Dropdown box/combo box items are hard to read because of underline
I just tried Nightly Build "4f8cdbb" on Windows XP SP3.
Unfortunately, every drop-down box or combo box has this daft underline on the current item, making it almost unreadable (see below).
Please PLEASE can this underline be removed? It's hard enough to read text that small without making it even more difficult by putting an underline on it!
Note to developers: using non-standard controls with rounded corners, 'fancy' effects, etc. is NOT progress; it's adding unnecessary 'eye candy' which actually makes the program MORE DIFFICULT for anyone with less than perfect 20/20 eyesight. Please stop doing it, and please consider that not every user has great eyesight!
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Comments
I suspect that the "eye candy" you're referring to is a feature of QT5
Most of the dialogue boxes and palettes are straight out of the box from QT.
Possibly some of your problem is your ancient operating system.
While I accept that it is probably the best OS that Microsoft produced (indeed I still have 3 working XP machines in use), you have to bear in mind that it is now really old, and graphics hardware and drivers have moved on.
I bought a brand new Windows 8 system at the beginning of this year, as preparation for Microsoft's discontinuation of support next April, and was amazed at the improvement in how Musescore 2 pre-release versions ran.
Incidentally there is no underline in that menu on my windows 8 system, just a blue highlight, so it may be something to do with your Windows settings, or indeed XP itself.
In reply to I suspect that the "eye by ChurchOrganist
Indeed - I think running XP has a lot to do with the problems being perceived. I do see underlines on my Windows 7 system, but they are positioned more normally, not quasi-strikethrough as in the posted graphic. I suspect that's either a bug in Qt on Windows XP, or else an artifact of the screen resolution used.
BTW, I suspect the "crossfade animation" referred to in another post is actually just the ancient OS and graphics hardware struggling to keep up with Qt5. There is no such animation that I am aware of, and tabs works smoothly on my machine, too. Qt is actually more standard than WIndows - after all, it runs on Windows, Mac, Linux - so I would not assume that just because something doesn't look like Windows (and like XP in particular) that this means the developers are going out of their way to do bad things.
In reply to Indeed - I think running XP by Marc Sabatella
I noticed the same 'cross-fade animation' effect PenAndCad is passingly referring to in this post and on which Marc is commenting above.
Note I run MuseScore under Linux Mint 14 on a fairly recent 64-bit, 4-cores, 16-GB RAM machine, so OS (and possibly hardware) are not the same of the OP.
It mostly appears in multi-tab (or multi-paged) dlg boxes, for instance the Preference dlg box or the Styles | General Style dlg box: when I change tab or page in the dlg box, a short but noticeable delay occurs during which the old page 'fades' into the new page; in between both pages (or pieces and bits of both pages) can be seen.
As far as I can tell or remember, this occurs since the switch to Qt 5. I am not sure this effect be intentional, as it looks somehow 'uncoordinated'. If this is relevant, I mostly run MuseScore in debug configuration (meaning -DDEBUG, and NOT the -d CLI switch).
As I also have a far from perfect eyesight, I also find this effect disturbing (perhaps not as much as the OP, but disturbing anyway). If it could be cured, I would appreciate!
Thanks,
M.
In reply to Cross-fade animation by Miwarre
Miwarre, thanks for your informative and insightful comment: you're describing (and much better than I did) the same slightly odd, and as you say 'unco-ordinated' crossfading artefact I'm seeing here on my Windows XP box.
Please may I ask, Miwarre: on your Linux machine, do you also see the underlines in dropdown lists (image in my OP)?
On a side note (geddit?), what a nice change to have a Windows user and a Linux user agree on something! ;)
Seriously though… hopefully the reason is, as you implied, a setting (or several settings) in Qt5 which the MuseScore developers can find and change easily.
In reply to Not just me, then? by PenAndCad
Yes, I get the strange underline in combo boxes too. The selected item gets a greenish background in my case, not red as yours, but the black underline is there and in the same (uncommon) position (interestingly, the green might be dictated by my desktop theme: Linux Mint, do you see?).
The cross-fading is taking more or less half a second (which, for our eyes, is not a short time as it may seems), more when the 'new' dlg page has many controls, less when it has fewer.
I'm rather confident that it dates approximately from the time of the switch from Qt 4.8 to Qt 5 (I instinctively put it in relation with QML) but I 'm not 101% sure.
M.
In reply to Yes, underline too! by Miwarre
In the last commits, the underline should be gone. And the fading is optional in Edit -> Preferences -> General -> Style -> Animations. It would be good if some people can test and report if it suits them better without the animation (and if the option works)
In reply to Cross-fade animation by Miwarre
Hmm now that I look closely there is a rapid crossfade which I hadn't noticed before.
It is rapid enough on my Windows 8 system not to worry me - incidentally the graphics card is a bog standard Intel HD Graphics 2000 - far from the gaming cards PenAndCad mentions.
Incidentally the crossfade is there in the QT4 versions too, and remains after switching off "All unnecessary window animations".
I can see that it would definitely cause problems on older hardware
The interesting thing is that there are no crossfade animations in 1.3 which uses the same QT 4.8.4 we were using for MuseScore 2 until recently.
This means that somehow they have been switched on somewhere in the code.
In reply to Indeed - I think running XP by Marc Sabatella
Marc, I agree that XP is now Very Old. My wife has a laptop which runs Windows 7 and I still think of Windows 7 as 'that new OS!' There are still many, many XP users out there such as ChurchOrganist and myself, and many of us have neither the money or the inclination to upgrade to a newer OS any time soon. So in my opinion, it would be a pity if MuseScore excluded the millions of potential v2.0 users around the world (myself included) by setting a 'Windows 7 or higher' requirement.
So if it's the case (as I hope) that us XP-using fossils are included in the V2.0 party, even if it's by default or even grudingly, I feel that MuseScore should Play Nicely with XP as far as possible. Perhaps the underlining can't be fixed for XP without a massive amount of coding work: and if that's the case then no problem, I can accept that. But if it's a simple change that won't affect other platforms, it would be nice if it could be fixed on XP.
It also seems that my animation artefact occurs for at least one Linux user with beefy-sounding kit, so I don't think that is necessarily an OS nor a hardware issue; wise money so far is going on Qt5 or, more accurately, some property or properties within it. It could be that it's a Qt5 property that has no visible effect on high-end graphics cards, so only those of us with entry-level video cards, or on-board MOBO monitor port users like (oh, you guessed, huh?) see it.
Though I'd bet that many MuseScore users don't have gaming-quality graphics cards, so it will probably benefit a large number of MuseScore users if the source of the perhaps unintentional 'crossfade' could be found and, ideally, switched off or removed.
In reply to Playing nicely with XP by PenAndCad
For the record, it wasn't me who said I still have XP machines, although I think I might somewhere. I don't think MuseScore is setting any sort of official "XP not supported" policy (although I suppose it's possible). I was just observing that from a *practical* perspective, running brand-new versions of software on older OS's is likely to be problematic. As a software developer myself, I know how hard it is to continue to support older OS's with newer software versions, and that becomes doubly true when your software relies on third party GUI libraries like Qt. You're kind of at their mercy. As far as I know, Qt5 officially supports XP, but I guess it just doesn't surprise me if it isn't particularly well optimized to do so right out of the box. Hopefully it is just a matter of tweaking *how* MuseScore sets things up in Qt, and some motivated XP user / programmer could go in (since it is open source) and fix these things.
Regarding the cross-fade, my system is not particular fast at all - a low end laptop that cost under $400 brand new. And I typically am taxing the system pretty hard, with tons of application windows open, only rebooting once a week or so, etc. On my system right now, just bringing up a dialog often takes several seconds - for File / Open, it's often over 10 seconds. Of cours,e this is a debug build, running under the debugger, so I expect things to be slower than usual. Anyhow, even in this very sluggish environment, I cannot detect anything but instantaneous switches between tabs in Edit / Preferences or any other dialog "most" of the time. As I continue to bang on it, I'd say maybe once every 20 tab switches I get a glitch where I can still see the old text for a fraction of a second while the new is being drawn. Is this what you are referring to? And you saying you see it often? Or that it lasts for more than a fraction of a second?
For comparison, I also looked at the recent versions of LibreOffice, QtCreator, and a number of other programs. I can't say MuseScore looked any slower in its tab switching behavior than average, and in fact was noticeably faster - even running in debug mode - than several.
Not sure what this tells us. I'm still guessing it is a simple performance issue as opposed to anything intentional. But what triggers it, I cannot say.
In reply to For the record, it wasn't me by Marc Sabatella
As far as I know, Qt5 officially supports XP,
The reality is that the writing is on the wall for Windows XP
Microsoft will no longer support it with updates after 5th April 2014.
Already you cannot install the newer versions of Office or Publisher on Windows XP.
Once Microsoft support is a thing of the past then slowly support will disappear from everything else, and I think we're seeing the beginnings of this in QT5
In reply to As far as I know, Qt5 by ChurchOrganist
Windows XP sp3 is indeed under extended support by Microsoft.
Regarding the officially supported OS by Qt5. Check http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-5.0/qtdoc/platform-details.html
Windows XP 32 bit is supported only with MVSC2008 compiler. MuseScore uses Mingw...
XP was supported in Qt 4.8, but only in tiers 2 http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/supported-platforms.html
Basically, creating software is a difficult job. Supporting software is probably even more difficult. Having both for free...
Oh BTW, the ugly underline is gone :) Thank you Werner!
In reply to Agree by [DELETED] 5
I can confirm that the underscore is gone on Windows XP as well. :)
Ditto the lack of animations does make the dialogs perceptibly faster to use on my computer: well done and many thanks! It seems that clicking View, Synthesizer crashes MuseScore but I didn't zap the hidden MuseScore Development folder yet, so that may be my fault.
All looking MUCH better: my sincere thanks again to all concerned.
Happy camper!