Improvements for toolbar customization

• Feb 15, 2021 - 00:56

Hello. So I have been using Muscore for over a year and recently I tried to customize the user interface (UI). I start by making a new workspace. Conveniently, there is a + next to the workspace list so I click that and make a new composition. Now, it is easy to customize the left panel containing the notes and articulations, etc. But it was not obvious to me how to customize the top panels, containing the note input and play buttons. So this is my first feedback:

  1. Add a button (commonly a gear or wrench) on the top panel to have a quick shortcut to editing them.

Now, I can still customize them by going to view>toolbars>customize toolbars. So I open that. Now the 'edit toolbar' box opens, and I see "Actions" and "Available Actions." This is very confusing, and I guessed that "Available Actions" on the right referred to what is available on the toolbars, and "Actions" on the left referred to actions that I could add to the toolbars. Actually, it is the other way around, so my second piece of advise to clear up the confusion between what these two panels do is:

  1. Rename the "Action" panel to "Available Actions" or "What you see" or something else to convey that what appears here is what appears on the toolbar. Rename "Available Actions" to "Remaining Actions" or "What you can add" or something else to convey that what appears there are the remaining actions you can add to the toolbar.

So after the confusion, I notice that when I change workspaces, Muscore forgets the toolbar customization I set. I found out that this was because I did not set the program to save "Toolbars" in the dialog when I created the workspace, so I had to edit it by going to view>workspaces>edit. I did this, but I will add a third piece of advise:

  1. The "Edit Toolbar" box should check the workspace to see if it will save toolbar settings. If not, it should print a message at the bottom that the toolbar settings will not be saved unless the user goes to view>workspaces>edit and tick on the box next to "Toolbars" (or offer them a shortcut to tick it on).

Finally, on the "File Operations" toolbar, I see a "save," a "save online," and a "print" option but no "export" option, so:

  1. In the "File Operations" toolbar, add an export button.

Comments

The majority of these, if not all, are fixed in the nightly Musescore 4 builds. They aren't really usable yet, but massive toolbar improvements are on the way

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