> Hi David,
>
> Thanks for the feedback.
>
> > 1. Touch screen zooming
>
> This should work but we have had a couple reports of this. Please get in touch with the support team and they'll be able to help out.
>
Thanks Sam. I will contact Support when I have some time. I'm sure touch screen users are a minority of your customers, and while I expect this bug to be easily reproducible on any touch screen hardware, it's also possible it's hardware dependent, and thus not something you could test prior to release. Given this possibility, of course I don't necessarily expect a mature application on day 1 of a release, and I'll try to work with you to work out the bugs.
> > 3. The new "Ribbon"
>
> Keyboard shortcuts will be the best thing for you to use here. They'll help you access the filters you use regularly. As you have a touch screen, you may find tapping the filter you need is quickly than finding your mouse and scrolling through the list. As for accessing parts, "W" will help you jump to the part you need.
>
Sam, of course I'll have to program some custom keyboard shortcuts, or the mouse/touch. I had already come to that conclusion. I was just noting that keyboard accessibility could (perhaps "should") be improved in at least this one spot on the ribbon? With that being said, to be fair, Sibelius's version 6 menus were a bit weird in terms of keyboard accelerator menu letters--sometimes a single letter would be used several times on the same menu!, and you'd have to press it 2-3 times to get the selection you wanted. I've never met another application like this, and it seems obvious to me that Sibelius has a lot of commands to try to cover by the keyboard and it's a challenge to design something that works well for the keyboard! So Sibelius 6 certainly had "room for improvement" in this regard. But on the rest of the ribbon, the problem was "solved" in Sibelius 7+ by introducing multi-letter shortcuts--for example even to select the proper tab at the top level of keyboard access, we have PL for Play and PA for Parts. It seems to me the same thing could have been done for filters, so that I could have typed Alt, H(ome), FT(ilter), CH(ords), for example. Do this a few times and it would easily be memorized, just like the rest of the ribbon... whereas currently, that "CH" I'm hypothesizing isn't available and requires either switching to the mouse/touch, or hitting the "Down Arrow" 15 times instead.
The reason I have learned to do these types of filters on the keyboard in Sibelius 6, is actually because of the other, pre-programmed and well documented filter: selecting a single voice. I do a lot of work in multiple voices... and filtering voice 3 (for example) only with the mouse is of course much harder than the keyboard shortcut, and it's a real pain to have to switch back and forth between mouse/touch and keyboard more than necessary. So after pressing Ctrl-Alt-Shift-3 to select voice 3 only, it became very easy in Sibelius 6, to then hit Alt-E, I, C, for example, to filter down to only notes and chords, thus allowing me to leave my hands on the keyboard and perform both operations back to back in under a second. The nice thing about the menu based interface is, there was nothing to remember. If you didn't remember which letter to press, it was right there on the screen,... just like the keyboard prompts for the ribbon are right there on the screen. And of course after customizing Sibelius 7+ to introduce a keyboard shortcut for each of the common filters I use, it'll be just as fast as before, if not faster... but I'll have to remember what I picked for the shortcuts. So I still think this is a hole in the usability out of the box.
Thanks for wanting and listening to feedback. I'll let you know if I have any more. :)
--David |
Sib 8: definitely not mature - David Beattie, 28 Jun 11:48PM