Usability and Documentation (was Re: [Bluemusic-users] Tooltips)

[Steven Yi <ste...@gm...>]

Oh, I see what you are saying now I think.  Did you want to get rid of
the ftable tab altogether and only support ftgen statements?

Well, as a design principle for blue, I'm concerned with not forcing
anything on a user in terms of Csound style or compositional style.=20
IMO, It's what really separates blue from any other Csound program,
the fact that it is made to be very generic.  By doing that, however,
it's made blue much more tricky to develop, but much more useful for a
wider range of purposes.  I do this because I don't want to limit
myself either!

I understand the concern regarding numbered fstatements, but I
wouldn't want to remove numbered ftables (though, I guess we could
auto migrate them over to the global sco area and remove the tab).=20
Also, for Csound users who come to blue with experience, I believe
they would be used to having all their ftables numbered and may in
fact migrate projects over using numbered ftables.  Most people
probably also learn csound (myself included) by using numbered ftables
as that was for a long time the only way to do it.

On the other hand, for non-blue users, having to deal with numbered
ftables has always been a problem and an incredible hinderance to
instrument reusability.  If you compare the blue experience to the
non-blue experience when using numbered ftables in both, then the
experience is exactly the same with all the same caveats.

Now, I think that since the method of using ftgen statements embedded
with the instrument has proven to be really useful that I would
definitely recommend it as a best practice.  There's a precaution to
that as well though as a lot of older csound practice uses numbered
ftables to do indexing, i.e. these 10 ftables numbered 100-109 hold
information and the instrument chooses an ftable to use by a pfield +
100 (say, for the case of designing an instrument where p6 is a number
0 - 9 to correspond to different amplitude envelopes stored in
ftables). I would discourage that style of coding as Csound today has
other means to do this without relying on a hardcoded ftable num.

So... this leads to some questions and thoughts. =20

-Should I remove the ftable tab and guide users who use numbered
ftables to do so using the global sco tab? That way people can develop
as they see fit, but the use of numbered ftables is not as present in
the UI.

-I will definitely start working on a Tutorial on this subject of
designing encapsulated instruments.  As it is now, the blue manual
seems that it should perhaps start to be split up a bit more:

-User Guide (how to use the program, tutorials, best practices, FAQ,
Glossary, etc.)
-User Reference (info on all the plugins)
-Developers Guide with API docs for Plugins

-What areas of blue do people have questions about?  The feature for
encapsulated instruments has been around for a while now and I've
obviously known about it, as well as the default.blue feature.  I
think it's a problem if those features aren't easily discovered and
known about and should be better documented.  Is there anything else
you all think are features that you use but are perhaps not well
known?

-Regarding the last section, should we have a blue tips page show on
startup?  (With possibility to disable as well as reenable in program
options).  This seems like something pretty common in programs.

BTW, Michael, I appreciate your comments very very much.  I hope
nothing I've said has come across as harsh but simply curious. =3D)  So,
a big thanks for your comments!!!

steven


On 4/20/05, Michael Bechard <got...@ya...> wrote:
>=20
> --- Steven Yi <ste...@gm...> wrote:
>=20
> > Hi Michael,
> >
> > I'm a little confused as to what you are concerned
> > about.  Instruments
> > with ftgen statements are completely encapsulated...
>=20
> Yeah, ftgen statements are good. It's not a huge
> concern, really, and I appologize if I came off
> sounding like I thought it was. But basically, the
> scenario goes like this:
>=20
> I make an instrument that oscilates on table 2. No
> ftgen statement in the instrument, but there is an
> f-statement for table 2 that's a sine wave. It sounds
> good and I add it to the global instruments. However,
> in a new project, I've got an f-statement for table 2
> that is a square wave. When I import that instrument
> into my new project, it sounds totally different, and
> now I have to find out why.
>=20
> So there's the "one way of using the app" that might
> prove confusing for someone not using ftgen
> statements. And for someone not very familiar with
> csound, it might be a very plausible scenario.
>=20
> > As for instruments being global, I don't understand
> > what you are
> > talking about. Could you explain?
> >
>=20
> Global instruments being the ones in the global
> instrument library that you can copy into local
> projects.
>=20
> > As for the feature, I've found it incredibly useful
> > as I've
> > increasingly found myself using my library of
> > instruments to quicly
> > add a few in to new projects and work away.  I can't
> > see any drawbacks
> > and did put quite a bit of thought into how to
> > implement it, but I'd
> > be happy to hear any drawbacks you can think of.
> >
>=20
> I actually find it very useful myself and have been
> wanting this feature for a long time. It's very
> helpful; thanks for putting it in. I haven't run into
> the "problems" I've posted here, because I use the
> same stable of f-statements from project to project,
> so all my instruments have the same expectations when
> it comes to table numbers. I guess I always try to
> approach an application I'm developing from the
> standpoint of a newbie, so that's why I brought up
> this point. Like I said though, it's probably not a
> big deal.
>=20
> Michael Bechard
>=20
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