You can do several things to insure that NoteView draws and redraws the screen as quickly as possible.

• Most important by far: if your Macintosh supports it, set your screen to black and white instead of color or gray-scale. This can make an ENORMOUS difference in any program, not just Nightingale. The reason is simple: when drawing the screen in color, the computer has to move lots more information around (in 256 colors, eight times as much as in black-and-white!), and that takes time. To set the screen to black and white, use the ‘Control Panels’ command in the Apple menu, then choose Monitors. Note 1: some newer Macs—PowerMacs in particular—don’t support black and white with all video cards; with these models, choose the smallest number of colors available. But this has much less effect on speed on PowerMacs, anyway. Note 2: If you run other programs that need color and you want to change this setting frequently, several pieces of shareware and freeware—for example, DepthGauge/DepthMenu—make it much easier to do so.

• You can interrupt redrawing at any time by pressing command-period.

• For menu commands that will drastically change what's in view, use command-key equivalents instead of using the mouse on the menu. Most people find it's faster to do this anyway, but there's a special benefit to it in NoteView: commands that will greatly affect what's in view interrupt redrawing. This is especially useful when changing from, say, 50 percent to 150 percent magnification (or vice-versa): if you hit command-] to ‘Enlarge’, then immediately hit command-] twice again, you don't have to wait for Nightingale to draw the score in 75 and 100 percent along the way. Besides ‘Enlarge’ and  ‘Reduce’, this feature applies to the ‘New’, ‘Open’, ‘Look at One Voice’, ‘Go To’, and ‘Close Window’ commands.