Info-Mac 4/Info_Mac IV CD-ROM (Pacific HiTech Inc.)(August 1994).iso/Sound/Utilities/Nightingale 1.4 Demo Folder/Nightingale Essentials/Nightingale Help/Nightingale Help.rsrc/TEXT_160_Speed.txt

Text File | 1994-05-21 | 2KB | 14 lines

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

• Most important by far: 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. (If you run other programs that need color and want to change this setting frequently, several pieces of shareware and freeware—for example, DepthGauge/DepthMenu and Switcheroo—make it much easier to do so.)

• You can interrupt redrawing at any time by pressing command-period (unless you've turned this feature off with NightCustomizer, that is).

• Using NightCustomizer, set "Quality of Slurs on Screen" to "Fastest, least beautiful" or, at the least, avoid "Slowest, most beautiful".

• 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 Nightingale: commands that will greatly affect what's in view interrupt redrawing. This is especially useful when changing from, say, 50 percent to 200 percent magnification (or vice-versa): if you hit command-] to ‘Reduce’, then immediately hit command-] again, you don't have to wait for Nightingale to draw the score in 100 percent along the way. This also applies to the ‘New’, ‘Open’, ‘Look at One Voice’, and ‘Go To’ commands.

• If you have the Tool Palette showing, when you switch from one score window to another, Nightingale redraws all of the window that you brought to the front, even if all of it was already showing. If the Tool Palette isn't showing, it redraws only the part that was just uncovered. (If you close the Tool Palette, you can bring it back with the ‘Show Palette’ command.)

For more information on the above topics and some additional tips, see the Nightingale manual (there's an index entry "Speed and Efficiency").