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.

Are you illiterate?

It is possible to be pro-Palestinian and anti-Hamas at the same time.

Hamas might be doing bad things, but there is no need to condemn Hamas in order to also criticise Israel. In fact, the exact opposite is true. Hamas exists and has the power it does because of Israel.

I dunno how many people have seen season 2 of Star Wars: Andor, but there’s a part in that where the Empire funds rebels on a planet specifically because they want them to do terrorism so they have an excuse to come in and genocide the people. They want to manufacture consent for genocide, and while we don’t see a lot of the broader public’s reaction, it certainly seems to have worked.

That whole thing is literally taken directly from real-world conflicts, including this one. Netanyahu himself directly funded Hamas because he knew they were more extreme than other Palestinian organisations, and by doing that, he helped create the conditions where he can continue to escalate the genocide while the world sits by watching. Every person killed or otherwise harmed by Hamas is Israel’s fault. And that’s before you get into all the murders of children, doctors, and journalists done directly by Israelis.

In Star Wars, we side with the rebels even though sometimes they do terroristic things that cause innocent deaths. Why? Because they’re rebelling against genocide. Once the genociders are wiped out entirely, we can talk about how a good government for the people should be run.

I don’t “support” Hamas, but neither do I condemn them. I recognise them as the direct result of Israel’s genocide. Effectively, another agent of the Israeli government. The only way to defang Hamas’s actions is for Israel to pull back, unilaterally, to the 1948 borders and to provide massive aid in reparation to the civilians who they have harmed through the IDF, through West Bank settlers, and through Hamas. Terrorists thrive in injustice, and anything that doesn’t fully call for Israel doing everything to cease the injustice is pissing in the wind.

Where do you get torrents these days? I’ve not been doing much game piracy for nearly a decade, and TPB seems to be a shell of what it once was.

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.

They could, and probably did. The issue here is with the UK admins’ failure to act in a timely manner on the basis of some nonsensical reasoning, and their terrible communication.

I actually wouldn’t mind upgrading to Windows 11, but I ran Microsoft’s compatibility tool and it told me I couldn’t. I only built my computer in late 2018, and have upgraded storage space since then. But it’s nowhere near old enough to need replacing the motherboard or processor.

Microsoft is just requiring an arbitrary hardware specification as an olive branch to their hardware manufacturer partners.

I’m not 100% sure but I think PNG might be light orange too?

Read as in, with their eyes? Or how to ingest it into some other app/script? Cos I’m vaguely aware that awk can be used in some way for this, but wouldn’t have a clue how.

Good post.

Wrong community.

they’re not blocking access

Wait what? Then wtf is the point of that message? “Your operating system is not supported”, except that it totally fucking is.

members of the divisions by zero

Wait, dbzer0 is “division by zero”‽ I always thought it was database 0…

but over the post of one guy is crazy

Not the post of one guy. The response of the admins to that post. Refusing to remove the transphobia (because of, if we take them at their word, a misinterpretation of an unjust court ruling). Refusing to communicate with the blahaj admins.

Yeah I also expect MS will see W11’s poor uptake (iirc, W10 actually increased market share over the last 12 months) and will see it as necessary to extend. Probably more to reduce the risk of bad press from a serious security incident, rather than because they’re afraid people will switch to Linux.

I’m more surprised at PewDiePie, tbh. Jason runs a Mastodon instance, with the account [email protected] (I’m hoping that by leaving out the @ sign before the local username, that won’t send him an unwanted notification), so the fact that he’s also a Linux user is less surprising. I don’t watch PDP, but I gather he has a very large and impressionable audience, so him promoting Linux should be good!