space will play from the start of the flow (without needing to rewind first!), but once you know that Space is used to start playback, and that Dorico uses modifier keys to group similar commands on the same key, you might even start to guess that trying out modifiers with that main key would yield interesting results.
Overall, our goal is to make Dorico easy to learn, not easy to guess and prod your way around experimentally or based on your own completely subjective expectations about how it might work. We work hard to arrange its features logically in such a way that will provide efficient use once you have learned it. You will probably use a feature like playback thousands of times over your use of the application, so we optimise for the tenth time, the hundredth time, the thousandth time, rather than the first time, so that you are not left repeatedly jumping through hoops – designed to hold your hand when you know nothing – when you have mastered that aspect of the software.
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One of my “favorite” “features” is how the configuration for multiple ending repeats is hidden… in Engrave mode, despite being indisputably a compositional rather than layout item.
Just call it an Easter Egg and continue composing.
I understand from the web that people love discovering Easter Eggs.
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I’m not the moderator of this list - I am the OP who created the topic - but this thread is becoming the universal catch all thread of half a dozen different topics, obscuring the original post and intention. While all of the complaints here could be filed under intuitive/non intuitive by stretching it a bit, I think it would be better to break out new topics into their own thread, if for no other reason that to let people better follow the discourse. I run a few Discourse servers, and this is a perennial issue - thread hijacking, as it is known. Veering off onto another topic. As I say, I’m not the moderator, but I can’t follow my own topic any more! Also, I think the Discourse search function mostly works on the Subject line, unless you use the Advanced Search, so all the useful talk here about PDF is not easily accessed, because the word is not in the Subject, and consequently becomes hard to find for others later. For example, a search for 'PDF" does not show this topic. I was hoping to get back to a discussion on the use of the term intuitive as frequently used in posts.
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I’ve moved a bunch of posts concerning the PDF version of the Operation Manual out to a new thread, but I’m afraid I don’t have high hopes that your dream of a deep discussion of the word “intuitive” as it pertains to software design and usage will be realised in any case! I suspect we’ll just continue to have complaints about synonyms in the manual…
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That last emphasis is mine, but I think this is a key point. The development philosophy has been a.) pretty clear from the beginning and b.) very consistent. Obvious letters (in English) are used to control commands, and alt and shift are used as modifiers to get those primary functions to do special things. Once you know this, you can indeed ‘intuit’ that the system will indeed apply to other commands. Alt+entering time signatures, and text does something special with the item. Alt+arrows allow you to change notes (pitch and rhythmic placement) rather than navigating the selection around, and alt+shift+arrows changes note values, etc. This same logic repeats itself over and over again.
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