teasting beast 0.6.1 - some more comments

[henning_sprang gmx de]

Hy,
finally i found my notes, and i am happy to being able to read my own handscript :) -  very small and quick things i just noted while playing around a bit:

- the "save" button works exactly the same as the "save as" button. 
  Commonly, most other programs just ask for a name when hitting "save" 
  when it's the first time a file get's saved, after that save simply    overwrites the same file. "Intelligent" Programs that want to prevent    users from overiting their work, usually write "*.bak" or similar files when hitting save.

- when in song view, each time i click on a part in a track, a new piano roll opens, no matter how many of them are already open for exactly the same part - wo i when playing around an doing things my desktop gets flooded with zillions of piano rolls for the same part.

- in piano roll: i would expect tha the most common action, namely moving notes around, would be reachable with the most common mouse-click method - the simply left click. In beast, moving is somehow "hidden" on the middle clickm, which took a long time for me to find out, while changing the lenght of a note i on the left click. At least switching those two would be great, but maybe there is an idea missing how
changing note duration could placed even better than on the middle click?!

- custom synthesizer view ( is "view" the right name? or is it just called "tab" or both?): somthing similar to the last topic: when doing left click on connections, i get an information window about that link.
When clicking right i get a menu with some (a small) amount of option of what i can do with it. I feel this should be switched, too, as left click is the most common action, and the most common thing i want when clicking left on a connection is not just getting information about it, but "doing" something with it - maybe just getting it marked as "selected" which is not possible now, is another thing, me and supposedly other people epect from a left click. After the thing is selected, maybe there could be the possibilty to shot keyboard-shortcuts on it, like "CTRL-X" for deletion, or "CTRL-I" or something for information - that sounds best, i think, this combined with a right-click that leads to a context menu as it is now seems the best solution to me.

- Another one for custom synthesizers and mouse actions: When worling with different kinds of graphical editors for different things, most common action when doing left click is selection, after that i can fire keyboard shotcuts like deletion and copy on the object, plus when holding down the left key, in most applications (say, file managers, which is for sure one of the most commonly used GUI Tool, and many many other ones) enable me to move the object around on the workspace. Again, beast is different, which makes it less usable - it took me hours (really!) until i found, that moving an object is not impossible, but ony hidden on the middle key. When working graphically, i need to rearrange things pretty often, as the more things i add while developing my ting (say here sounds and synths), the more i need to place them to have a better overview of the full work. 

- Selecting a group of objects with rectangular selection b yleft click and drag on the working pane, and then being able to move multiple objects around at the same time, or copy the selected one(s) by having a "copy" option in a right-click context menu available to put copies of them into the same or any other custom synth is a fine thing I'd expect being possible to do, as well as fire keyboard shortcuts on them. Quick access to an object's properties, which is now activaed by left click would be placed well enough on the middle button. 

- when working with custom synths, i quickly get the need of having a copy of a complete custom synth under the same name, for example to create a new one out of the base of this one.

I think those things are not big and most of them (like switching mouse functions from right to left button) are not much work to do, but can increase usability a very lot, making beast usage a much bigger enjoyment, drawing more users to it...



Henning