Everything can not be implemented at once, the program has to be allowed to grow without rushing things in to premature solutions, and of course it takes longer than x weeks to write the code for… etc etc.
All good, no worries.
Give a hint regarding when chord symbols can be expected?
I heard someone had heard someone say “by the end of summer 2017” …
Aha…! Surprised to hear that, having assumed that to be an important feature to a large group of users. That said, I also assume the dev team’s priorities reflects the needs/wants of their estimated market group, nothing wrong with that.
Anyone else have some info about the - for those of us mostly making charts with chord changes - estimated and glorious arrival of chord symbols?
I knew this kind of third-hand information would end up getting posted back here…!
I was in the US a couple of weeks ago and gave a number of presentations of Dorico to musicians in New York and Nashville, and of course several of the questions I got from people in attendance were about when various things would be added to the program. I could not give to those people in attendance, and nor can I give to the community here on the forum, any specific information about when chord symbols or any other complex feature will be added to the software.
The truth about software development is that by the time you have broken down a complex feature into tasks of sufficient granularity to be able to predict with any degree of certainty how long that feature will take to implement, you have basically done a good deal of the work (at least the design and architecture part).
So the truthful answer to the question, “when are chord symbols coming?” is “we don’t know, and we can’t tell you!”
However, what we can say, and what I did say to the people I met in New York and Nashville, is that our plan is to be done with all of the updates for Dorico 1.x by summer 2017, and that by that time we will have implemented as many of the features that we have identified as being top priorities as possible – including chord symbols, cues, unpitched percussion, repeats, editable note spacing, piano pedaling, fingering, etc. etc. One of the people at one of the demos has then interpreted this response as meaning that there will basically be no movement on chord symbols until “summer 2017”, and has posted it somewhere (VI-Control.net, I suspect), and now it’s become some kind of “official statement from Steinberg”.
(Moral of the story: don’t believe everything you read on the Internet, even if it comes from somebody who says they heard it directly from the horse’s mouth, i.e. from me.)
So let me lay it out for you: chord symbols are one of our top priorities at the moment. We are close to the end of the year, and the whole team is working on a few more small fixes and feature improvements that we hope to release before Christmas in the form of a 1.0.20 update, which will naturally be of smaller scale than the 1.0.10 update (which did only come out just over a week ago…!). The team will be taking some well-earned time off over the holidays to reacquaint ourselves with our partners and our children, and when we return in the New Year we will start working in earnest on these larger features, and we will continue to release updates as frequently as it makes sense to do so.
As definitely as I can say, chord symbols will be with you by summer 2017, yes. But hopefully they will actually be with you some time before that. How much before that I simply cannot say at the moment.
The good news is I get asked the question at least once every day or two, so I can be sure I will have sufficient opportunities to provide an up-to-the-minute status report…
Over and out.
Indeed, asking in the stables is better than asking someone who went to the tracks…!