I have used GraphicConverter from Lemke Software (link) for longer than I can remember. Well, not quite. The first version appeared in 1992, and I know that I was using it not long after that. As is the case with many shareware users, I suspect, it took me 3-4 years before I decided that the program really was invaluable and finally purchased a license, which I have updated ever since. All graphics work in this blog and in my essays published on the Texas ScholarWorks platform has been done with the conversion and editing functions in GraphicConverter. My thanks to Thorsten Lemke for creating and maintaining an excellent, stable, and versatile product.
On the other hand, I am only a recent convert to MuseScore, currently in version 2.3.2 (link). My earliest attempts to use music notation programs were with Keith Hamel's NoteWriter, one of the first reasonably well-functioning (if quite limited) programs for the Mac. When NoteAbilityPro (for Intel-based Macs) replaced NoteWriter, I tried it but gave up not long after -- just as I later did with Sibelius -- because I needed only a very small subset of the program's capabilities and because it was too much work, given what I actually needed, to learn the necessary keyboard shortcuts. (Mouse-intensive work is hard on my hands.) MuseScore is specifically designed to be easy to use in its basic functions and it produces a very clean, good looking music score. For additional editing, I export to PDF, then to JPG using GraphicConverter. For those who need it, MuseScore Pro can be used to create complex scores and analysis graphs.
Finally, I was delighted when Apple released iWorks 8.0 and then 9.0. Pages was designed on a page layout basis but worked equally well and seamlessly as a word processor. It was easy to use and was perfect for the graphics intensive essays that I have been publishing on Texas ScholarWorks since 2010. Some of the earliest of those were conversions from web pages originally uploaded to university servers that were later decommissioned. Others, of course, were derived from posts to my blogs on blogspot. Unfortunately, newer releases of Pages (I am now using 7.1) seem to have separated out page layout and word processing, and I find it somewhat more difficult to use, but I will stick with it.
