Musescore 3 - Can't place items from any palette

• Jan 20, 2019 - 03:07

Just updated to musescore 3. Whenever I try to place something from the palette (an accent on a note for example), a red "nope" sign appears where my mouse cursor is and I can't place it.

I think this may be because musescore does not allow you to place something on the same tab as the palette, and it is not recognizing that you switched tabs when going from palette to score.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!


Comments

The "Nope" sign is tricky to make turn into a +. You have to ignore the item being dragged and place the top left "corner" of the nope sign on the note head if you want to drag an item. I always use shortcuts when I can assign one or they already exists. If I can't use a shortcut, I double click the item in the palette. Both methods allow me to add items to several notes at once.

See the discussion at #278767: "no drop" mouse pointer badly positioned

My observation is that the drag behavior depends on where within the palette cell you click to begin the drag. If you start at the top left corner of the palette cell, it works well, otherwise the mouse pointer is off from the element being dragged. But even though it is disorienting, it does still work about the same. The "pointer" that eventually appears is toward the top left, and once you get the top left of the red circle over the notehead, it works as expected. As far as I can tell, the zone of success is the same size as always, you just have to make sure it's the top left of the red circle you pay attention too. I agree it's annoying.

In any case, I also agree that drag & drop is not a very efficient method no matter how you slice it - click one or more score elements then double-click in palette is almost always much better, and shortcuts when available are better still.

In reply to by richard.garrod

Hmm, what goes wrong when you try? As mentioned, the placement of the icon is sometimes not close to the mouse cursor which can be distracting, and it can be hard to accurately position the mouse cursor on the item you wish to drop to, but it should never be impossible, and restarting should not affect this in any way. Luckily, this is already fixed in current builds and should be available in the next update.

In any case, again, drag and drop is virtually never necessary or very efficient - it is almost always much easier to select the score element then double-click the palette icon.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Thanks for the response Marc. When the dragging ability goes - it really goes i.e. the "ghost" (sorry don't know the correct term) of the icon does not even appear when you drag across. The cursor turns into a little two headed thing as well. Think I'll stick to version 2 which I'm most comfortable with. Thanks again

In reply to by richard.garrod

"a red "nope" sign appears where my mouse cursor is and I can't place it."

I agree with that, and understand your concern. The new way is poorly designed. The red sign is just annoying. Like a foreign body (or like a bull in a china shop)
And above all, it hides the cursor until the last moment. As if you didn't know exactly where to step. With version 2, the cursor remained visible, with the symbol stuck to it, in a way in symbiosis with it. I don't know the reason for the change, but for me, it's a failure, a regression.
That said, I don't use this method, or almost use, for quite some time now.

In reply to by cadiz1

Have you tried on a recent nightly build? The placement is a lot better and so is the overall experience. But it's still the case that you see the red circle until you reach a legitimate target. I didn't make the decision, but the reasoning seems obvious enough - way too many people were dragging to the general area of where they wanted something and then dropping it then wondering why nothing appeared in the score, making it seem like the whole thing was just broken ("I dropped a tempo marking to my score and nothing happened"). The red circle makes it clear you aren't in a good place yet. Of course, that doesn't help you figure out where you do need to be, but at least it does give you feedback. And in my experience, this is exactly how most other programs that use drag & drop in a similar way do things as well. So it doesn't really seem surprising to me.

The problem I'd like to solve is giving feedback about where you need to drop something. Like, maybe the whole score would gray out except for the legitimate drop targets.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

"Have you tried on a recent nightly build? The placement is a lot better and so is the overall experience. But it's still the case that you see the red circle until you reach a legitimate target"

Absolutely, I tried again with a current nightly. But the design error, in my opinion, is always here, so, that change nothing basically.

"The red circle makes it clear you aren't in a good place yet. Of course, that doesn't help you figure out where you do need to be, but at least it does give you feedback"

Simply disagree with that: maybe yours, but not an/my expected experience of feedback. The continue presence of the cursor/arrow is definitely the best feedback I can hope.

In reply to by mike320

I agree it's really hard to place the red circle and that this can still be improved. But - are you really not familair with this icon, and have you really never seen it used for drag and drop? To me, it's practically ubiquitous and very well-understood, and I'm quite surprised to hear people say it's confusing or meaningless. Again, sure, it would be better to make sure it's easier to place when you reach the target, but the use of the universal standard "you can't drop here" cursor seems like it should be noncontroversial.

For example, Windows Explorer has both the red circle and an arrow, with the red circle disappearing when you reach an appropriate target. That seems a no-brainer.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

"are you really not familair with this icon, and have you really never seen it used for drag and drop? "

Not familiar? Rather: really never seen here before. I've never met it. I am surprised, to say the least, and this is a euphemism, that I am told that this would be a universal standard! We're walking on our heads apparently.

And please reread the head message without prejudice on the fundamental experience, the feeling, actually experienced by the user (and that I share, like others)

In reply to by cadiz1

I accept your word that you've never seen this before. But I hope you will also accept mine that this really is a standard UI technique. Here for instance is what happens when you try to drag something on a page in Google Chrome to some place you cannot drop it:

y9e8NaEgDH.gif

This is virtually the same as we do - the mouse pointer becomes a circle with a slash, no arrow at all. But I think we can do better. Here is what happens if you try to drag a file in Windows Explorer to a place you can't drop it:

E5K1dkk93G.gif

As I mentioned before, the key difference here is that in addition to the standard circle-with-a-slash that indicates "you can't drop here", you also get a pointer that helps you place the mouse more accurately when you do reach a place you can drop.

I think this is what we should do as well. Then we can have the best of both worlds - feedback to the user that he can't drop yet (which was missing in 2.x, leading to much confusion among users), plus help in positioning the pointer when he finally does reach a place he can drop. We would still be missing some help in telling him he needs to drop on a note in the first place, but it would still be better than either 2.x or the current state of 3.0.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

What I don't understand and have just observed. With Windows7, the circle is not red (but black), and it just sticks to the back of the arrow, so the arrow always remains visible. And the circle becomes a small "+" that we know when the note turns blue. This seems pretty good to me (I should try more with Win7)

On the other hand, with Windows10, I see the behavior described above: a red circle that completely hides the arrow (you don't see it literally anymore, and that's just regression, as I said earlier), before disappearing when you've had the chance to fall in the right place.

Any idea of this difference in behavior, the display? Would it be a mouse setting to make (I must say that I always use the "default" setting as well with Windows7 and 10, so I would be surprised by that). Or the difference between Windows7 and Windows10? I would also be surprised, but since we need to find an explanation?

In reply to by cadiz1

Very interesting! First, let me summarize my point: the presence of the circle is not a problem - in fact it is a very good thing to help new users realize they can't drop yet - but rather, it is the absence of the arrow that is the problem. Seeing that it already looks this way on Windows 7 and that even on Windows 10 this is how Windows Explorer does it, just confirms this feeling for me.

So the question is, why are we seeing different cursors for different OS's, and can we get the WIndows 7 cursor everywhere? We actually rely on Qt to choose the actual icon for us, but I'm not seeing where we ever tell it to change from Arrow to Forbidden or vice versa.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

' the presence of the circle is not a problem - in fact it is a very good thing to help new users realize they can't drop yet - but rather, it is the absence of the arrow that is the problem.'

Absolutely, I agree with that. Windows7 first behaviour (arrow+circle in back) is correct.
And when I said I hadn't seen this circle yet, of course, I had seen it between other circumstances, but it didn't come to mind, 1) because the context was different, between documents/directories and large areas vs. tiny space of a measure and musical notes.
2) and especially, because there was obviously total misunderstanding and a little irritation. And for good reason: no one saw the same thing! I myself noticed the two different behaviours afterward.

So, for the future, in case of obvious misunderstanding, and in order not to repeat this unpleasant experience, it would be good to get into the habit of attaching an image (or animation) of what everyone really sees on their screen, to be sure that we are all talking about exactly the same thing!
It is a prerequisite before starting any conversations.

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