Hello Herbert and M.G.,

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I do not like at all the floating tool pallets in Photoshop 7. They always are in the way and need to be shifted frequently.<!-/quote-!><hr size=0></blockquote>I personally have the same preference against floating palettes for the same reason. But many people do like floating palettes, so that they can place the tools close to where they are working. The general rule in user interface design for such cases is: If there are lots of people that like it one way, and lots of other people that like it another way, then offer it both ways. In the new user interface design, palettes can be temporarily "torn off" the side of a window to float, and then later be redocked against the side of a window. Between sessions, MidiNotate will remember whether the palette is docked or floating. This has already been implemented in the upcoming version of MidiNotate.

Cheers
-- Mark

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[MidiNotate] would display one group of staffs only with a horizontal scroll bar, that permits scrolling through the whole score and a vertical scroll bar to move through the set of staffs, similar to what is done in midipiano roll editors.<!-/quote-!><hr size=0></blockquote>This would be a very good option. It has been on the wish-list for MidiNotate for a long time. (Actually, I had this partly working around 10 years ago.)

An alternative approach I'm considering is to support scrolling through the score one measure at a time even when multiple systems (sets of staves, lines of music) are displayed. If you scroll forward a measure, one measure bumps off the top left corner of the window, and one measure newly appears at the bottom right corner of the window. It's not actually that simple, because if the measure that is bumped off is much wider than the newly displayed measure, then two new measures might be displayed. Or, if the measure that is bumped off is much narrower than the newly display measure, then it might be necessary to bump off two measures to make room for the new measure.

Let's call your proposed arrangement the "horizontal scroll view". It has advantages you've described. But it also has disadvantages. One, consider where the music uses just one or two staves. A lot of vertical space is left unused, that could be used by more sets of staves (systems, lines of music). Two, if you really want the vertical positions of the staves to remain fixed as you scroll through the score, then MidiNotate would have to allocate the most amount of vertical space used by each staff throughout the entire song. One of MidiNotate's strenghts is how compact the notation is (without any effort on the user's part). That advantage would be lost with a horizontal scroll view that wants to keep each staff at a constant vertical position in the window.

In spite of these disadvantages, I agree that it would still be a good idea to include a horizontal scroll view as an option in MidiNotate.

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One of the current concerns I have with Composer is that during editing, the point of focus jumps around the screen or even off screen.<!-/quote-!><hr size=0></blockquote>This is a concern of mine also. I'll make it a higher priority to eliminate the remaining cases of focus jumps that we run into.