GarageBand 2: Application menu commands disabled when no project window is open

Posted by Pierre Igot in: GarageBand, Music
July 1st, 2005 • 11:00 pm

As noted in another post a while back, when no project window is open in GarageBand 2, you get this proprietary window with two buttons (“Create a New Project” and “Open an Existing Project“).

It’s bad enough that we get this non-standard behaviour. What makes it worse is that it’s so poorly implemented. First, there is the fact that, which you can still access the “Open Recent” submenu in the “File” menu, all the options in that submenu are disabled. This means that you cannot open a recent project through that menu when no project window is open. It’s clearly a bug. (iMovie HD has the same type of “in-between” window, but at least the “Open Recent” menu can still be used.)

Then there is the problem with the application menu itself. Believe it or not, when no project window is open in GarageBand 2, menu commands such as “About GarageBand“, “GarageBand Hot Tips” and “Preferences…are actually disabled, as if they don’t apply when no project is open!

Of course they do apply. You can still want to read about GarageBand or refer to the hot tips. And you can still change preference settings that have nothing to do with whichever project is currently open!

This is just bad. It reeks of Microsoft-like carelessness. In Microsoft Word 2004, the “Preferences…” command in the application menu is also disabled when no document window is open — but at least they have the (admittedly extremely poor) excuse that some of the “preference” settings in the “Preferences” window are actually document-specific settings and not application “preferences”.

Apple doesn’t even have that excuse! As far as I can tell, all the settings in the “Preferences” dialog in GarageBand 2 are application-wide settings.

This is just bad.


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