Feature Review for Thorn

This is intended to be complementary to the Fake Bug Tracker – it's an attempt to go through every feature in the program that has its own user interface space, such as a dialog or ruler, and decide how many of them are acceptable in layout and basic function and how many could do with some more work on the interfaces. Real behavioural problems should go in the tracker, not here.

Feature review by menu, bottom to top, right to left. If no comments appear for a heading, everything is working fine.

It took a bit of jiggling to get this to work, but I think it's OK now that I've saved a working MIDI input setup in my default studio. In spite of getting rid of the stupid “current? Y/N” problem (the answer is YES DAMMIT now) we still don't have working MIDI recording out of the box on my home setup, because there's only one input device, and it's not connected to anything at all out of the box.

This is one thing where I might consider the opposite approach from the one I've been going on about on the playback side. There's not much harm I can think of creating devices for every available RECORD device, and hooking them up out of the box. (Whereas doing this on the PLAYBACK side is completely EVIL.)

Seems to be working a well as always. There are still problems with ledger lines and grace notes. The note heads are scaled down, and so are the lines, so if you have a grace with ledger lines adjacent to a full sized note with ledger lines, they don't sync up at all. It might be worth taking a quick look at fixing this one before February, because it has irritated me for a long time, and it might not actually be that difficult to solve. I'll try to look into this shortly. But anyway, definitely working well enough to release with as far as my experiments have shown (and a vast, VAST improvement over the old grace note tool that was utterly worthless).

Even works in combination with grace mode. Good stuff. There are assorted well-documented age-old problems with triplet spanners and whatnot, but none of that impacts release.

Observation: I tried do-re-mi keys and toggling H to enter chords followed by single notes followed by chords, and it all worked well.

I did not test every combination, but I've been through this pretty heavily while working out the problem with C and B and so on in the Romance language translations. That all works now, and I think it's all in good shape, but I must admit I did not test this thoroughly.

Observation: We really need to make up some keyboard maps à la Open Octave Midi and publish them somewhere. Even link to them from inside the GUI by way of web links or something. Doesn't necessarily have to be done to release, but it would be very nice of us.

This all seems to be working, but I did not test methodically this time around, and breakage may have crept in somehow since we were hammering on all of this a few months ago. Probably hasn't, but I'm admitting the lack of testing for the record.

see…

Choosing chords and inserting them into notation works generally.

BUG Something is wrong with the highlight colors. The highlighted fretboard has a different background from all the other highlights. May be a style problem.

Seems to work and look rather better than it used to.

BUG From fret 5 onward, the little blue hover cursor does not show up, and it isn't apparent you can click to make a dot appear.

Not very apparent which ones can be deleted and which ones can't, but the “Delete” button does cycle enabled states appropriately, and this does seem to work generally. General improvement might be indicated long after more pressing matters are dealt with.

(Moved from up above, work into a more methodical review where suitable.)

I've started with most of the things accessible from the main window – do feel free to add more (and fix these).

2009/10/23

1. Splash screen
2. Transport window
3. Main window layout and toolbars
4. Main window menus
5. Segment canvas
6. Main window rulers
7. Segment parameter box
8. Track parameter box
9. Insert Range dialog
10. Main window status bar
11. Device manager (though, like all dialogs, Help doesn't usefully work)
12. Warning message feature (could just use a title on each warning… but what?)
13. Preferences (though it doesn't come up on right page when invoked from an editor window) (and it doesn't because this fixed a nasty crash, and an alternative didn't really suggest itself)
14. Document properties
15. Relabel segment dialog (fixed)

1. Add Time Signature (too much space between numerator and denominator; Help button doesn't work)
2. Marker editor (button bar a bit crap; nothing in Help menu; time display radio buttons don't radio)
3. Tempo & Timesig Editor (nothing in Help menu; Show/Hide Status Bar menu label needs to get updated; first col in table needs to be wider to fit time values; time display radio buttons don't radio properly)
4. Composition start/end dialog (not too bad, just a bit weird layout)
5. Synth plugin manager dialog (layout strange, needs stretch adjustments; Help button produces placeholder only. Does seem to work though)
6. Metronome manager (should probably have only OK button, not OK, Apply and Close – Apply doesn't seem to work properly until OK is used anyway?; Help button doesn't work)
7. Instrument parameter box (MIDI) (instrument name & connection not updated properly in many situations, including first thing on new document load)

1. Audio file manager
2. MIDI mixer
3. Print dialog (you talking about the LilyPond export options thing? I've tested this extensively, and it's fine)

1. Transpose by Interval: a bit too much blank space though not too bad
2. Playlist
3. Quantize dialog (layout crap; Advanced toggle doesn't work; Help button doesn't work)
4. Add Tempo Change
5. Audio mixer (some fonts too big for buttons, other fonts too small to see; submaster labels cover faders; channel headers offset left of faders; Master fader is squished compared to others; nothing in Help menu)
6. Remap instruments (unbalanced space; should have only OK/Cancel not Apply [that's a bug in Classic])
7. Instrument parameter box (Synth) (plugin buttons don't work; I don't think I believe the level meter) (wow, that's odd, they used to work, but they don't now)

1. Add Tracks dialog (crashes on OK) (can't confirm, I tried adding at the top, bottom, above, below and wound up with 2228 tracks at the end, and no crashes) (tracks > 1000 even at the default 9 pt. font don't show up well, which fact I'm perfectly willing to ignore)

1. Hot Linux groupie chicks begging me to jeopardize my marriage by partying with them

1. Instrument parameter box (Audio)
2. Triggered segment manager (was OK the last time I checked it out)
3. MIDI filters dialog (I fixed this, but don't know for sure if it's working or only appears to be working)
4. Almost everything in editors other than the main window!