Sibelius 5 - Universal Binary

My tool of trade for the last few years, Sibelius, is finally running natively on intel Macs with the release of Version 5. After using Sibelius 3 and 4 on windows, I found the Mac version of Sibelius 4 (which I'm using right now) to be painfully slow running with rosetta on intel Macs. Now the universal binary should be a huge performance improvement.

Finale, the main competitor of Sibelius, has already gone universal earlier in Dec. 2006. I dislike ugly things, especially ugly GUI and hard-to-use programs, so although both are standard notation programs, I never got into Finale (it has this 90s amateurish look to it with all the aqua orbs and faux-metal).

Besides the transition to UB, there are a few interesting things among the new features introduced. The new Panorama view let you view the score without the limitation of pages, which is what I always wanted. Often you want an overview of the whole score and having to worry about page layouts and spacing is very cumbersome. This seems to be something Finale had for a while and Sibelius should definitely have from the start. Apple's Garageband has something similar in its editor, but it isn't really a notation app, and doesn't output any scores.

The new idea hub to collect motifs and musical ideas and the support for VST/Audio Units are cool, but for Intel Mac user like me the universal binary is probably the biggest improvement.

More at What's new in Sibelius 5