:-) Share Some Laughs? — "Best" Ideas for (ahem) "Improving" (i.e., ruining) Dorico

Dorico
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Fellow Doricians,

Several threads over the past months have included fun humorous asides about some ways the Dorico UI could be altered to assist the user, such as:

More recently, @dspreadbury made this marvelous observation about the Dorico team in another thread:

Daniel’s quip got me thinking about the deliberately inconvenient, annoying, and unusable everyday objects by Athens-based designer and architect Katerina Kamprani in her The Uncomforable https://www.theuncomfortable.com collection.

(One of my personal faves:)

All together they got me thinking of a fun thread those of us inclined to inanity could share: the absolutely “best” (i.e, worst) ideas for how to “improve” (i.e., ruin) Dorico’s design and its UI.

The only requirement is that your ideas should not simply put a layer of “bad-idea-icing” on an otherwise “good-idea-cake” (as in the threads I shared above); they must be truly and utterly without merit. The idea here is: what would be the most hilariously frustrating way to make Dorico “the notation software no one anywhere ever wanted!”

Start your humor-engines and bring 'em on! Remember: do your worst…! See if you can earn the much-un-coveted Meritless Badge!!

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To increase focus on the notes being edited, how about an option 'make all non-selected notes invisible". Who actually needs context?

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How about the whole development team dedicate the next month to producing a scalable, printable, page view piano roll representation? Five line staves are so 17th century…

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Maybe ‘note colours’ options could be expanded to include ‘highlight originality’.

This would warn users if they are caught doing something inventive or interesting.

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Why stop at the non-selected ones, @RichardTownsend …? :smirk:

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Used on a 9’ grand PC or Mac!!

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One “brilliant” idea that occurs to me: “Meta-Variations” (with all due apologies to Benjamin Boretz).

How would it work, you (don’t) ask…???

Each time Dorico is launched, the default and user-defined key commands are randomly shuffled.

“But that’s not all…!”

During any given session, one of the key commands (randomly chosen) serves to reshuffle the others in real time.

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On similar lines, ‘unreliable undo’, where every so often, an undo command is not executed, although the undo log says that it has been.

I think ‘Dorico 6 with unreliable undo’ sounds good from a marketing pov.

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Honestly, change invisible to maybe “20% opacity” and I’d be all for it. Wouldn’t use it every day but I could see it as being very useful for editing an inner voice in a dense passage.

I also don’t think a thread in the main official forum mocking other users by name is in very good taste or spirit.

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Imagine a customer complaining that the notation software is broken. Some of the notes have a hole
grafik

while others have a correctly filled belly but an annoying flag on the pole
grafik

The notation software is deemed broken and a fix is demanded.

You think this story is just made up? Are you sure? Cause you’d be mistaken.

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What mocking do you see, @TylerE?

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You’re calling their suggestions useless and by implication saying they’re dumb for even making the suggestion. Seems fairly self-explanatory.

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Ogden Nash meets software user crank!

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To be honest, I don’t come here for fun. I come for sharing information.

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Fair enough, @Mark_Johnson.

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I believe you’ve misread me, @TylerE. But please, if anyone here feels that I have “called them dumb” or their ideas “useless,” please let me know (private message if that’s more comfortable) so I can make amends properly.

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Well, given that Dorico can determine and assign chords from a given score, I would like to see the following: I think it would be great if it could take a score from the New Complexity school (say by Ferneyhough) and reduce it to simple triads. Maybe Black Midi, as well. You know, strip away all the extraneous bits, and give us the core - the essence - of a piece. C’mon, who’s with me on this?

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Nice!

Ever heard John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps”…in C? Auto-Tune cranked up to 11!

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You do know if we keep this up we’ll get kicked out of here…

For the record, I have long wanted Dorico to be able to make a nice decaf latte. Not sure how to program that into Streamdeck, but that’s a problem for another day.

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Dorico implements “Ribbon UI” in order to become “on peer” with Microsoft Office and Sibelius.

Dorico implements virtual assistant named “Clicky” which pops up and offers “helpful suggestions”.

Dorico implements new licensing policy requiring subscriptions.

Dorico adds ten new “Jazz Fonts” and sets “Jazz Font” as the new default.

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