Ability to change color of current note (or element)

• Dec 20, 2013 - 10:14
Reported version
2.1
Type
Functional
Severity
S5 - Suggestion
Status
closed
Project
MuseScore

It is difficult to find the current note in a score which includes lots of notes. The contrast between black and blue is too slight. I'm attaching a screen shot to show that it is hard to find the current note.

Please add the ability for the user to change the color of this note via the global preferences.
Or at the very least make it red or green so it becomes visible.

Thanks.
Jim

Attachment Size
Screen Shot 2013-12-20 at 10.38.22 AM.png 260.14 KB

Comments

• Dec 20, 2013 - 11:29

This is already possible from the Edit Preferences dialogue in 1.3

I see though that this has disappeared from the Preferences dialogue in the Nightlies.

This is an extremely important setting for visually impaired users who need to be able to configure colours to gain maximimum visibility.

It will also affect colour blind users who may not be able to see differences in shade between default colours.

It is, therefore, very important for this to be replaced in the release version of 2.0.

Personally I regard this issue as critical as it affects a significant percentage of MuseScore users.

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• Dec 20, 2013 - 14:38

I would not argue on the percentage... but we can't just keep on adding more preferences with a custom widget for each one of them. I would propose to add a searchable list of settings, a bit like the about:config box in Firefox and expose there *all* the settings we have in the preferences file. It includes the selection color, the voice colors, and 10s of others.

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• Dec 20, 2013 - 14:52

That sounds a very sensible solution to me Nicolas

Perhaps even providing access to the .ini file from the preferences dialogue albeit with dire warnings about misconfiguring options would be the way to go??

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• Apr 29, 2014 - 08:40

May I suggest that before solving the general problem of how to manage 10s of preference settings, that you first change the selection color to something more sensible. A dark blue selected note does not seem to be the best choice of color when all the other notes are black.

Does anyone agree/disagree?

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• Apr 29, 2014 - 14:14

I suspect it depends on your monitor settings - color calibration and overall brightness / contrast. My current settings do make it hard to distinghuish the blue from the back, but on my previous computer, it was easy. That's with the same color calibration setup (via Spyder2 Express), and the same overall backlight, but I think my current (lpatop) monitor must have lower contrast than the previous, and there is no independent contrast control.

Which is to say, it will probably be hard to pick one set of colors that works well for everyone. Not saying a lighter blue would bother me personally on my current computer, but it could be a tricky balance.

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• Apr 29, 2014 - 18:06

I don't think any colour would make the selected note in the screenshot easy to pick. Is there a clearer way of highlighting it? A box around it, or a shadow.. maybe you could pick up the orphaned and lonely blink tag now it's been abandoned by html? :) edit: this is perhaps not entirely silly, a flashing text cursor is used to great effect to approach this problem in every text editor and word processor since who knows even.

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• Apr 30, 2014 - 00:46

Keep in mind, we need not just one "selected" color but four - one for each voice - and they need to be easily distinguishable from each other. Red is close to the colors used for voices 3 & 4 already. You also have to consider that there a many thousands of people accustomed to colors used in 1.X who would find it confusing to have the colors suddenly changed around for no apparently good reason - people whose monitors are set up such that the default colors work fine.

That's why I think merely going to slightly brighter variations of the colors already used is probably as far as we should take it

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