Re: [Denemo-devel] Involvement

[Richard Shann]

On Thu, 2012-10-25 at 19:10 +0200, Éloi Rivard wrote:
>         
> Does every command need to appear in a menu ? 
Every command appears by default in a menu, so that the user can
discover their existence and what the shortcut (if any) is.
Until we have a better mechanism for people to learn how to use the
program we cannot remove them, but users can hide them. This is an area
where improvement is much needed - dropping (hiding) an item from a menu
should be on the right click menu.

> If a command appears in a menu, we can expect it is because you can't
> execute more easily with the mouse.
Whether you can execute a command more easily with the mouse depends on
whether you have your fingers on the keyboard or on the mouse when you
want to perform the command. Clearly, no one is ever going to use the
menu item to move the cursor right, but they do need to look at the
navigation menu to find that the left/right arrows do that, (which in
this case they might have guessed) and then that ctrl-arrow takes them
to the previous measure, PgDown to the next movement and so on.
>  Considering that I think some commands does not belong to a menu,
> like those about cursor moving, as it is more efficient and intuitive
> to just click where you want the cursor to be.
Not if you are typing in notes and you just want to back up to correct
one note. I use the mouse a lot, but there are many who are more
keyboard oriented.
>  For example, there are two commands to create a slur : "begin slur"
> and "end slur".
There are already examples of this in the Denemo shortcuts provided as
standard. If you look under Notes/Rests->Markings->Dynamics you see that
crescendo can be done by putting on the Caps Lock holding down the shift
key and dragging with the left mouse button.
There was (is?) one defined for slurs too, which I recall trying out,
but it I didn't get along with it. Instead I use the commands to enter a
rhythm-note slurring from the previous. With those commands I can enter
slurs while entering the rhythm and not losing the musical sense of the
piece I am playing in.
>  This is efficient for keyboard, but not intuitive for the mouse. A
> mouse-friendly way would be to just select what you want with mouse
> dragging, and have a button (or a menu entry) to create the whole
> slur. This reasoning is expandable to most of "begin/end" commands.
> Another example is "include something before" and "include something
> after" commands. A mouse user will just click where he wants to add
> something, and then click on a "add something there" button or menu
> entry.
Creating these shortcuts is not a problem (see above) but giving the
user a choice of how they might like to work is - we have already had
one abortive attempt at doing that.
> I think keyboard oriented commands shouldn't appear in menus, as menu
> and toolbars are graphical elements, that you use with the mouse.
Yes, I agree - we should have a better way of letting the user find out
what all the commands available are and what shortcuts have been set.
But we can't simply hide all the commands we don't think people will
want menu items for, as the user will have no way of discovering them.
>  Considering all this menus should be clearer :D What do you think ? 
yes! It is trivial in Denemo to hide them, the discovery problem is not
so trivial.

Richard