I have a small bad feeling about this features since ages, so I hoped I will get a brilliant idea while writing this. That wasnt the case, but well, …
But, would it maybe help to:
Enable the “strong” pattern editor focus every time on startup? When enabling this by accident, people might get really nuts and don’t know where to turn it off again. They might not know that such a thing exists.
If you want the new focus thing, its not hard to enable it via the F8 shortcut every time you launch Renoise. You know what you are doing then…
Somehow visualize the local and global shortcuts different in the ToolTips and context menus? I have no idea how an obvious icon could look like. There is not much space available for that. Anyone else?
After having used Renoise 1.8 now for a few months, how do you others think about this feature? Was it worth the trouble or is it more confusing than helpful?
I always use the strong pattern focus and the “Control (+ Shift) Tab” shortcuts. The “fluent” mouse focus mode just gets on my nerves. The pattern editor still seems to be the center of the universe.
When it’s a local shortcut, write (when X has focus) in italics behind the shortcut would be my idea, plus adding a toggle for “beginner mode” to the preferences, and when that is off (which explains what changes then), just display local shortcuts in bold.
Same here… but now that the feature exists, by all means keep it. Who knows when it will become really useful.
Regarding confused newbies, I think having a rock solid documention/tutorial is always better than accomodating the GUI to the lowest common denominator (which doesn’t mean you should HAVE to read the docs from back to back before you can use the program, but that’s what tooltips and tutorials are for).
I guess most of you know the game Civilization. It had a thing called Civipedia, and besides a big list of buildings, advancements and unit types also had a list of “other small things”, general concepts of the game. In regards to Renoise, one of those general things would be Focus. (which should also be mentioned on this page btw)
It would not be impossible to explain* all of such things on one page (* not super-detailed (that is, not with too many screenshots and/or usage examples - do that on a subpage)). No offense, but this is just a joke:
Rename that to “tutorial songs” and make create a proper Quickstart page would be my suggestion, or one called “Things for beginners to look out for” or whatever.
I didn’t lock the focus. I’ve somehow forced myself to get used to the whole focus stuff, and I’m quite accustomed with it, though some more focus enhancements (you know which ones from the alpha stage discussion) could improve the experience very much.
would be interesting to know what new users (the ones who never used a tracker before) think about this
