In reply to Magnus Johansson.

Hi Magnus.

Actually, I don't personally have anything against cursors. I think they have to be implemented in a tasteful way, but they certainly can be clear and intuitive to use. Really, the Speedy Entry tool in Finale is quite good, I think, for being a fast a simple way to enter notes. The only thing that's really annoying about it is the way the bar is visually highlighted/altered visually when using the tool. This seems totally unnecessary to me; why not just have the cursor appear in the normal bar? Very strange.

But I definitely find that I'm consciously "translating" all the time when trying to use the A=A approach. Sibelius is absolute torture to us on my laptop, partly for this reason, though also of course due to the dependence on the numkey pad.

I'm looking forward to a new post from Daniel on the input method, though! I'm sure they'll come up with a good middle-ground. I think it's actually a fairly difficult problem to solve nicely for a generic keyboard. I created an interactive composition program during my PhD that just used a cursor and arrow keys. Personally, I found that extremely fast an efficient (then again, I designed it!). It didn't do Common Music Notation (mensural) mind you... Rather, it used a form of proportional notation, so I wasn't dealing with explicit rhythmic values.