General Usability Issues
What would be the best way to report a bunch of things I observed in the course of watching a new MuseScore user work with the program?
System Environment:
- Windows 7 SP1 x64
- MuseScore 1.3
- ThinkPad T400
The user was given a link to the tour (http://musescore.org/en/musescore-tour) and an introductory video series (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6BDCE01557636C85).
In general, the problems I observed are not big showstopping problems but they required assistance from another person and additional research to figure out, which makes the program harder to use for new people.
I only observed 1 big bug, which I will report through the normal bug reporting process in the support forum.
For the curious, I will post the current list of usability issues in a separate comment.
Comments
1. The "What's It" button has vanished from the toolbars and it's not clear how to customize the toolbar to get the button back. The button is visible in the videos mentioned in the first post.
2. Cut/copy/paste don't work when only 1 note is selected. There is no clear way to move a single note to another beat.
3. Hard to figure out how to delete measures. This is particularly painful because new measures are created via Create | Measure (just append) but deleting measures is in a completely different menu (Edit).
4. After opening more than 1 score, there is no way to switch between them. Most Windows applications use some sort of "Windows" menu, which MuseScore is missing. This becomes really confusing when the user tries to close the entire program by using ALT+F4 or by clicking the "X" in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. MuseScore will prompt to save the visible document (let's call it "B') and then prompt for the invisible document (say, "A") without displaying A. The user is left guessing at whether or not to save the contents of A.
5. MuseScore generates 2 files when saving a single score for no apparent reason.
In reply to 1. The "What's It" button has by zian
Hi zian, thank you very much for sharing your usability feedback. We appreciate this. Unfortunately as Jojo indicated below, these issues are already addressed for the coming version of MuseScore, i.e. version 2.0. You can test the beta release via http://musescore.org/en/node/42051
Have you had a a look at MuseScore 2.0 Beta 2? The tour refers to 1.3, the videos were sign even older version.
1.3 won't receive further fixes, so please check 2.0 Beta 2 or later nightly builds and if you find issues there, report them.
Ad 2) select note, shift+right, shift+left. Then cut/copy and paste...
Ad 3) select measure, hit Ctrl+Del. Same in 1.3 and 2.0.
Ad 5) MuseScore does not generate 2 files, but it does save a backup on first save of an existing score. In 2.0 these are hidden files on Windows too.
In reply to Have you had a a look at by Jojo-Schmitz
"Same as 1.3"
I should've been clearer; the user has never used MuseScore before.
[Ctrl]-[Tab] moves between scores.
What is the easy shortcut to move between spreadsheets in Excel in MS Windows?
Thanks for the pointer to version 2.0. I have switched the user to 2.0 Beta 2.
It sounds like the videos need to be updated or, if there are more up-to-date videos that could be used, then the link on the MuseScore website should be updated.
I get the impression that these things should be reported as individual issues. I assume that is also the place to post notes about the handbook.
Thank you for the positive response to my observations. I will see which ones are still a concern with the latest nightly build and go from there.
P.S. Apparently the handbook talks about using ritards but not how to specify where they go. Ah well...
In reply to Thanks for the pointer to by zian
Handbook for 2.0 is still work in progress (and the 2.0 handbook pages currently allow for comments), tutorials and videos not (yet) available...