Some thoughts on the Create New Score dialogue.
I had one of those flashes of inspiration in the middle of the night last night. A particularly venomous gust of wind had driven the torrential rain with enough force against the skylight in my bedroom to wake me up, and before I drifted off back to sleep this idea presented itself to me about this part of the UI.
At present the create score dialogue is very instrument driven. It is more or less assumed that the user will create a new score by selecting the instruments they want after entering the title.
This is not how composers tend to work though. The first step is to draw the layout of the score ie the line down the left hand edge of the system and the necessary braces. Only then do you write in the names of the instruments.
So how about, if the first step in this UI was to choose a score template, which then could populated with instruments if necessary. As I had some free time this morning I made a drawing of how that first dialogue would look. I don't pretend that this is complete there are some obvious omissions such as lead sheet and guitar tab, but I hope it gives a general idea about how this may work.
Once the user had clicked on the type of score they wanted to create, the interface would then go on to the current choose instruments dialogue, unless they had clicked on User Template. The only difference being that if they had chosen a preset score template the staves would already be laid our for them in the right hand section of the instrument list.
Now I have no idea about the coding implications of this, but it seems to me that it would result in a score setup UI which would require fewer clicks to operate than at present.
Anyway let me know your thoughts
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Comments
There is an assumption here that users would be very familiar with all the different clefs, instrument combinations and layouts. I have my doubts. I play several instruments, know the clefs, and even compose a bit, but I would not know what to do with half of the above examples. Also, the number of combinations required would seem to be more than you presented and so the initial setup dialog wouldn't have the room for them all.
This seems like an "advanced" users dialog, like from a different set of dialogs for different levels of users.
In reply to There is an assumption here by schepers
Well my first thought was to use text in the icons.
This would, however, not be conducive to the multi-language nature of the MuseScore community.
I was making the assumption here that most people would be wanting to compose in a format they were comfortable with, and so would choose the icon which looked most like the music they were used to playing from.
The concert band and full orchestra icons could always be hidden in an "advanced" section.
I agree that as is, the graphics don't really convey enough information to be useful in my opinion. And if you then have to populate with instruments, I'm less impressed - it seems a step backwards from using templates. Except that the graphical presentation is good.
I do kind of like what I see when I hit file/new in Sibelius 7 (I have trial version only installed, but that's sufficient). I see what is basically a list of templates, but each with large thumbnails showing the layout they will create. There are far too many of them - pages and pages to scroll through - and it's unnecessarily hard to get to a place where you can create from scratch.
So what I'd propose - if you are looking to make a change - is to reverse the first two dialogs in the new score wizard. Have template selection come first. Each template should provide a preview. So the first thing users see on file/new is a dialog that is a cross between yours and Sibelius': a graphical presentation of the various templates available, labeled with the name of the template (not the individual instruments within it) - and a button as you have to allow for creating a custom score (which would take one to the instrument selection dialog).
If we label the icons using template names as I am suggesting, I can't see how language would be an issue. After all, the templates *already* have names. We're just adding pictures.