Re: [Denemo-devel] Current State of Menus

[Jeremiah Benham]

On Mon, 2007-10-15 at 14:47 +0100, Richard Shann wrote:
> I've done a little survey of the current state of the menu system
> (below). As it has grown like topsy, it is in a fairly illogical state,
> and could do with an overhaul.
> One overall comment is that there are quite a few hardwired shortcuts.

I agree.

> File->New from template, should open in a templates directory. There
> should be a save as template saving to a (personal) templates directory,
> stripping out the notes. 

Would denemo copy templates from the local directory into the "personal"
template directory upon initial launch similar to how gimp copies a
bunch of stuff into the users home directory? 

> Staff menu is insufficiently hierachical - you have to read through a
> long list of inessential items (such as adding a staff in initial
> position) before finding the one you want. 

How would you suggest it be laid out?

> Some appear not to work eg
> add voice to current staff, chords to staff. 

add voice does work in classic mode. It does not work with the Rhyhmic
overlays at the moment. Yes, the add chord and lyric staff does not
work. It should probably be removed from the menu. 

> Staff is treated quite
> differently to Clef and Key, which lurk under insert. New staffs lack
> staff lines in measures after the first when added to a score which
> already has measures.

It used to not be that way. The reason for that is that we wanted to be
able to have different staff lengths. This is supposed to allow easy
deletion of arbitrary measures in a single staff and then later adding a
measure into one staff only. Say you were transcribing something and you
later realized you forgot to enter a measure. You can add a measure in
voice x then enter the missing music. 

> insert->chords  this appears to be broken - it looks like it might have
> been intended to put chord names above chords.

insert->edit chords like insert->lyrics and figured bass needs a note to
be attached to. It can be used to put note names above chords but was
designed to create a fake book or jazz lead sheet style document. I just
tested the insert->chords  

> insert->barline->  openrepeat working,   closerepeat broken,
> open/close repeat broken - none of these have any graphical indicator

Yeah it would be nice to have a graphical indicator. 

> Playback->Play using Csound is not working/grayed out

You need to go into playback properties first and then select you csound
options and then choose the orc file to play along with. This has
changed from the past because a dialog popped up every time a person
tried to play with csounds. It was annoying. I suppose their should be a
popup configuration dialog when there is an configured csound, csound
fails, or their is no orc file indicated. 

> Help->help cannot find the manual pages - while denemo is installing to
> local the manual is in usr/shanre/denemo. Manual is incomplete and out
> of date.

Aaron are you still working on the manual?  I suggest after our next
release we start putting how-to videos up on youtube. 


Thanks,
Jeremiah