Forum Archive

The EigenD UI is spectacularly weird and unintuitive.

Every other Mac application on the planet has, under the application menu, an 'About ...' item and a Quit item. EigenD has neither, so you can't query the version (to know if you need the 1.0.1 update, say) and you have to go elsewhere to quit the app, which is just frustrating.

Just some little things to work on, admittedly not central to the product as an instrument, but important little things that make first impressions.

After my first weekend with the Pico I love it so much that it just makes these software issues even scarier to me. I am more geek than musician so I can deal with it ok, but I want the world to love the eigenharp range so that a long and prosperous future is in store. The present software makes the hill steeper, and serves neither the power user or the beginner well. Its a good thing the hardware is so spectacular at what it does, as this will make the climb more worth it for many. Personally Im glad they launched without highly polished software because Id far rather have the present software than have to wait longer for the device to be available at all, but Im not sure this is good in the grand scheme of things.

I'd like to second the vote to make all the settings easily available via mouse, so that one can just use the Pico for playing.
I get how having everything available from the instrument makes sense in a live setting, but at home or at the desk, it would be orders of magnitude much simpler with mouse-navigated setup.

I think the answer is to provide the choice. The problem with the instrument-driven control for me at the moment is that some of it doesn't work very well (eg scrolling and Scheduler)

Hi

In response to all todays comments:

*There'll be an 'about' menu dropdown where you can find the version number you're running in either the next software release of the one after - its being put in right now. Thanks for pointing it out, it was a stupid oversight.

*The key scrolling is being worked on as well - the law used to control the way it works is not good right now and Al (who works on the browser) is improving it right now. Substantial Improvements to be expected in the next couple of weeks.

*Not sure what trouble you've had with the scheduler, could you be more specific?

*Regarding the mouse versus instrument control issue, this was a design decision based around the need to make it possible to do everything without taking your hands off the instrument. It becomes much more important in the larger Alpha, which is often played standing up and quite a way away from the computer, which may well not even have a screen attached to it. It is difficult to get used to in the beginning, but becomes very intuitive after a while and has the effect of making it possible to play and work without messing about with the mouse, which, once learned, is great. We may add some more point and click functionality to the brower to help beginners, but you'll see very shortly (there is a seriously cool feature about to appear that I'm not talking about till we've finished testing it) that the actual system has a very powerful command style interface that enables all sorts of things that are not possible with a traditional GUI. We're trying very hard to walk a fine line between making is as easy as possible for beginners and not breaking the system for power users - command style interfaces are capable of many things that GUI's are not, like doing multiple disparate activities at once, very important for live playing, but command style interfaces are harder to learn and a lot more hostile than GUI's.

From the many comments, it seems likely that we need to work on making the learning curve a little easier, which we'll keep on doing. Your comments are all really helpful for us in this process.

John Lambert

Hi Chad

We've been looking at using the lights to help with tutorials - we have an ambition for the Pico to become useful to educators and this goes hand in hand with that. Personally I'd love to be able to see some of the more way-out scales lit up on a chromatic layout so I can get a visual representation of them. It will be probably be mid next year that we get serious about this stuff, and we'll be announcing it then.

Using the strip controller for scrolling is a really nice idea. We may well have a play with some setups that do just that in the next few weeks. The only downside is that on long lists it might get a bit twitchy, but we'll give it a go and see how useable it feels. You will find the scroll keys a lot nicer from 1.0.4, we did quite bit of work on them last week. And making them available as playing keys is certainly possible - I suspect that when we get the scripting support in this will be one of its first applications.

John

Hi Chad

I'm not quite sure what you mean by drivers for Garageband, as I wasn't aware that it had an extensible API beyond AU's. You can already use the Pico with Garageband, in the same way that you can use it with Logic (there are quite a few forum posts now about the various ways to do this, and we're working on making it easier right now). Am I missing something? It's quite possible I am as we're all Logic users here and don't use Garageband much, though its a great app.


John

Ah, this is currently a raised bug. There are two issues, both of which you should find go away very soon, hopefully in our next bugfix release. The first is an issue with handling sample rate changes in Snow Leopard (spotted by Geert see http://www.eigenlabs.com/forum/threads/id/148/ and now being actively worked on) and the second is that the factory setup has a sample rate of 48k set, and changes CoreAudio to match this when it starts up. We're going to change the factory setup to have a 'no sample rate' setting which means it will just use whatever CoreAudio is set to. If you're running Tiger or Leopard the ugly work around is to change the sample rate back to 44.1 after EigenD startup and you should be able to run at the same sample rate then. This will go away in our next release.

John