Apple Logic Pro /LogicExpress Discussion

GAMoore wrote:

> No, this is opposite of what I have heard for years on the LUG. I've 
> heard
> plenty of the emagic elite making comments to the affect "If you 
> complain about
> Logic being too complicated, obtuse, or difficult to use then you are
> forgetting this is a 'pro' application" - as if 'pro' is an excuse to 
> not make it
> simple and straight forward.
> ...
>
> It would be like in the 1800's, if you say "Hey, I think the most 
> expensive
> houses should have indoor plumbing and bathrooms" and these guys say 
> "well, its
> not really any trouble to light a candle and walk a hundred paces in 
> the
> middle of the night to the outhouse. Why should the house builder go 
> to all that
> trouble just for the occasional convenience of someone?".

Love that image!

When at NAMM I stopped in at Melodyne/Access.  I saw the rep demo-ing a 
global quantization and tuning feature with a big, beautiful, 
easy-to-use, middle-aged-eye-friendly dialogue box that I'd never seen 
before in the program.  At first I thought he was running a beta of a 
new release, but it turns out that it is from their entry-level 
"Melody-lite" version.

To accomplish the same thing in the pro version you have to select a 
tiny tool from a pulldown menu of almost indistinguishable other tiny 
tools, put it place, and then go to an obscure pulldown menu in another 
nano-scaled box. I asked the rep, "This is what I'd get if I were an 
amateur, but because I'm a pro I get to do it the unnecessarily 
complicated and difficult way?"

He smiled, nodded, and said, simply, "Ya."

Best Wishes,
Michael A. Levine
www.MichaelLevineMusic.com

On Mon, 24 Jan 2005, Michael Levine wrote:

> When at NAMM I stopped in at Melodyne/Access.\ufffd I saw the rep demo-ing a
> global quantization and tuning feature with a big, beautiful,
> easy-to-use, middle-aged-eye-friendly dialogue box that I'd never seen

Someone explain this to me.  I'm a computer guy, and a musician.  So
naturally I'm nearsighted...well, that probably doesn't follow, but c'mon,
most pros in both computing and music need some sort of eyewear.

WHY must every maker of software make the fonts teeny and hard to read, or 
at the very least not at all scalable?  I opened Sculpture for the first 
time and couldn't read half the controls...light grey on a metallic grey 
background running at high-res is not friendly to my poor optics and ended 
up giving me a headache.  Yes, I know space is at a premium, but please, 
they can do better than that.  It's unecessary graphic design in the name 
of looking cooooooool.  I'm not even *that* nearsighted, just enough to be 
unable to drive legally without corrective lenses.  And yet, I can barely 
read some of these interfaces.  What gives?

I write software for banks and insurance companies and their ilk and if I 
ever put out a product that wasn't readable by all their customers, they'd 
fire me on the spot.

You'd think Apple, with their long history of ergonomics (Tog is a hero of 
mine) would've gotten that straight, but instead they systematically 
darkening and font-reducing all their apps.

Meanwhile, I'm going blind.

_______________________________________________________
Eric Oehler / wonko@... / www.nulldevice.com
Synthetic music for synthetic people.