Re: GUI

[Joseph Haig]

Forgive me for jumping in, as this is a long thread and I have only
been partially reading it.  However, I have a couple of comments which
I hope will be useful.

Firstly, I think the new web site looks great.  I do not think the
current site looks particularly bad (I have seen much worse), but it
is fairly basic and a little dated.  Lilypond is about producing
beautiful music scores and the web site should reflect this.

Regarding how to find the 'Alternate input' link, I did find it fairly
easily following the 'Introduction' page.  I do, however, think that
it would be sensible to have this link also also on the 'Download'
page, perhaps in the warning about Lilypond being text based.  Eg, "To
see how Lilypond can be used in other ways, try the alternate input".

There has been some discussion about whether people understand what is
meant by an editor, environment, etc.  Would it help to hide the fact
that people are actually using Lilypond directly, and instead refer to
"software based on the Lilypond engine"?  I must confess that I have
not tried most of these editors myself so I do not know how much the
actual running of Lilypond is hidden from the user, but if (in the
case of Denemo) someone can just point-and-click with the mouse, press
a button and then get the output does it matter whether or not they
know what is actually editing a text file?  Also, referring to
"software based on the Lilypond engine" you can pass it off as 3rd
party software (and therefore supported by someone else) but give it
the Lilypond seal of approval for compatibility.

I hope this is useful.

Regards,

Joe