Just wanted to follow up... Ben Kennedy wrote:
The advantage of the floater is that as soon as you have more than one song open at once, you are making better use of screen real estate. Everything in the inspector (with exception of the "default velocity" slider) reflects the current state of whatever is selected or around the cursor, and so it seems redundant to duplicate such controls in every window.
In context, this does make sense. But that setup only becomes useful if you are working in multiple song windows at the same time. I can't speak for everyone else, but I know that I don't work on more than one song at a time. Even if I do have more than one song window open at the same time, I'm only really *working* in one of those. It is an extremely rare occasion that I would need to switch back and forth between song windows. And when you're only working in one song window, having to go to a separate floating window to access controls seems unnecessary. That's why GarageBand's interface makes so much sense when compared to most other DAWs. Up until now I've ignored the inspector window entirely and kept it closed, since all its controls were accessible from the main menu. But now the "velocity for new drums" slider has been added, and it's not accessible anywhere else. And it's becoming clear that there is at least some demand for easy-to-access buttons for adding and deleting bars and beats, right on the main window. So I think Corey's screenshot is right on. You might even consider moving the "zoom" buttons into that section for consolidation.
Personally I have a distaste for drawers, but I'm open to the suggestion.
I'm not a huge fan of drawers either -- I prefer the removable sliding panels you see in GarageBand for things like the mixer (the whole "sliding" thing is cool, but extraneous). Considering how small this particular section would be in the window, I wouldn't be too concerned if I couldn't remove it at all, really. Sorry this message is so critical... I do love Doggiebox quite a lot -- in fact, it's the only non-Apple application that I currently own, aside from plugins, so that tells you how useful it is to me. The drum tracks I make with DoggieBox are the final versions in my recordings, and they're the first step in my recording process. :)