Beginner mode

• Feb 27, 2014 - 21:09

I've been thinking that some day it might be nice to have a "beginner mode" in MuseScore, with something along the lines of the infamous Microsoft Word assistant, "Clippy". Something where you could type a question on how to do something and get some sort of answer, but also, that could try to guess what you were doing and proactively offer help, especially if it thought you were probably doing something wrong. For example, if you enter a slur on a note and the next note is the same pitch, it could pop up and say "I notice you are creating a slur between two notes of the same pitch. Did you mean to create a tie? Here's how to do that...". Or, if you try to change text properties for an element, it could say, "I see you are changing the properties of this particular text element. Would you prefer to change the text *style*, so that your changes automatically affect all elements of the same type?". And so on.

This would be incredibly annoying to many of us, I know, so we would of course not want to turn this mode on. But I could see it being useful for beginners, especially in a school setting. Maybe the initial state could be an option you set in a welcome screen on first startup, or the teacher could set it up on behalf of his or her students.


Comments

I agree that it would be annoying to have an on-the-fly or pop-up feature ("It appears that you are entering a death metal tune; should I change everything to be consistent with a distorted F# minor key?") but I see where you are going. A score analyser feature would be good, though, where you can ask it to check for inconsistencies or uncommon usages. Maybe something for the new plugin framework?

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