Dear gyprock,
The keyboard shortcuts for options (Engraving options, Layout options, Notation options and Playback options) are available from ANY mode. Cmd-shift-E/L/N/P (that’s ctrl shift on PC). It should help!
Funnily enough, Tantacrul himself explained, back in the original video on Sibelius that kickstarted this series, that the whole reason for the ribbon is that the complexity of the software ballooned. What Word or Excel were capable of in '87 — you couldn’t pick a number yielding higher contrast — has nothing to do what the features they packed in 2003(?) when the ribbon design appeared.
What feels extremely silly in this video is that he’s not critiquing bad design per se, most of the time, but rather complaining that the features of the software do not neatly conform to his preconceived notion of what the design should be — and this mismatch between form and function is in itself a big design faux pas.
Another thing to remember is that Dorico is still ‘growing’. In order to get a shipping product, some aspects of the UI are clearly waiting for additional functionality; and some existing functions are waiting for better UI controls.
I started using Finale back in the 90s, with no manual, no video tutorials, no searchable webpages, or internet forums. Similarly, I tried the demo of Sibelius, and couldn’t get my head round it, or see any particular advantages, beyond mere differences.
Dorico, by contrast, was very easy to learn after a few of Anthony’s videos: it’s always SHIFT something to add things; Meta-keys with arrows always do the same thing, etc, etc; and it immediately offered tangible benefits rather than just differences.
Yes, I’ve fallen into the trap of trying to add bars with no meter, but once I just started entering stuff (including a time sig), that went away.
Compare that to Finale, where the default setting for Note Entry is to only enter rests, not notes. (Speedy Entry, with no MIDI keyboard: you have to deselect MIDI entry in prefs to get note entry with QWERTY keyboard.)
I really loved the video. The Qt switch to activate checkbox, add player, Playback template related stuff being hidden all over the place, left sidebar beef for me were 110% on point. The ties, scissors and dynamics are fair issues in that learning the efficient way of doing those things in Dorico is not straightforward (they never learned that doing it from the caret is the way to go, which is a point to address if Dorico would want to be „easier” to use at first)
Of course I do not mind those things, all programs, and I mean all of them have a lot of incompatible solutions only the invested users appreciate. We all learned the program, we all see the benefits. It does not invalidate most of the points, though. Maybe just that one should tamper the urgency of dealing with those, as I am preferring to have more features, and then, eventually in the future, when all of them are laid out and known — a proper redesign that tweaks them taking all of the new features into consideration — because it is inevitable that design solutions become a little bit clunky when so much new stuff gets added all the time. It is only the testament to the team that the design and overall cohesiveness mostly stands the test of time, and is way better than the competition.
I’m in my evaluation period of Dorico and have found it to be a struggle. A channel I follow just happened to put up a review of the Dorico interface, here. As a software developer reviews like this are gold, especially when done so well where he enlisted and recorded play testers in the process. Just want to put this out there so the Dorico folks can use it as an opportunity to take advantage of some depth feedback. For what it’s worth what he found matches my first experience almost perfectly on the initial setup and impression.
There’s already an extensive thread on this video right here.
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Don’t let your struggles continue unaided. Post here for help.
While I appreciate some of the insights about setting up a score (although I definitely don’t agree with all his suggestions; I’d consider the old sibelius-style add dialogue a step backward), I found myself 40 minutes into the video and rather frustrated when he gives example after example and keeps saying, “best practice is to…” …but he’s not even close. Which surprises me, as sharp as he is.
Some criticisms are definitely valid; no doubt about it. Deleting a single tie in the middle of long multi-bar ties for instance without needing to re-tie everything else back together? Totally agree. Not sure how the team would work around it to make it work considering the “rigid” framework they’ve implemented, but I think he has a fair point. Many of his complaints about adding notes and whatnot would have so easily been solved by pressing enter and moving the caret over an 8th note. I also agree with other people’s opinions already stated that he seems hell-bent on using the mouse for everything. At one point he says (re: sibelius), “and I don’t need to formulate a game plan in advance…” I feel very much the same way about Dorico. There is nothing I can’t do that isn’t easily reconfigured in a rather forgiving way. It’s one of the things I love, in fact. Insert mode was a game-changer!
All told, I enjoyed the video, but not unlike the sibelius and musescore users before us, I found myself disappointed that some of the more laudable aspects of the program weren’t properly featured or explained as a foil to his many criticisms.
Ultimately, he references, at least obliquely, the idea that one has to learn to think the way dorico “thinks” and this paradigm shift is very important. I myself went through it and I’ve witnessed countless new faces on the forum go through the same growing pains. Once it clicks though, that’s when the magic happens. The good news is, it DOES click (unlike dreamweaver which I hope rots in software hell, lol). Sadly, it hasn’t clicked for him yet, which is apparent when you watch the video.
But it’s trivial to do that the right way (not his way).
Put the note entry cursor where you want to cut the tie. Press U. Done.
I myself made a Google search to do that and ended up in the Steinberg manual under Deleting ties : Press U.Click Scissors in the Notes toolbox.
Those scissors are ridiculous :
Step 1 : use your mouse
Step 2 : leave the tie you want to cut
Step 3 : go to the scissors icon
Step 4 : select the scissors icon; it cuts the tie
Step 5: return to where you were in the score.
This video should be gold for the Dorico team. Just thinking of the Score set up described at 28 minutes should be implemented ASAP.
Joss, I really don’t understand Tantacrul’s complaint, and nor do I understand yours. Look:
With any complex design program, there is a balance that needs to be struck between ease of use for the complete beginner, and functionality for the power user. He clearly put his focus on ease of use for the beginner which is fine as long as it’s acknowledged that’s what his video is. Beginners use the mouse and expect icons to look like their function. Power users use the mouse as little as possible and do most everything through keystrokes and often MIDI. Aside from some universal keystrokes for Copy, Paste, etc, keystrokes are not necessarily intuitive for the complete beginner and must be learned. That’s fine, and Dorico gives the user great flexibility in programming keystrokes to whatever is most logical for the user. Presenting the way a beginner uses the program as the correct way for the power user is kinda ridiculous though.
The one area he didn’t really get into where I find the design frustrating is Page Layout. Master Pages are a brilliant concept and work great, but System Breaks are a fairly slow method of modifying the layout from the default settings specified in Layout Options. They can only be created in Engrave, but then can only be copied in Write, which seems like a completely unnecessary mode switch for the user. 99.95 percent of the time I only want to put system breaks on barlines but Dorico forces the user to either click the barline exactly or the first beat of the bar to apply a break or else the break will split the bar. I do want the program to easily be able to split a bar, but I’ve now been using Dorico as my primary software for over a year, and I’ve probably wanted a mid-bar system break less than 10 times. I know others may require this more often, but in Finale I can just click anywhere in the bar, then up or down arrow to move to bar the previous or next system, which is a much, much faster method of casting off. Propagate Part Formatting is in Setup, which seems a little odd, but it also copies Frame Breaks, which most of the time is not what I want as different parts will have different page turns. Again, in Finale I can simply copy the system layout from any part to any part(s) all with one click. It does feel like adherence to Dorico’s system here gets in the way of casting off speed. I can probably do all the casting off of a big band arrangement in Finale in about half the time as it takes in Dorico. Tantacrul’s closing comment of “consistency is important, absolutely, but interface design is as much an art as a science and it’s ok to sometimes break your own rules, if not, then your super rational system may translate into a frustrating experience,” seems relevant here. Forcing the user to have to switch between Engrave, Write, and Setup modes to cast off at an efficient speed seems quite unnecessary IMO.
There are lots of Dorico specific concepts that may take a while to “click,” especially for users coming from other notation software, but then once they do, they are really great! The fact that you almost never input rests is one example. The fact that you don’t tie from the previous note, but tie to the subsequent note is another. Insisting on intuitive design can sometimes get in the way of a better solution, like in those two examples.
“Deleting a tie (completely)” and “cutting a tie” are two different things.
Almost every procedure in Dorico that starts with “use your mouse” is an inefficient way to work. The same is true for Sibelius. I remember the advice in the manual right back in Sibelius 2 (written by some guy called Spreadbury) that the best way to learn to use the software efficiently was to put your mouse on the floor, where you couldn’t reach it.
IMHO mouse-driven note entry and editing should never have been in Dorico at all. I suppose that would have been too radical for some customers who might otherwise have bought it, but it’s a sad reflection on the state of the other major notation software that people think using the mouse is the “obvious” way to work.
Why not go the whole nine yards, and have an on-screen keyboard to enter text by clicking one letter at a time? (Oh, wait - cell phones already do that…)
Let me leave a short comment here:
It is a hard work to balance between professionality and intuitivity, still.
(Long comments are coming after I finish watching this video thoroughly. My ADHD sucks.)
I don’t know, but I have always been fond of drag and drop with a mouse. Although I got pretty good with arrow, cltr v/x, shift key usage, in windows, I still would prefer the mouse.
I look eagerly forward to Tantacrul’s next project and hands factory fresh saxophones to guitarists and discusses the the user interface problems of instrument how it should be redesigned to match their expectations of what is “intuitive.” It will be a breakthrough for instrument-makers everywhere. 
The argument that a complex machine like music typesetting should be intuitive is problematic to begin with as people aren’t born with a natural sense of the activity, it is a learned trait. His out out-of-the-box testing where the testers deliberately avoided any preparation is nonsense, because then the only models of how the product should work would be some other product (such as Sibelius or Finale) or a related idea in software (such as WYSIWIG word processor) --neither of which are either intuitive or natural to a human. I found myself watch nearly of an hour of “It doesn’t work the way something else works” versus any real attempt to understand the advantages of Dorico’s approach, which values time and duration as the composers intent first, and the typesetting rules as the responsibility of the Doricos engine. Dorico, for me lets you spend more time “thinking the music” and much less time on forcing the correct typesetting (which in itself is a complex set of traditions that don’t start out as intuitive.)
Not to say he didn’t have a few valid points, but they were utterly drowned in false-analogy and a disingenuous approach to what was intuitive. I felt at times he was saying, “I don’t want to unlearn my bad habits so make your software conform to the bad habits that I’m comfortable with.”
Dorico does have a few shortcomings, many of which have been addressed, over the past couple of years and there are (in my mind) a few that remain, but he seems to miss those almost entirely in some false quest for mode-less intuitivity. I thought he was particularly disingenuous when he argued that consistency (such as horizontal versus vertical placement of elements in music) should be discarded (or the consistency broken) when he personally though it would be more intuitive to be point-and-click without changing modes (even if that point and clicking suddenly discarded the rules established for the page…) For example, I actually find it helpful that I do have to hit one (and one) key-combination to announce to the program I am discarding the rule engine to make my own placement of a notation.
Does it mean a few more milliseconds are added to the operation? Sure. Does it mean I spend fewer minutes cleaning up mistakes later when the music ends up getting re-flowed and my rule-breaking decisions now mess something new up? Definitely. The point is, it’s more intuitive to me that I make the decision (through a key-press) to discard the rules than to simply let me click freely, breaking vertical placement rules willy-nilly only to find dozens of places later that need fixing. Proofreading has always been more painful to me than having the computer apply the rules in the first place… and the effort involves far outweighs the times when I have to ctrl-3 and ctrl-2 as I editing some notation that I feel has gone astray.
Now, where do I go to get an hour of my life back? 
Well, it’s clear this guy is getting exactly what he needs - attention.
Having stumbled into his twitter feed, it seems he just sent a tweet asking “does anybody want to test Dorico and be in my next video?”
Not the most structured way to get a user-test panel that will generate useful feedback, I think.
One could argue, that more intuitive usability is the reason, why the mouse was invented in the first place.
Before I bought Dorico I watched the intro Videos , read basic things in the manual etc. But my first experience is still just an endless struggle with the “help”, “the manual” etc.
And sure it is just because I am so silly and unwilling. But in fact , lots of the questions from the video are/wre mine as well.
And just to say “I am a pro and know how things have to be” as R. T. does, “so anyone else with problems is just not spending enough time” is just not willing to take a real look at the problems of the program.
It is just a reflex to say “this is exaggerated … it is wrong”