I never actually put any serious effort into using MuseScore myself before the changes, so I can’t comment from extensive personal experience.

But as a musician, I did use scores written by someone in MuseScore, as well as ones written in Sibelius. And I could always tell when it was MuseScore. I’m sure it was possible to write good looking scores in MuseScore 2, but it clearly did not make it easy. The scores were obviously inferior in terms of layout and design compared to those produced in Sibelius. Basic things like spaces between notes not being the right proportion, or dynamic markings appearing as plain italic text instead of the usual bold dynamics would be wrong in MuseScore far more often than in Sibelius.

As a general rule, a good UX should:

1. Make it very, very easy to do (or discover how to do) the most common basic things, and should result in them being done in the way a user expects
2. Not slow down a power user from accomplishing basic tasks at speed
3. Allow easy discovery of and access to less common tasks

A lot of designed-by-software-engineer FOSS applications do a good job of 2 and an ok job of 3, but fail at 1.

Interesting. That would make his survey of rather limited value, in my opinion, because just by doing notes (including rests), durations (just from semiquaver to semibreve, including tie and dot), and accidentals, you get 18, right off the bat. Considering the ranges offered in the poll he made were 1–5, 5–10, 10–20, and 20+ (never mind the overlap if you happened to use exactly 5 or 10…), that makes it very hard for anyone who types their note input instead of hunting around slowly with the mouse to get into anything other than the top bucket. Especially since he quite explicitly said “including typical ones (like Ctrl+S, Ctrl+Z, etc.)”

Unfortunately Sibelius’s development has basically stagnated since 2012 when the new corporate owners fired the entire original development team, with only one noteworthy release of the core app (not counting side-projects like an iPad app) since then, in 2014.

I first learnt Sibelius on its pre-ribbon interface, which I think was much better (even though I loved the ribbon in MS Office). That certainly made the transfer to more modern versions easier. Still, although Sibelius has a number of specific hangups in its interface that make fairly common activities awkward and unintuitive, I really do think it has the best basic flow. When you’re just in the zone inputting notes, it’s so easy to use in a way MuseScore isn’t.

I actually take some issue with Tantacrul’s design process, because it feels like he fundamentally doesn’t understand how intermediate users like myself use the app. At one point he sent out a survey asking “how many keyboard shortcuts do you use?” in Sibelius/MuseScore etc. The problem was that he didn’t define what a keyboard shortcuts is, and when people asked for his definition, he just snarkily responded that it would be obvious. But it’s not. In Sibelius, you use your left hand on letters A–G to enter the note pitch, and your right hand on the notepad to enter rhythm values and common articulations. Slur lines and some other things can be entered during this process as well (slurs with the letter S).

Does this count as keyboard shortcuts? To me, everything I described above except maybe the slurs is actually the musical equivalent of typing text into a word processor…or a browser text box, like I’m doing right now. Does it become a “keyboard shortcut” just because it can also be done by clicking a rhythm value in a toolbar, and then clicking a location in the staff to choose pitch? I have no idea if Tantacrul thinks so, because he chose snark rather than clarifying.

Incidentally, his MuseScore design replicates this flow, but without the visual reference of the keypad toolbar that lets you learn and easily see what number to press, without requiring sheer memorisation. It’s been a while since I last tried it, but I vaguely recall having other issues with the flow being hard to work out with a keyboard. Great if you’re just slowly mousing around everywhere, but not for the intermediate user trying to get in the zone.

Which is such a shame, because he did such a fantastic job of the other stuff. The user onboarding, score setup, page layout management, etc. The attention to detail even with small things like music fonts and symbol design is impeccable.

That whole series is absolutely brilliant, but it’s hard to go past the Sibelius one if I’m gonna go back to one. And I say that as a long-time Sibelius user who can comfortably work much faster in it than in any of the alternatives.

The open source music notation software MuseScore used to be really, really bad. A musician and UX designer gave it a scathing review in a humorous YouTube video. And then the company behind MuseScore hired that YouTuber and spent a lot of effort doing a major redesign, and now it’s actually quite good.

All it takes is for the people in charge of the project to put aside their hubris and trust that sometimes, programmers aren’t the best designers, and to get people who are trained in designing and evaluating user interfaces to do the job. And to perform adequate user testing.

This is ridiculous. There’s no way a client calls a dolly a “pan”.

That’s obviously zooming.

It’s a subsystem of Windows

If I say “the life support system for the USS Enterprise”, nobody thinks that that’s a system running on the life support that gives you the USS Enterprise. It’s a system running on the USS Enterprise that gives you life support. Windows Subsystem for Linux sounds like it’s a system running on Linux that gives you access to Windows.

Wahoo absolutely does this.

This comment perplexes me. A direct link to the image? Why not either embed that link so the image appears here on Lemmy without clicking a link, or link to the comic page which has both the comic and the title text?

And I hope youhave learned to sanitize your inputs not fucking use generative AI for grading

Ftfy

IMO a “simple browser” of this sort should display literally only the content in the HTML file itself. It shouldn’t even view CSS stored in a separate local CSS file, let alone reach out to the web to download more content.

That’s not necessarily true. Circa 2016–17 I frequented a website that worked in Chrome but not Firefox. This was due to Firefox at the time not implementing web standards that Chrome did. Firefox only got around to it in 2019. So naturally, the developer of the site was telling people to use Chrome.

I don’t think there’s anything “goofy ass” about that. Quaker Oats Company was explicitly named (and used a logo) to cause people to make that mistake.

Change it to /watch?v= to have the normal standard YouTube URL. Since comments have no such detection, feel free to use the short URL there.

Anyone got a non-Xitter mirror of the ad?

I just find the two clearly very different interpretations of this prompt interesting, based on the poor grammar in hlwnit was phrased.

When did you think someone was lying and was [but you were] embarrassingly proven wrong?

Is how I first interpreted it. But I can also see how others arrived at

When did you think someone was lying and was [they were] embarrassingly proven wrong to be lying?

Both interpretations lead to interesting answers though.

Note that there’s a severe vulnerability that was only patched very recently in 7zip. I’ve seen recommendations to fully uninstall it and then reinstall the latest version.

Al the Age of Empires games, apart from AoE1 DE, are excellent.

In classic Microsoft style, “Xbox” doesn’t necessarily mean the console. It’s also the name of their gaming service and the store you can use to buy games on Windows.

I don’t even care about the privacy aspect per se. Phone number as user ID is a crappy UX that fundamentally does not work when international travel, multiple devices, or needing to get a number changed. It also doesn’t work for shared accounts or people who might want multiple identities.

Some of these relate to privacy, secondarily, but my primary concern is the UX.