Re: A thought on Windows Experience

[Tim McNamara]

On Dec 4, 2013, at 6:18 PM, Phil Burfitt <address@hidden> wrote:

> From: "Janek Warchol" <address@hidden>
> Sent: Wednesday, December 04, 2013 11:55 PM
> 
>> 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.

Apple's applications are written by a legion of well paid professionals who do 
nothing but live up to the Apple aesthetic.  Lilypond is written by a bunch of 
volunteers in their spare times, none of whom (as far as I know) is an GUI 
interface expert.

Powerful software and simple software are usually mutually exclusive.  Compare 
Word, Pages and LaTeX, for example.  Pages is more elegant but can do a small 
fraction of what Word can do.  Word can't do a lot of things that LaTeX can.


> AMEN+1
> 
> I also think lilypond's website is terrible. It looks like something out of 
> the eighties knocked up on a dos machine. By comparison, take a look at the 
> home pages of musescore, finale and sibelius.

All things considered, I'd rather focus Lilypond's meager resources to software 
that creates beautifully engraved sheet music.  The printed output of Lilypond 
is vastly superior (and more readable by musicians) than MuseScore, Finale or 
Sibelius.  I'm always amazed at how crappy Finale output looks, in particular.

If you think that Lilypond's web page needs a facelift, then volunteer to roll 
up your sleeves and help change it by writing text blocks, creating better 
HTML, creating better graphics, etc.  There is no well-funded corporation 
behind Lilypond, just a bunch of dedicated and amazingly talented volunteer 
programmers.