New Palette Design

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The new palette design in version 2.0 is probably the single most significant improvement in the usability and user interface of Notation Musician and Notation Composer.

In version 1.1, Musician and Composer let you see only one level of a three-level hierarchy of palettes at any given time. You had to spend too much effort navigating up and down the three-level hierarchy of palettes; and you didn't have a good bird's eye view of your navigation in the palette hierarcy.

That problem is now fixes, so that you can see all three levels of the palette hierarchy at once. The first level of the hierarchy is displayed as a list of text tabs: Notes and Rest | Text | Staff Symbols | etc.

Depending on which of these tabs you choose, a different second-level palette will be displayed. For example, if you choose Staff Symbols, you'll see different buttons for brackets/braces, clefs, key signatures, meters, and barlines.

Then, depending which choice you make in the second level palette, a different third level palette will be displayed. For example, if you choose Clef in the second level, you see choices for Treble, Bass, Alto, etc. in the third palette.

As in version 1.1, you can still use Shift+Letter commands to go to a palette, such as Shift+K to go to the Key Signature palette.

Since the Shift+Letter commands are easy to remember and few, you might want to hide the first two levels of the palettes by using the Show Upper Level Palettes command in the View menu. This will free up some of the space in the window.

You can drag the palettes to any side of the window, or float them in the middle of the window. You can also "rip" the third level palette away from the first two levels.

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