Prko, I just wanted to say thanks for offering this user interface suggestion - UI design is extremely difficult, and one of my favorite things about Dorico is the many innovations they’ve made in their UI. Always room for new ideas!
but how do you then deal with the sub-sub-menus?
I think a submenu can appear as a rectangular menu
- immediately when the mouse is over an icon,
or - when the mouse is staying longer than 100 ms over an icon,
or - when an icon is clicked with the left mouse button.
A rectangle a sub-sub-menus must, however, appear immediately when the mouse is over an item.
Don’t get me wrong: I can totally see the value if there’s either a physical wheel or we’re talking about a touch display, but with a traditional keyboard and mouse I just can’t see the point - we have input devices that work well, and input methods that are designed to work with them. Just my opinion, as always.
Well, I’ve been kicking around a bit longer than that. It will soon be the 50th anniversary of the day I started getting paid for writing software.
Actually we were using something pretty similar to the ribbon 30 years before MS reinvented it. We had a big (A3 sized) digitizing tablet that was effectively a touch screen but with way better resolution. Design an A3 sized grid of little rectangles, label them with every command in the software’s interface, print it out on paper, tape it to the digitizer, and you could get to every one of literally 1,000 commands with one touch of a stylus.
If you didn’t like the layout, you changed it. If you didn’t like the labels, you edited the graphic and printed your own piece of paper. (We had one fanatic in the office who refused to use any software where the user interface wasn’t in Welsh…)
Beat that, with modern technology 
Brilliant!
I have literally never written a single note in Sibelius, and I was dying. Time well spent. Gotta see if he’s done one for Finale.
Edit: no, darn it.
I never bought any versions after Sibelius 4. Back then the even numbers tended to be focussed on better notation and the odd numbers on better playback. Version 5 was the first support of virtual instruments rather than external MIDI, and it removed some of the previous external MIDI functionality, which didn’t please me at the time since for the way I was using the software, it was just change for the sake of it, not a benefit.
By the time version 6 and the ribbon came along I had already jumped horses. Version 4 still runs on Windows 10, which is surprising in itself considering I first installed it on Windows 98!
I am already pleased with the current features of Dorico.
I do not need
- to arrange the positions of articulations, dynamics, hairpins, etc.
- to change names of instruments to Italian.
- to drag too often the staff and system.
I only need to input musical ideas and to think musical context.
It is already the best environment of conveniences and user-friendliness.
That would be no use at all to me. I only use a mouse when I can’t do something any other way. I’m not interested in wasting time watching a pretty animated menu do its thing.