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Feature Review for Thorn

This is intended to be complementary to the Fake Bug Tracker.

NOTICE DISREGARD ALL OF THIS FOR THE TIME BEING. I have been thinking about what I started here, and before this gets too far out of hand, I'm going to go through here and refactor it, and all the instructions I wrote 10 minutes ago are null and void now.

We'll do one page per major editor (what was H2 in the original) and we won't go in reverse order. I'm going to flip all of that crap around before I go any further.

What we're going to wind up with is a systematic and formatted list of all menu functions with review comments inline. It's no far stretch to take that work, polish it up a little here and there, and turn the whole shebang into the beginning of a new manual from scratch, that won't leave anything out. We can pull bits from the old manual into the new structure, and add copy to fill in all the holes (the original manual had a ton of comments about things that never ultimately got documented) and eventually wind up with a good piece of documentation out of all of this. Of course I don't expect that to get done before February, but it's pointless to type all this crap without an eye toward getting the biggest long-term return.

Stay tuned…

This was a good idea Chris had, but I'm starting over from the top and being more systematic and methodical. Because I have a tendency to use the menu options on the left more than those on the right of any particular context, the methodology is to go from right to left, bottom to top. When menu items appear in related pairs or groups, eg. “move to staff above” and “move to staff below” it is OK to glob them all together in one section unless particular of them have problems. If all of this seems confusing, a look below should make it apparent enough.

The TOC in this document doesn't like having major editors as H1 headings, so I had to adjust everything to make the TOC sensible.

===== Major Editor (eg. Notation, Main Window) =====
==== Top Level Menu ====
=== Menu Item ===
== Menu Sub-Item ==
**Menu Sub-Sub-Item** (not enough levels of headings to make that work out)

While going through the interface, bugs are noted as BUG inline in the comments. These should be collected and copied to the bug tracker page. It is acceptable to wait and copy them straight to the “bugs now fixed” section at the bottom if they are trivial bugs to hammer out.

As one thing leads to another, major sub-features like the guitar chord editor, the control rulers, and so forth will get their own H2 level sections with links from the relevant sections in the menu item by item documentation.

This is going to be a huge pain in the ass to finish and do as well as what I've restarted here in the Notation section below. Seems like maybe Julie, Chris and Ilan are all anal retentive enough to help out with this and be thorough and methodical enough to make it worthwhile. Any takers? We could divide up and work on different sections in the same fashion as what I've begun here. Then somebody could go back through and pull out all the BUG notices.

Notation Editor

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

Help

About Qt

About Rosegarden

Guidelines

Tutorial

Manual

Tools

Step Recording

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.)

Grace Insert Mode

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).

Triplet Insert Mode

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.

Chord Insert Mode

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.

Insert Rest

Insert Note

Do Re Mi

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.

Durations

1 2 3 Y .

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.

Guitar Chord

Text

BUG No Help link

I reviewed the behavior not long back and fixed the text background, resizing problem,and so on. I have not done a fresh review, but at a glance it seems to be in the state I left it in, and well-behaved enough for release.

Symbols

Clefs

Accidentals

Erase

Draw Notes and Rests

I keep feeling like there's something still vaguely quirky about all of this, but I can't pin anything down at the moment.

Select and Edit

Works generally with the caveat that selections between the edit view and any associated ruler are buggy. See...

Move

Transport Controls

I won't go through these one by one. They seem to be working.

Next / Previous Segment

Not working, or has no meaning in the current testing context. REVIEW

Next Staff Up / Down

The Track Header blue outline moves responsively as I would expect.

BUG The playback/insert cursor stays anchored to its original spot BUG I had a whole staff selected. When I moved up and down from there, the selection remained

Entering with do-re-mi keys follows the blue track header outline. After entering the first note in this fashion, the two bugs above correct themselves.

Clear Loop

BUG This should use action states. If there is no loop to clear, this should not be enabled.

If a loop is set manually, this does work.

Set Loop to Selection

Obeys “have selection” action state.

BUG Does not function! (Missing slot?) NOTE I am testing in a multi-staff view

Cursor Back / Forward and Select

BUG Does not function! (Missing slot?)

Dubious icons. I'm not sure about these, but I think I like them better than I did the last time I looked at them, so maybe we should leave well enough alone there. (Or remove this feature if it won't be made to work again.)

Adjust

Visibility

Make Invisible / Visible

Works.

BUG the recolor code is making a mess of the note glyphs. Invisible notes get fat as all their whispy peripheral pixels of very light opacity all seem to take on the same alpha level. This looks shitty.

Fine Timing

Jog Left / Jog Right

Fine Positioning

BUG Something is going wrong with symbols and the “have selection” action state. If I select only a segno or coda, the “have selection” does not go active, and I can't reach anything on the Adjust menu. This applies to lyrics and slurs too. Basically everything I have tried to fine position that should be capable of moving in any arbitrary direction refuses enable the Adjust menu. SERIOUS BUG

BUG The menu items work, but in practice you usually hold shift while clicking and dragging something to fine position it. This is broken. SERIOUS BUG

Velocity

Increase / Decrease Velocity

  • *CANNOT BE TESTED / NO VISUAL FEEDBACK In a multi-staff view, the velocity ruler is completely blank, and the raw note ruler is just showing a bunch of black nothing Observation For the sake of sanity, logic, and reason, it may be a good idea to disable all property and control rulers in multi-staff/multi-segment views. I have not looked at Classic during this test, but I remember looking at Classic while considering this point fairly recently, and I recall that Classic made a complete mess of this. It's a mind bending problem trying to decide how it should behave, and I think disabling it is a fair option to consider. Want to use the rulers? Do it segment by segment. Worth discussing! Set Event Velocities This dialog looks frigged up. Either something is missing or its layout is much taller than it should be. ===== Guitar Chord Selector ===== ==== Choosing and Inserting Chords ==== 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. ==== Editing Chords ==== 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.

Deleting Chords

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.

Tail

(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

Acceptable

  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)

Functional but ugly or problematic

  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)

Not properly tested but OK to look at

  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)

Not properly tested but ugly or problematic

  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)

Broken

  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)

Absent

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

Untested

  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!
 
 
dev/qt4_feature_review.1258337473.txt.gz · Last modified: 2022/05/06 16:07 (external edit)
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