Improve "Generate" (formerly "New All") and other Parts dialog box buttons

• Jun 23, 2019 - 11:27
Reported version
3.x-dev
Type
Wording/Translation
Frequency
Once
Severity
S5 - Suggestion
Reproducibility
Always
Status
closed
Regression
No
Workaround
No
Project
MuseScore

As pointed out in the Tantacrul video, Parts -> "New All" can be improved

My suggestions:

(these should all be in excerptsdialog.ui, based on Context in TX)

"New All" (3.1) / "Generate" (nightly) -> "All Parts New"

(related strings)

"New" -> "New Part"

Also, since "New" does not have a tooltip like New All / Generate, add tooltip for "New Part":
"Generate new part for an instrument"

Comments

• Jun 23, 2019 - 17:21

"All Parts New" seems like not an improvement over "New All". To me, a clear verb phrase would be best: "Generate All", maybe "Create All" if you want a little shorter. Or, maybe just rearrange the buttons to put this and "New" together, give them an over heading that says "Generate", then label the two buttons "All Parts" and "Single Part".

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• Jun 23, 2019 - 17:42

heading that says "Generate", then label the two buttons "All Parts" and "Single Part"

That would work for me. My only concern is the size of the buttons (do they mean the window now needs to be wider?) and are they readable (do the words automatically shrink to fit on the button and become too small to read?).

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• Jun 23, 2019 - 19:51

I am happy with Marc's alternate suggestions.

These strings are very close in length to each other.

Generate
All Parts
Single Part

Should not pose a problem. I cannot answer your question about the auto-scaling, but this dialog has a lot of variable space in the block to the left of the current buttons.
Enough space should be left to allow for the inevitably much longer translated strings if the buttons do not adjust to the string length.

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• Jul 5, 2019 - 15:45

"selected parts" would be misleading, it's not parts that would be selected at that point, as they don't exist yet (which is why you are needing to generate them). The button just generates a single empty part.

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• Jul 17, 2019 - 16:32

I suspect part of the difficulty with the naming of the New All / Generate button is to do with the current design of the whole dialog. I was thinking about this a bit and experimented a bit. One idea that came up did was to re-organise the dialogue so that instruments appeared at the top (and were never greyed out). The flow through the dialogue would then be from the instrument list to creating parts and then to fine-tuning.

Screenshot 2019-07-17 at 16.15.13.png

With this approach:

  • you can create parts with one or more instruments (by multi-selecting) - this covers one kind of use case

  • you can do the New All / Generate thing ("Auto Create Parts").

  • parts that are editable and non-editable (because previously created) are clearly differentiated (see second image - a pencil icon indicates it is editable and a document icon indicates it's not - obviously if there was interest in this design approach different icons could be used)

  • the edit name field is removed - part names are changed by double clicking on the name in the list - this, in particular, would remove one source of confusion for users new to this dialog - at the moment you can put something in the name field and then it will disappear when you click New to actually make a part

  • when a part is created from a selection of one or more instruments a suggested part name is automatically generated based on the name

Whether this is more intuitive or not is probably going to differ from user to user. If nothing else, it might stimulate other (perhaps better) ideas. The current dialog confused me a lot when I first used it and still feels awkward in use, even though I understand it now.

If anyone wants to try it out it's coded up at https://github.com/Obliquely/MuseScore/tree/obq-parts-dialog. (I can submit a WIP PR if there's interest in taking this further.)

Screenshot 2019-07-17 at 16.21.04.png

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• Jul 17, 2019 - 16:55

This is nicer, but the dialogue still has some problems.

Perhaps this is from that it is three functions in just one dialogue:

  • create all parts automatically
  • instrument list plus create parts for these instruments
  • edit the instruments and voices for an existing part

Maybe splitting those a bit, visually if not in separate dialogues, could help.

Reply

• Aug 10, 2019 - 09:59

Thank you Startled Bee. I also have issues with the current Parts workflow (creating an empty part, adding instruments to it), which your suggestion of starting with the instrument, creating the part from that, solves.

So we have basically 3 suggestions on the table

1) string replacements/improvements
(Riaan's quick fix)
[Generate] (Formerly [New All] -> [All Parts]
tooltip
"Generate new part for each instru" (truncated);
->
"New part for each instrument" (this is shorter, should be short enough by leaving out Generate"
[New] -> [Single Part]
tooltip:
"New part for single instrument"
(requires no coding skill to replace strings)

2) everything in suggestion (1) + "Generate" heading
(Marc's medium fix)
Generate (new heading)
(requires Qt skills to introduce the "Generate" heading)

3) Redesign
(Startled Bee's long-term fix)

Can we action (1) now, or (2) if someone with coding skills and time can take ownership). Since (1) and (2) are not contradictory, doing (1) now until someone can code the "Generate" heading for (2) would not be unnecessary effort.

Startled Bee, if I can make a suggestion: create a separate issue for the issues you have with the existing dialog box and based on people's input, code up your WIP PR. My issue is a string / wording issues, whereas yours is with the UI / UX.

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• Dec 23, 2019 - 18:32
Title Improve "New All" and other Parts dialog box buttons ⇒ Improve "Generate" (formerly "New All") and other Parts dialog box buttons

Title change to reflect the current string. When I created this issue, "Generate" was in the nightly, "New All" was still current.

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Fix version
3.4.0