Some interface details for 3.0.5

• Mar 21, 2019 - 04:45

I'm starting to use MuseSscore 3.0.5. As had been anticipated, it has been a MAJOR update, no kidding, my sincere congratulations for the new features! I find many things are now more organized, I love the possibility to shrink parts of the inspector, very welcome for small-screen laptop users. Very nice for bilingual users to be able to change language without having to close and relaunch the applicaction. And I have not tried yet the announced non-conflict positioning!

There are some details that could be improved:

1) In the inspector, the use of the mouse scroll wheel still causes trouble when it inadvertently happens to fall inside a parameter selection box. The expected behavior would be not doing any edit with the scroll wheel until at least a click inside the box confirms one wants to change things. The risk is that one changes something without noting it until much later (for instance, an individual note's tuning). Workaround: try to use the scroll wheel over the scroll bar at the right or close to the left of the inspector, where no harm can be done :)

2) Grabbing and dragging a palette item to a note creates a red crossed-out circle with no arrowhead until one is close to the notehead. But intuitively one tries to put the circle over the note, which does not work. It doesn't work either placing the item icon over the note, one must displace it slightly to the left, until the arrow shows. It would be better to display an arrow with the crossed-out circle (a new custom icon) and replace it by a simple arrow when the arrowhead gets close to the element which the palette item must be attached to. No workaround but keep moving the red circle until the arrow shows.

3) Beam properties palette: the feathered beam is easy to get in, but difficult to get out. Double-clicking or dragging AUTO should do the trick, but it doesn't. Workaround: Undo if it is the last action; otherwise, change one of the notes to no beam, then select all the notes and double click AUTO.

4) Several items in the Palettes are not localized correctly (at least for Spanish), even if in 2.3.2 they worked OK (the palette names themselves are localized). This is a small regression. For instance: Clefs, Key signatures, Time signatures, Accidentals, Articulations, Ornaments, Breaths and pauses, Grace notes, Noteheads, Arpeggios and glissandos, Tremolo, Text, Tempo (in this case it always says the same: "Tempo text"; it should distinguish metronome mark from text), Fingering, Repeats and jumps, Bagpipe embellishments, Breaks and spacers, Frames and measures, Beam properties.


Comments

Point 1 is a standard behaviour of all software.
When a list field has focus, changing its value with mouse wheel is the expected behaviour.
But you're right, when a list field has focus because it is the autofocus field of a form and this form has just been opened, the user generally don't notice it and expect to scroll the form, not to edit a value.
This is a very common complain for all software, not specific to MuseScore.
The recommended way to avoid this inconvenience is to design forms where the autofocus field is not a list, except for very small forms for which it is not necessary, as using the mouse wheel to scroll is not expected in very small forms anyway.

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

As I find the discussion for 2) too ramified, I drop a comment here:
a) The behavior differs across operating systems and even within the same OS, for example some installs of Windows 7 show the red prohibition circle along with the arrowhead, and other installs, like mine, do the opposite.
b) The reason seems to be that the software uses the default cursor for the context, which may not be the same for all versions (it might depend on some undocumented setting?).
c) The solution has been suggested by Marc Sabatella: "ignore the system default cursor an instead provide our own that combines the "no" symbol with an arrow for easier positioning"

For 3), simply click the beam and hit Delete. But feel free to file a formal Suggestion to the issue tracker to provide other methods. Not sure "Auto" should do this, though, you might not want to complete reset to auto but merely remove the feathering. As far as I can see this worked the same in 2.3.2, BTW.

Also, BTW, you are using the automatic placement, it's always on by default, doing its job silently.

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