Always keep in mind that your software represents in music composition what the brush represents in painting.
An artist picks up a brush, loads paint onto it, and brings the brush to the point of contact with the canvas. What occurs after that point is what matters. The painter usually doesn't need a brush with rows of buttons on the ferrule that adjust the input and output of the paint and he usually doesn't want to set up as many as 64 channels to get the paint out of the brush. He wants to focus on how he applies the paint to the canvas. That's where the art is. Picking up the right brush, picking up paint, and approaching the canvas isn't an insignificant part of painting, but he doesn't want to have to master that part of painting before he can start painting.
I wish software applications would unfold when first opened. I'm always amazed when I open a new program and see that the entire program fills the screen—splat! the first impression of the program is how extremely much the whole program can do. Is that an alpha-male thing? When I'm just starting with a program, I hardly need any of the program. So why is it there taking up space? Demonstration of prowess to attract a mate? Yes, music software can do an amazing amount and can produce truly beautiful sound. But it's mostly designed for performance and mixing. When I'm composing with the staff view, I don't need all that. I want the interface to get out of the way and let me have easy access to instruments that don't sound like the tinny default MIDI instruments. The instruments could even include a touch of reverb so I don't have to dig into the interface to find out how to set that up. Then, at that point I can start creating music, usually with complex harmony like some of Manhattan Transfer's music (eg "A Nightingale Sang," "Birdland").
There are apps for tablets that emphasize creating with the staff view and I'll probably end up using one of them. But why aren't they on the desktop? It's a little strange to be sitting at my computer while working on my iPad. (Isn't it? Or am I missing the point of wireless?) After some frustrating searches for PC software with a simple staff view, I've concluded that I must be among the few of the old-school who compose in the staff view. The piano-roll and dropping loops and beats methods seem alien to me (That's a quarter note? But what note is it? Which octave is it in?). My searches have turned up Sibelius and Cakewalk as applications that include a staff view. Both are accessible, but neither is simple enough to just start clicking notes and playing them back. I started in both creating four chords of whole notes in a piano staff and then moving notes and switching instruments, to see how involved it would all be. Sibelius' interface is the plainest, with most everything tucked up in the ribbon at the top of the screen, but I still have to look up how to do something as simple as scrub with the playhead. That should be just click and drag. While Sibelius' focus is a little heavy on creating beautiful sheet music right from the start, Cakewalk emphasizes recording and mixing. In the default view, the screen is heavy with electronics and I have to manually open the staff view and resize it to fill most of the screen. I used Cakewalk's MusicCreator back in the 00s to create two CDs of public domain music I extensively arranged in staff view. After I learned where things were it was fun to create music with the program. The interface, of course, has substantially evolved since then and I'm back to square one having to learn where things are. I created and played back the four chords a little faster than with Sibelius and remembered that scrubbing was accomplished while holding the J key while click-dragging. Switching instruments was about equally hunt-and-click with both programs. I've seen some apps with a small group of buttons on the side for switching instruments. Simple. It would be nice if simplicity like that could be embraced by software developers for the introductory levels of an application, and from there the user could add complexity as he wants. Starting out with the whole powerful program on display on the screen seems a little like chest-beating.
