Love tentacrul. I re-watch that video from time to time just because it’s so good. It was also really funny watching a later video of his where he just casually dropped that he was working on musescore.
Omg yes. I actually tried using that after my Fusion360 student license expired and the amount of time it took me just to extrude a basic shape was insane.
You want to make a midplane, a reference plane midway between to parallel planes. You click the Datum Plane button, and then the two parallel planes, and you get a plane that is perpendicular to both, not parallel halftway between. I found it easier to forget how to need midplanes than to get FreeCAD to make one.
There’s some cool concepts in there, I make heavy use of the spreadsheet function, but I swear to every god in every pantheon that Autodesk is paying the FreeCAD development community to keep their UX at least this horrible to preserve their business model. I can’t explain this level of incompetence any other way without relying on rock chewing stupidity.
I love that FreeCAD exists and use it often, but I really hate how much you have to “fight” the UI. I even briefly considered learning OpenSCAD out of frustration with the ui and the toponaming problem (before realizing that switching to OpenSCAD would just shift my frustration onto Javascript fuckery).
Now that the latter is fixed, though, I have just forced myself to forget how to do things the “normal” CAD way (i.e. using patterns and flows that most other software has standardized around) and instead how to do them the FreeCAD way.
I hope at some point we get an overhaul of the UX, but in the meantime I’ll grin and bear it since I have yet to find an even remotely comparable F/OSS CAD software that works the same on both Linux and Windows.
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 conclusion I got from the video was that, while it’s very powerful software, it’s very difficult for new users to start using the program due to unintuitive placement of options. That’s how he, for a lack of better word, reviews each piece of software, from the eyes of a new user.
But on the other hand, the video is also 7 years old at this point so maybe sibbelius has fixed some of the stuff that he pointed out. I don’t really compose music so I honestly wouldn’t know.
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.
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.)”
Love tentacrul. I re-watch that video from time to time just because it’s so good. It was also really funny watching a later video of his where he just casually dropped that he was working on musescore.
I want him to do FreeCAD.
Omg yes. I actually tried using that after my Fusion360 student license expired and the amount of time it took me just to extrude a basic shape was insane.
You want to make a midplane, a reference plane midway between to parallel planes. You click the Datum Plane button, and then the two parallel planes, and you get a plane that is perpendicular to both, not parallel halftway between. I found it easier to forget how to need midplanes than to get FreeCAD to make one.
There’s some cool concepts in there, I make heavy use of the spreadsheet function, but I swear to every god in every pantheon that Autodesk is paying the FreeCAD development community to keep their UX at least this horrible to preserve their business model. I can’t explain this level of incompetence any other way without relying on rock chewing stupidity.
I love that FreeCAD exists and use it often, but I really hate how much you have to “fight” the UI. I even briefly considered learning OpenSCAD out of frustration with the ui and the toponaming problem (before realizing that switching to OpenSCAD would just shift my frustration onto Javascript fuckery).
Now that the latter is fixed, though, I have just forced myself to forget how to do things the “normal” CAD way (i.e. using patterns and flows that most other software has standardized around) and instead how to do them the FreeCAD way.
I hope at some point we get an overhaul of the UX, but in the meantime I’ll grin and bear it since I have yet to find an even remotely comparable F/OSS CAD software that works the same on both Linux and Windows.
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 conclusion I got from the video was that, while it’s very powerful software, it’s very difficult for new users to start using the program due to unintuitive placement of options. That’s how he, for a lack of better word, reviews each piece of software, from the eyes of a new user.
But on the other hand, the video is also 7 years old at this point so maybe sibbelius has fixed some of the stuff that he pointed out. I don’t really compose music so I honestly wouldn’t know.
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.
I’d say those are keyboard shortcuts.
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.)”