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Re: GUI


From: Tim McNamara
Subject: Re: GUI
Date: Fri, 18 Dec 2009 11:30:33 -0600


On Dec 18, 2009, at 2:59 AM, David Kastrup wrote:

Kees van den Doel <address@hidden> writes:

Of course there is nothing really wrong with the current website.
Most people will want to just download lilypond and try it out; who
has time to read all the crap on a product's website?  Once they've
clicked on the downloaded icon on their screen something reasonable
should happen.

Well, but Lilypond's whole operation is not "something reasonable". If they get what amounts to a demo run, that won't take them any further in
the process of creating scores.

So the question is what action from the clicking on the "downloaded
icon" will be the fastest leading to the average unsuspecting user
writing and processing their first "Michael row the boat ashore" kind of
file.

I have no good answer for that.

IMHO here is where we run into the issue of what LilyPond *is.* It's a backend with no face, basically. This is something that most Windows and Mac users will find hard to grasp initially, whereas Unix users will be familiar with such things. To the extent that we want to reach out to Windows and Mac users, we need to provide them with some way to understand and be comfortable with that- otherwise they will install it, double-click and say "where's the f*****g application?"

For this reason I like the idea of optionally bundling LilyPond with various pre-configured text editors that are ready to go (as much as possible). I'm leery of bundling Emacs because of the huge size of the thing and there being so many different versions. For Emacs, I think it might make sense to just bundle LilyPond and the code that needs to be added to site-lisp and .emacs, aiming that at established Emacs users. The other editors are easier for people to start with and there's no good reason to present people with a double learning curve.

I think this would be much more time- and resource-efficient than trying to develop and maintain a GUI for LilyPond. Heck, maybe the maintainers of the editors in question would do this as a cooperative effort and make it just part of their default package.






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