I spent a weekend in December trying out Dorico 1.0.10 with a new project and was able to work from setup through to printing; my feedback from this has been split into parts for each section of the application, so here are my thoughts on the Setup mode.
Feedback posts:
1. General UI
2. Setup mode
3. Write mode
- UI realisation of Dorico’s core setup concept
The Dorico concept of assigning players, layouts and flows to each other is clearly very powerful, but I bet the UI team struggled to come up with something workable for users to be able to grok. At present, I think the method of activating one panel, then having to move to the others to tick or untick the checkboxes, is utterly unintuitive, and took me a long time to work out. I’m a software engineer by training and I’m into faceted classification schemes, so this kind of multidimensional matrix is familiar to me, but the UI made it seem very remote.
I’ve made a suggestion on one method to improve this in another post: Setup UI - a suggestion - Dorico - Steinberg Forums
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Project info
The workflow for accessing project info on a flow basis is convoluted. I’d expect to be able to set that info from the Flows in setup somehow, instead of having to go to the whole project info dialog then changing focus to a flow. -
Redraw bug:
When I opened a new tab on the same view as the existing one the page area outside the existing tab wasn’t shown when moving around the score until I changed the zoom level. -
Disappearing buttons
Empty players have a plus sign to add an instrument, but it goes away once you have an instrument assigned. Can that (and any other common actions) stay as an action button, please? Otherwise you have to use a different method to add a second instrument, instead of consistently staying with one. -
When you expand a layout button to show details, the size is there in pt. In the page size selection, though, plenty of sizes have names and it would be nice to see this name in places like the Layout list (e.g., “B5: 498.0 x 708.0” instead of just “498.0 x 708.0” but see also my point in the general UI post about not using pt when mm has been chosen by the user).
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Groups
It would be nice to have a checkbox on Groups of players, as well as the individual Players when assigning to Flows and Layouts - they could often need to be treated as a section for score use. -
Numeric labelling
In choral music, if a player has two instruments that are the same (e.g. Soprano I, Soprano II) then when only one is in use the staff should generally be labelled Soprano not Soprano I. I bet there are exceptions to this, and plenty of other occasions when keeping the “I” label is the right thing to do, so there needs to be some way to indicate that these two instruments are referred to together. -
Long names
There’s something odd going on when you have a long name in a Player or Layout - in version 1.0.10 at least, a scroll bar appears but the items don’t get longer to show the full length, so you can scroll into empty space. -
Auto group
When you add an ensemble of players, that seems to me like a good opportunity to add a group around them automatically with the name of the ensemble. Behaviour that could be turned off, of course, but it would allow you to work with them separately, particularly if there are checkboxes on groups as well as players (see 6 above). -
Scroll while selecting
When selecting with a rectangle in the music area, if you hit the edge it doesn’t scroll; I think scrolling is probably expected behaviour in most applications now.
Thanks,
Iain.