Lillie & KB, thanks for taking the time to respond.
First to KB’s points, “the design philosophy behind the iPadOS is that functions should be intuitive” and “To be honest, intuitive can also mean “try and error”…”.
I while heartedly agree. As a designer my focus was imagine how the untrained user will expect it to work and do it that way, and in the world of Windows and graphical interfaces allow multiple routes to the same operation. When I’m asked (especially by my wife) how some software feature works (in an application I’m unfamiliar with) my first thought is, what would the untrained user expect the app to do, and that’s almost always he answer.
Dorico does not seem to behave the way other applications do - especially in the area of user help.
For example I use LumaFusion to edit small videos I share with my fellow piano students, it has a simple “?” Button and all it does is illuminate labels for all the controls, a simple overlay on the screen but those two or three words help me identify what I’m looking for. If I click on an an icon in an Apple app it’ll give me not only the easily recognizable icon for the operation but a few words as to what it does.
Dorico on the other hand has none of that, a long press on on the note insert mode icon presents another list of 4 cryptic icons, how does one discover what these things do when even the name of the control isn’t indicated. The keyboard pop ups are the same, they provide some unlabelled controls and no hint as to how to use it - on some there’s a bust of a person, I haven’t a clue what the name of this control is or what it does, how does one discover this information.
On to Lillie’s comments.
As a new user to the Dorico environment, and approaching it from the iPad perspective my first action was to look at the Learning page. I went through the quaint graphic and text box thing which generated as many questions as it answered. After scanning the page the only 3 potentially useful links or button are in the top right: Forum but I don’t even know enough at this point to ask questions, Manual the one you point to but as I previously mentioned as new user I’m not yet committed to the product or reading the entire manual prior to creating a “Hello world” project, Resources that’s the obvious new user starting point! And that’s where the trouble begins, virtually everything points to the desktop SE version.
As a new user what I’m looking for is a simple 10 to 15 minute, iPad specific video walking me through my “Hello world” project (something I previously described). All the video’s point to the desktop Quick Start Guide.
If it wasn’t for the recommendation of my on-line instructor Bill Hilton, and research I did via ChatGPT I would have given up long ago but Dorico iPad has two key features — it has a unique way of looking at time allowing the music to expand or contract across bar lines that products like MuseScore don’t do, and it runs on an iPad which is my favourite platform.
Lillie, concerning multi-select, rather than a long personal description as Google for the “etimology of the term multi-select”. So this hints at a bigger issue (which my research via ChatGPT eluded to) which is Dorico has its own unique ways of doing things and corporate jargon. This means things don’t operate the way new users expect, they aren’t labeled with terms I expect.
So taking multi-select as an example. Simply defined it is selecting multiple objects in order to perform some common operation like move, copy, or some other change.
In the world of graphical operations, to select a series of notes, this typically mean, touch the first item with the stylus (or finger) to select it, Dorico doesn’t this. To select a contiguous series hold the shift key (I use a Bluetooth keyboard) and select the last item in the list, no Dorico doesn’t do this. How about holding shift-cmd and individually adding notes to the selection, nope, doesn’t work.
What about touching the stylus and dragging to create a box around the desired items, again no. What about a long press (unusual but I’ve seen one example of it) before creating the box around — it kinda works but it creates this weird pulsating square around the stylus. After additional experimentation I figured out the square centred about the stylus point was trying to hint that this was the corner of the box. Why in the world wouldn’t the app simply show the stylus at the corner of a tiny box hinting that you need to drag the stylus to enlarge the box? My initial thought was the app was misbehaving and really didn’t like a long press on the stylus.
Comprehensive reference manuals used to be the norm in the early days of computing (yes, I’m that old) and it’s great to see that Dorico has invested them, but, in these days of self discovery two things are needed: controls that are labelled so the user can type that label into some search bar and up comes the help for that component/control and secondly, a short, well scripted video that walks virgin users through the common steps of creating their first Hello World project.
BTW: The term “Hello, World!” project originates from Brian Kernighan, a computer scientist at Bell Laboratories, who first used it in a 1972 internal memorandum titled A Tutorial Introduction to the Language B.
Thanks for taking the time to read this…novel
Doug
