Re: on marketing

[Richard Shann]

On Sat, 2013-12-07 at 13:40 -0500, Carl Peterson wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 7, 2013 at 1:19 PM, Richard Shann
> <address@hidden> wrote:
>         On Sat, 2013-12-07 at 18:11 +0100, Joseph Rushton Wakeling
>         wrote:
[...]
> 
> 
> 
> I use MuseScore for quick and dirty composition work...I'm not trying
> to make it "pretty," I'm just trying to get it on a page and be able
> to directly manipulate it. I've done that with Finale when I've had
> some version of it installed on my computer. I can do that with
> MuseScore. I tried a couple of times to do it with Denemo and really
> didn't have a good experience. Part of it is the very menu-centric
> approach (too cluttered),

Well, up to now, the menus were there mainly to allow the user to find
out what the keyboard shortcuts were - even things like move the cursor
right have menu entries so that you can find out that right arrow does
this. (In that case you could guess, but move to measure right? ...
staff down ...)
Now we have palettes too, so those that want to click buttons can, and
search facilities for finding commands and short cuts. But there is
still a way to go.


>  but in general, it just wasn't intuitive to me as a GUI. MuseScore
> does well enough for what I do with it. I think that initial
> experience with Denemo can be very overwhelming, particularly if we're
> talking about someone coming from a Finale-like experience. I've used
> Finale and a broad selection of other music tools (both composition
> and production), and Denemo was just...different. MuseScore is
> different from Finale, but it's alike enough to be a much shallower
> learning curve.

yes, I can imagine.

> 
> 
> To bring us back to Marketing, it's well and good to talk about all
> the things that LilyPond or Denemo or Frescobaldi can do that Finale
> and/or Sibelius can't. However, if we're looking at convincing people
> to switch from Finale and/or Sibelius to the LilyPond sphere of
> influence, we have to be able to show them that everything

only some people are interested in "everything", many want just their
own bits of interest.
Denemo is customizable to a great extent, all menus and palettes can be
modified; most users will not do so, but it would be possible to create
specialized versions of Denemo for many different areas of interest.

Richard