Add option to reuse tabs for parts

In Sibelius 4-6, Dynamic Parts by default were only shown one at a time. You could get windows for several Dynamic Parts simultaneously if you wanted, by using Window->New Window, which would duplicate a part window, otherwise normally you'd only have two windows open, one for Full Score, and the other for the currently-shown part. Unfortunately, in Sibelius 7+, the designers have given us the non-intuitive Parts tabs interface. Once we learn how to open multiple parts using the tabs, then we discover that each new part we display automatically opens a new tab! This is highly undesirable for scores with more than 2-3 parts. Anybody (like me) doing scores for band/orchestra quickly discovers that our window gets cluttered with many tabs. The tabs can be ignored, but there is no way to "Close All", or to control the behavior, so effectively, we get to see all the parts listed in a tab bar, all the time, as soon as we start switching between all the parts for review purposes, because it's too much of a pain to close them, only to have them re-open the moment we want to see the part again that we just closed. So we're stuck with ignoring this ugly list of parts across the top of our screen. Please put back the old behavior, perhaps as an option, where switching parts (via right-click on an existing tab, via "Next Part" keyboard shortcut, etc.), will re-use the current tab, thus saving screen space and allowing us to keep our sanity. It would also restore some meaning to the "New Window" command, which is otherwise useless unless you really do want to see a certain part (or the full score) twice. If the developers are sure that the existing behavior is desirable, the current Sib 7+ behavior could be kept as an option in the Preferences, but then at least we could change the Preferences to work more like Sib 4-6 if desired. :) If we had such an option on the behavior of tabs, to reuse them like they were done with the MDI-style "Windows" in Sib 4-6, I could see the tabs user interface being nice, and actually a slight improvement over the Sib 4-6 way of doing it.

Comments (0) Features , parts, tabs