Warning. I this message, "Why don't we" does not mean "do it, you slave". It means just asking "do you think it's a worthwhile idea?"
The thread about usability and promoting has forked too much and my thoughts are somewhat related to both. I am crossposting to hear users feedback also, sorry for that. I keep seeing newcomers double-clicking the LilyPond icon on the desktop despite of our warnings about not to do that. LaTeX is also just a typesetting engine and people do not try to work with it by first clicking on a desktop icon, do they? I don't really know what's the Windows LaTeX experience like, but I can assume the user base of LaTeX is far greater than LilyPond's, and newcomers have always an experienced user in the nearby ready to help. That's the "critical mass" effect that Finale and Sibelius already have and we don't. Despite of having a README just in front of your eyes, IMO we should expect people will always try to "open lilypond" to work in a typical program window. Why don't we just give them what they want? That is: a program you open. All programs are "opened" and it doesn't matter how hard we try, most people want to open the program. We could make the lilypond icon to launch a shell applet to open ly projects and a button to compile. Of course, a console output window and a PDF pre-viewer are necessary. I see the drag-drop ritual in the tutorial too few standard, too weird and too much lilypond-specific. That scares newcomers. But wait: this has been done. Valentin Villenave dit it once. A bundle that installed a PDF viewer and a small button panel with all the most basic operatons. I don't remember if it included a message output. But wait again: Frescobaldi already does this. It is super-easy to install on windows and it has got all the necessary items: an editor, a pre-viewer and a message output panel. Of course it has many, many more features, but even so it is lightweight (unlike the now almost defunct jEdit/lilypondtool). Why don't we do a cut-down Frescobaldi-like shell for the absolute beginner? The File->Open... menu entry must include a sub-menu with a lot of ready_to_compile fancy or real-world examples. Yes, we already promote easier environments, but in my opinion the bare minimum we offer is too weak as to be useful for all except mid-high level nerdies. I always think all you do to lower the entry threshold is never enough and ours is currently a bit too high. It's not the language, it's the experience. And never forget Windows users are potentially way more numerous than command line users. -- Francisco Vila. Badajoz (Spain) www.paconet.org , www.csmbadajoz.com _______________________________________________ lilypond-devel mailing list lilypond-devel@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel
