Re: A thought on Windows Experience

[Janek Warchoł]

Hi,

a couple of thoughts:

2013/12/4 Francisco Vila <address@hidden>:
> I find this path tortuous. People double-click
> the lilypond icon, and don't see this shell as many of them could
> expect. Instead, ugly things happen. Therefore, lilypond is ugly. I
> think this summarizes the start and the end of a newcomer's
> experience.

AMEN.
Francisco nailed it on the head.
Such things may seem small, but they make all the difference, and the
biggest companies (like Apple) know about this.  First impression,
elegance, simplicity, intuitiveness, etc. are very important.

Currently LilyPond's first impression (via LilyPad) is that it's a
second-rate program, looking as if it was written by a student in a
garage during the last holidays.  And it may seem that Lily is free
because it's not good enough to be worth any money.  Seriously, i
think that's the impression we're currently making.

While i'm sure that the people who created LilyPad had good
intentions, i really believe that LilyPad doesn't make sense (please
don't get offended by this).  For advanced users it's dramatically
underfeatured, while for newbies it's still not making things clear
enough.  And - at least the last time i checked - it lacks most text
editing tools, like syntax highlighting.  Only Windows notepad.exe has
less features i think.

David may be right that it'd be easier to integrate LilyPond into
Frescobaldi's installer than the other way round.  Or maybe there
won't be an easy way to have an installer that actually installs
everything - but maybe it would be enough if it downloaded other
program setup files and ran them?

Anyway, what about something like this: a "higher-level" installer
that installs LilyPond and lets user choose what editing program he
wants to use:

"LilyPond files can be edited using different programs.  Pleasse
choose what to install additionally:
* Denemo (has a GUI but it cannot open lilypond files created with
other programs)
* Frescobaldi (gives you more control, but doesn't have a GUI)
* I'm a computer wizard, and I'll use my own EMACS/vim/Notepad++"

This way we avoid the problem of favoring one editor over the other.

I believe that the most important thing is just to have a powerful
editor installed with LilyPond so that people get the most of LilyPond
right away.

best,
Janek