Re: User Experience Engineering

[fiëé visuëlle]

Another one...

My Mac used to run Linux PPC and MacOS Classic parallely (MoL) until  
finally MacOS X came out.
I just *need* the features of some Unix (tools, shell etc.) plus the  
features of a nice GUI.

I studied typesetter and I do most of my layout work with InDesign,  
because it's best for that.
But I also use TeX (ConTeXt) where that's best - e.g. for books and  
everything that doesn't need a heavy varying layout or for  
automatable tasks like database stuff.

As I looked after a program to typset music (and couldn't afford  
Finale, Sibelius etc. for a few songs), I came across  
HarmonyAssistant by Myriad -- it already won a prize for bad GUI  
design (I don't think it's so bad, but anyway), but it's a graphical  
music program with decent output in print and audio. But for me as a  
typesetter its PostScript output just isn't good enough.

I knew of LilyPond from my former Linux times and decided to try it  
again (after I despaired of getting a running MusiXTeX), and I'm sure  
I'll stay. :-)
For I mostly typeset song sheets (and that's one thing LilyPond isn't  
sufficiently good at), I need to integrate the LilyPond scores with  
something other - include PDFs in InDesign or use ConTeXt's new  
LilyPond integration.

I consider myself a programmer, but even my girlfriend who needs to  
imagine programs as little gnomes doing stuff, likes to write down  
her fiddle tunes in LilyPond code - it's nearly the same as she used  
before manually. Ok, I do the formatting for her, and she get's  
confused if I call it "source code", but hey, she can handle notes,  
chords, repeats and knows what to do, and the simple interface of  
LilyPad and its preview are just right for her. A graphical music  
editor would be just too slow - either you must use a MIDI keyboard  
(none of us plays piano) or learn the mapping on a normal computer  
keyboard (not suitable if you don't use it very often) or set every  
note by mouse (sloooow) - so a short ASCII notation like LilyPond's  
is the fastest possibility, at least for us.
And with LilyPond's Scheme I finally got a reason to learn Lisp... (I  
prefer Python.) ;-)

So, hail to the wizards - keep up your great work and don't let you  
distract by GUI stuff.

Greetlings from Lake Constance
---
fiëé visuëlle
Henning Hraban Ramm
http://www.fiee.net
http://angerweit.tikon.ch/lieder/
http://www.cacert.org (I'm an assurer)