A case study in improving software: What Office 2010 can learn from Notion 3

Lesson 4: Completely separate text commands from visual inputs

Most applications, in the name of "accessibility," invoke keyboard "shortcuts" as an alternate means of maneuvering through the menu or control system. But perhaps you've noticed this but never fully appreciated it: Each keystroke is a token for where your mouse pointer would go, if you were using the mouse. So in many ways, commands are not truly alternatives or even really shortcuts -- you can visually follow the same menu and dialog box locations you would have clicked on anyway.

While Notion 3's designers were gleaning ideas from PC games, one member of the team ended up..."borrowing" a method from a dark corner of game design, literally by accident: the cheat code.

The result was a facility called Express Entry, which Lubo Astinov told us "was not actually done intentionally. There was never really a design discussion about it, or anything. [Our senior programmer, Ben Singer] just made that as a shortcut for quickly accessing elements while the code was being written, and more or less, this was kind of an accident. As we started using it, I said, 'You know what, let's keep that!'"

Although Notion 3 does carry over a number of single-keystroke shortcuts from version 2 -- such as the 3 key during note entry to bring up a sharp, or q for quarter notes and e for eighth notes and the like -- these shortcuts are independent of the palette. There are a few conventional Ctrl + menu bar commands for managing elements of the program, though you'll rarely use them.

In addition to these, Express Entry pretends that there's a little invisible command prompt open someplace. So rather than imagine the spot on the palette where something is located and try to recall the key that brings up that area, you type a whole command, which can often be all or part of a word. For example, to bring up notation on the cursor that lets you place a pizzicato marking on a string instrument staff (plucking the string rather than bowing it), you would type 'pi -- the apostrophe key, followed by the command. Nothing visual happens at all while you're doing this, but once the command is accepted, the pizz. marker appears over your cursor, so you can stamp it where you want it. The 'norm command lets you stamp the location where the pizzicato section ends.

By acting like a cheat code mode, Express Entry violates all the rules that typical users would expect. Personally, I don't use it much...not yet, at least. But I see where a professional composer may be more interested in getting his "pen" to work right, than perusing the palette in search for something he knows he needs now.

Lesson 5: Seize initiatives now -- don't wait for a Service Pack

Since Notion 3's release in late September, there have been four major fixes distributed through the application itself over the Net. It has needed these fixes -- Notion 3 was not perfect coming out of the gate. It's had obvious glitches, which I reported to Lubo and the team; and other users have asked for minor enhancements, especially to the user interface.

The team has responded to these glitches and requests not by gathering incident tickets until they accumulate to a big enough pile deserving of a Service Pack, but by issuing patches and additions immediately.

"What I wanted to do from the beginning was a very dynamic and very close QA cycle that is tightly related to development," Notion 3's Astinov told us. "This is something that Ben and Evan [Ruiz] wanted to do in their development process internally here...Almost every week, we will have a new build. But in testing that build, I will check out the revisions and start testing the new editions, new features, keep up with any possible regressions that might have occurred from the code."

Astinov calls this process parallel QA -- essentially, a much tighter cycle between committing a change to the code repository and deploying it in the field. In one sense, it's a workflow innovation; in another, it's an unfortunate necessity of modern business: "We used to have a really large QA department back in the Notion 2 days; we don't have that luxury right now. There's really not that many people who do testing, but that kind of forced us into that parallel QA process even more, so we are always on top of what is being changed and what is happening, and we have direct communication lines to the developers when something goes wrong."

Lesson 6: Trust the user

One of the major problems that marred the release of Notion 2 was when users discovered a rather aggressive third-party copy protection system for securing the instrument samples. Indeed, it was the power of those samples that made Notion 2 sound...pretty good. Better than "passable." But the persistence of this little scheme in memory proved to be a performance drain on the entire operating system.

It's gone for Notion 3, replaced with a modern key-driven software activation system. But the problems haven't exactly been eliminated, especially for folks like me who think they're being cautious and "modern" by installing their applications "As Administrator." While Notion itself is fine with that, it comes shipped with two outstanding add-ons from IK Multimedia -- one that provides a beautiful programmable reverb, and another called AmpliTube XGear (please forgive the naming) whose job is to accurately simulate a bastion of interconnected amplifiers for rock, jazz, and hip-hop musicians.

Since both IK Multimedia plug-ins are installed during the single setup process, they inherit the "As Administrator" permissions from Notion. But since their software activation is keyed to those permissions, it creates a situation where you if you installed Notion 3 as admin, you have to run it as admin also. If you don't, the AmpliTube plug-in will insert white noise into the soundtrack automatically every 10 seconds.

That pretty much negates the whole purpose of restricted user access -- keeping a potentially vulnerable application from becoming exploitable. I'm not the only user who encountered this little problem, which I'm told Notion and IK are currently working to eradicate.

As with Notion 2, the close-mic instrument samples in Notion 3 are particularly precious intellectual property. Without them, all of the hard work expended in making the user front-end workable, would go down in smoke. But the real key to protecting those samples is presenting them in a format that only Notion 3 can use, not by encasing them in a paranoid protection scheme that polices everything the user does. Unfortunately, the music software industry has historically been prone to piracy; so putting producers like IK Multimedia in a position where they can trust the user more, as we're suggesting, will require some more work on the users' end as well.

Next: The joy of composing...