Cubase 8 is (no longer) a pain to work with

Gadget_Fiend · January 2, 2015, 2:32am

Bantam:

I did ask, or is it too much for this uneducated chap, why it is so horribly dangerous? You are apparently in possession of this knowledge and I am not. Tell me why it is so egregious please do. That is what I asked. I said it was over my head. You are the guy “weighing in”. All I’m asking is “what do you mean?”
No explanation = no “train wreck”. Get it? Or are you saying that the Steinberg programmers are totally incompetent? If so. Then we, the “uneducated” “asses” as you called me need an explanation otherwise it’s just another pointless rant. I would not appreciate an answer saying that “I wouldn’t understand…” that also would = no “train wreck”.
Actually, not just you. There must be other experienced programmers reading this who could tell me just how big a “train wreck” this is. Pointer to a clear layman’s explanation would do. It’s a genuine request. Thanks all and a happy new year.

My apologies if I misread the tone of your previous post.

Regarding the “UI train wreck” that is the Mac-like, pseudo global menu bar and associated gray background “container,” this is problematic for multiple reasons:

It works differently from almost every other Windows program ever developed (at least the ones that actually follow Microsoft’s UI guidelines). In fact, I don’t think I have ever seen any program on any OS that places a menu bar in the title bar of the window. So right off the bat, Steinberg is using an utterly novel UI paradigm. This is never a good idea unless you are solving a usability problem that cannot be solved in any other way. But that is not the case at all. Almost every other program in existence manages multiple windows without resorting to its own proprietary windowing system.
Okay, so people can probably get used to the new, non-standard combined menu bar / title bar design (even though it looks horrible on Windows 7 unless you hack the Registry to turn off the Aero Glass “etching” effect in the title bar). But does this weird menu actually solve the problem it was intended to solve? Not really. Although it is now possible to open the Key Editor, for instance, on another monitor without extending your main Cubase window across both monitors, there is no reason why this could not be done using standard menu bars on both windows. Take a look at how Evernote and countless other programs allow you to open separate windows/documents on separate monitors. These programs do this in a straightforward manner that adheres to all existing Windows UI conventions.
Well, even if the new design is non-standard (which is probably not a good thing,) how bad is it really? Bad, really bad. The problem is that this new system conflicts with how Windows itself manages application windows thus leading to all kinds of window focus issues.

I suspect that Steinberg took this approach in a misguided attempt to rationalize their UI across the Mac and PC with the intention of saving development/documentation time and resources going forward. But as others have pointed out, being cheap and trying to make a PC work like a Mac is bound to fail and result in all sorts of compromises that users are now experiencing with Cubase 8. This is coming from someone who uses multiple Mac computers for almost everything except music production, btw.