Re: [Denemo-devel] Current State of Menus

[Richard Shann]

On Fri, 2007-10-19 at 07:07 -0500, Jeremiah Benham wrote:
> 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? 

good idea.

> 
> > 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?

I have in mind using the gtk actions, proxies and accelerators as
discussed in the thread "Menu system and keyboard shortcuts"
With such a system you can cheaply give a choice of layouts. The main
ones people might find logical would be laying out by object type and
laying out by action type. 
1) In the object type layout there would be menus labelled "Staff",
"Measure", "Note", "Key","Time", etc and beneath these would be actions
such as Insert, Delete, Change, GotTo. At a more detailed level we would
have to decide whether to go down a level for Insert Before/After or to
offer both at the same level in the menu.
2) In the action type layout there would be menus labelled "Insert",
"Delete", "Change", Navigate and below at some level are the objects and
actions which are proxies for the same actions in the other views. Gtk
keeps track of maintaining the accelerator labels, so using any menu
hierarchy when you arrive at the function you want (e.g.
GoTo->Measure->NextMeasure) you get shown the correct keyboard
accelerator, and if you change it, gtk changes all the proxies too.

These menubars would have [x] buttons at the right for removing them
from the view, as people may well only wish to have one such (or none at
all once they have a keyboard map that they are happy with).

> 
> > 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. 
Well, it lets you put two voices on one staff (in Classic and Insert
mode) but they are on separate staffs in lilypond output.

> 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
Oh, right - I just didn't know what was acceptable input.
>  
> 
> > 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
> 
> 
Thanks for the feedback.
Richard