My fledgling arranger son got introduced into the Dorico world recently, and he’s doing well!
However: He doesn’t use a MIDI keyboard or a laptop, nor is he crazy about learning scores (pun intended… ) of cryptic key commands or popover shortcuts.
He is fairly intelligent and good with computers in general as well as with somewhat complexish content creation software.
Meaning, he’s using a mouse and the side panels for a lot of things! Which is to say, he’s likely a fairly typical new user and not the overtly tech-oriented type, but rather musically involved.
He expects to click somewhere and have stuff created, placed, edited and so on.
I was like that before, but really needed a MIDI keyboard and a Stream Deck to get comfortable. He doesn’t have that.
Which brings me to my feature request:
The only thing that has really puzzled him so far, is that in galley mode, changing the grid to a finer resolution doesn’t widen the area available to note input with the mouse, when the caret is active.
All I’m asking for is that the bar, where the grid is visible and that I’m inputting into at that moment is enlarged horizontally somewhat proportionally to the selected grid value.
In order for the young man to click notes into the score…
Please! Thx…
Exactly.
This is not about me, though.
New users use the mouse, and I’d like to make it easier for beginners.
I myself got this stuff down, especially since (as a guitarist, who can’t play piano if my life depended on it…), I got myself a keyboard and a Stream Deck…
I’d just love to help new users have a pleasant experience and see some quick results, that’s all.
Anyhow, apparently the State-level bigband he plays in is getting an official Dorico class by Steinberg relatively soon, and by that time it all might happily dissolve into a blissful panacea of key commands after all…
Cheers,
Benji
P. S.:
Don’t forget you have to hit shift-h, -o, -p, -r, - m and -d first though…
Perhaps some do this, but I expect most beginners do their due diligence and know that Dorico was designed to work best from a keyboard, either a MIDI keyboard or their computer keyboard.
People like to point and click when they first encounter software. If what you’re working with is fairly simple (like a file system or a mahjong game), that interface is efficient enough. But for something as complex as music notation quickly gets, there are far better ways, and obviously Dorico offers some of those. I side with the others: More accommodation for users who want to do everything with the mouse is not the best use of the Team’s time.
With all respect I have to strongly disagree with this. I wear multiple hats through the day and alternate between programming, 3D art and many other applications - by far Dorico has the most sensible and easy to learn commands than any technical application I’ve used in 30+ years of development. It’s not even close … and I’ll note that the fastest developer I ever knew - he can manipulate Visual Studio as fast as you can talk, just by using key commands. And those commands are cryptic!
Again respectfully, this whole ‘easy for beginners’ thing is bunk, it gets back to the infamous Tantacrul video where unrespectfully I think he’s full of it. He worked professionally as some kind of UI tester or whatever, which doesn’t make him an expert, just a guy with an opinion. I work on the other end of that - presently have a customer who wants what I’ve done to be both immensely powerful and simple enough for a guy off the street to use. Bah … conflicting requirements …
Sorry for the mini-rant but software can’t both be powerful and trivially easy to learn, but Dorico team has done it better than I’ve ever managed to pull it off in those many decades, so there.
Let’s please not forget my original feature request, which is just to enlarge the note input area…
I completely and utterly agree with everything you guys said so far.
) of cryptic key commands or popover shortcuts.
