I’m one of those appearently rare people in the IT biz that can both build software and immediately turn around and be a user, empathize with the user and see exactly what it’s like from their standpoint. I care deeply about end users and find no point in it otherwise. It took me a long while to realize that for most developers that’s very difficult, don’t know why. I also appearently have a high level of allergy to bad usability and can usually find at least a handful of usability problems in any piece of software you sit me down in front of, within the first 10 minutes. I guess that makes me odd and annoying
My belief is, unfortunately, that software in general have been in steady decline with regards to usability for many years and it continues. By my standards and rough memory, usability standards reached a peak somewhere around 1995-2000 and have been declining since then.
haha - same for me. But I did have to stop caring too much at work. In VCV it’s ok if ppl hate me, but at work I have gone too far being too negative and critical. It would be bad for me to get along poorly with my co-workers and managers, and even worse to get laid off or fired! So I happily make whatever ppl ask for at work, and use VCV and other side-projects as a a place where I can make stuff just like I want.
Oh, wait, I have been suspended from VCV before! Well, I try to avoid that now and behave at least tolerably here.
Just to add an idea about “powerful search”.
In reaper for the French translation has been introduced (or generalized I don’t know) the notion of synonym.
In the French version, the action search works with both English and French terms, and has also introduced synonyms for contentious terms. Mute, for example, who gave rise to lengthy discussions. Now the search works just as well with Mute, muet, sourdine, Muter…
It’s really made searching in French usable.
The equivalent with VCV would be, for example, for certain modules to take into account the names appearing on the module which are not, for reasons of space I guess, necessarily those of the module itself.
Most of the time it’s the same, but not always.
Another example is Audible modules. Being able to use the original names (braids, plaits etc…) could be useful.
That’s not a request, just a two pence idle remark.
Actually searching for plaits or clouds etc does bring up the audible modules and any others tagged as clones/ports in the module browser search. So that part works.
I figured it would be nice if I could “publish” a selection in the module browser and rate community selections made by others. Community selections filters could include things like:
Minimum rating / stars
free modules only, open source only, include pro modules, include commercial
published after a certain date
And perhaps a description created by the publisher and an option to comment (a la patch storage).
I don’t make selections that are like patchlets, I just take the simplest things I do over and over and make tiny selections to save me a lot of time. So I would get 0 stars every time.
Indeed, the choices we make creating our selections depend on our personal style of patching and might not always be directly useful to others. But exploring the selections of others and seeing which repeatable patterns they identified, or which solutions they found to a problem is definitely something I could and want to learn from. Like a collection of interesting ideas. Not unlike the VCV library itself.
And of course I don’t expect this will be included in the stock VCV browser.
I think that patch selections, smaller and larger, are very handy and it’s good to collect, share and discuss them in a common place.
However, I wouldn’t go as far as ‘publishing’ them in the browser or rating them. It’s quite easy to establish your own file and folder structure behind File > Import Selection for better workflow.
fuzzy match is kind of nice, though. Maybe this is more of a problem with the tag system, which is a) kind of inflexible and b) doesn’t let you type into the tag list in a way that you might expect.
I feel that it has become too “promiscuous” and it’s because to my recollection it used to be more exact. I haven’t tried to track any changes down, but I recall some months ago thinking to myself that the search results were much worse than they used to be, in the module browser, and in the library it seems downright hopeless now.
