MuseScore 4's User Interface requests and suggestions

I sense that the UI design philosophy of MuseScore 4 is geared toward:

• greater organization and discoverability (partly through contextual property display) resulting in a better everyday workflow and an engaging first-time user experience.
• perhaps a move toward mobile interface—which would explain so many oversized objects that on a tablet are easily poked with a fingertip.

To some eyes we now have a cleaner UI. But I’d rather have more tools and properties visible at once (as in MS3’s Inspector) and avoid situations where MuseScore 4 closes a “panel” of properties after use (like Properties>Playback>Velocity which, due to contextually, closes when I choose anything but another note).

I understand the purpose of contextual toolbars and subpanels, but not when their behavior causes me repetitively to dig down to access the properties I need.

I encounter mobile design’s daily encroachment desktop/laptop apps, which often interferes with workflow. For example, oversized controls and lists, and possibly a prevailing opinion that dialogs are just old fashioned. Given the inconveniences and limitations imposed on desktop users I hope developers allow that desktop apps retain their traditional and inherent advantages.

Generally I would prefer:

• smaller controls—with less space between them
• less buttons in Properties areas
• less properties hidden one or two levels down
• more use of dialogs over submenus (e.g. View>Show, though I don't mind it's presence if merely redundant. ) If the goal is sidebar access (to nearly everything) a single button in a sidebar could open a dialog to access a host of properties, in lieu of consuming sidebar real estate to display properties and subpanels (like Show and Score appearance) — Please see the attached image.

All that said … I need to emphacize:

The biggest issue with MS4 is the matter of multiple app instances. Countless others have accurately mentioned a) this means no tab bar list of open documents b) the standard OS keystrokes for switching between open documents don’t work. And indeed, those are significant issues.

And this is related to another huge inconvience in MS4: the inability to create a reliable workspace, with sidebars populated my custom placement of Palettes and Properties. Unless I’m missing something, each app instance retains the “workspace” used in the previous document session. And in contrast, an actual workspace created in one app instance is not available to any other instance, whether automatically or manually.

I understand we lost these features (hopefully temporarily) to accomodate the new audio system, but at great expense. I hope we’ll see the new audio system coexisting with a reliably configurable single-window interface and/or true multi-window support.

scorster