Staying On Top of Teaching Responsibilities with OmniFocus Perspectives (OmniFocus Mini-Series)

Teaching is a challenging, multifaceted career. I never end a day feeling like I accomplished everything I was supposed to. But sometimes, software can help! And for my tasks, that software is OmniFocus. 

Most of the checkable todo items in my life go in OmniFocus. It is a powerful task app for Mac, iOS, and Apple Watch that is based on David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” methodology. There are 100 reasons I love it. Lately, it’s because I am getting a lot of mileage out of the Perspective feature. Perspectives allow you to build different custom views for how OmniFocus displays your tasks.

The Forecast Perspective comes installed on OmniFocus. It shows you a convenient day at a glance so that you never need to stress about todos until the day they are due.

A Perspective is kind of like a custom search that you can save. The building blocks will seem similar if you have ever made an email rule.

I have over 1,000 tasks in OmniFocus. My goal with Perspectives is to create windows into my work that empower me to think only about the things that are relevant to me at a given time or in a given situation. 

Here are a few Perspectives that are most useful to me. 

Priority

The Priority Perspective filters only items that are due soon or that are high priority items I want to be working on for the day. OmniFocus highlights flagged tasks with an orange ring and due tasks with a yellow ring to draw your attention.

This Perspective shows me all of my most important tasks. I designed it for moments where I have an overwhelming number of things to do spanning numerous unrelated projects and I just need to focus on the things I can’t survive the day (or moment) without doing. This Perspective is set up to show only tasks that are due soon, overdue, and tasks that are both tagged ‘Today’ and have a flag. The result is a list of tasks that are due soon mixed in with the most important things I want to be working on ‘today.’ 

This is how my Priority Perspective is set up.

There are usually only a few tasks that result from this search which helps my eyes (and brain) focus on top priorities.

Today

This is a project that filters only items with the tag ‘Today.’ These items already show up on my Forecast view alongside overdue and due soon items, but there are times where I do not have any items due that day, or where I they aren’t available yet, resulting in a cluttered looking Forecast. The Today Perspective shows me only a list of things I want to be working on Today, organized by project.

This is my Today Perspective. It is similar to the Forecast, only tasks don’t necessarily need to be due to show up here, and it is organized by project. See an image of my Forecast at the top of this post.

This is how my Today Perspective is set up.

Deferred

This Perspective shows me when certain items became available to begin working on, in the order that they became available. This is useful for seeing if there are tasks that became available a long time ago that I am really slacking on, or maybe that I need to drop and admit I took on too much. 

My Deferred Perspective. Tip - Giving an item a Defer date in OmniFocus means that it isn’t available to work on until that date. You can use these to easily filter only items that are ‘available,’ which can relieve the stress of seeing everything at once.

Teaching

I have numerous projects relating to teaching in the Howard County Public School System. I have action lists for each of my ensembles, for directing the HCPSS Honor Band, for planning concerts, field trips, and for articulating our students from middle to high school. The Teaching Perspective focuses me on only the tasks related to teaching responsibilities, and organizes them by due date. This way I am thinking about only work tasks, while remaining focused on the next task I should be completing.

My Teaching Perspective shows only Howard County Public School System responsibilities. This is really useful for when I need to focus only on work.

Grading

My school uses Canvas for grading students and Synergy for tracking certain data on them. Both are slow, web-based, programs that take a while to load. For this reason, I tend to want to spend concentrated times working with grades and then ignore them, rather than being constantly in and out of the grade book.

For this reason, I add a lot of grade based tasks to OmniFocus and tag them with keywords like Grades, Canvas, or Synergy. I tend to use these a lot when triaging email. For example, if my school’s data clerk emails teachers with due dates and deadlines for final grades, I forward that into my OmniFocus inbox using my special email address that the app provides. Once it is out of my email inbox and into my OmniFocus inbox I give it a defer date and a due date, and tag it with the tag ‘Canvas.’

Sometimes students email me work if they have issues submitting it on Canvas. Or parents ask me questions in email about certain grades. In these situations, I forward the emails into my OmniFocus inbox and then tag them with the necessary tag. 

The Grades Perspective aggregates all of these tags into one view. This is useful because these tasks rarely have hard due dates. By not assigning them due dates, they never clutter up my Forecast perspective (where I spend most of my time). When I am ready to focus on grading, I can open up this Perspective and filter all other tasks out.

The Grades Perspective shows only responsibilities that involve entering grades and working with my school’s learning management software.

Top 3

Sometimes I get so overwhelmed that I just need to think “what are three things that I need to focus on today.” This usually happens on days where I need to be spending long periods of serious focus on one or more broad tasks. I often go traditional-task-list and break out a pencil and paper for moments like this. Lately, I use this OmniFocus Perspective called Top 3. I have a tag called “1,” “2,” and “3.” All this Perspective does is filter them so that I don’t see anything else.

Icons

OmniFocus Perspectives can be given a custom icon that matches the style of the perspective icons that come with the app. I am able to make my Perspectives look really attractive and eye-grabbing with the MacStories Perspective Icons, a new product that features 20,000 icons for OmniFocus. You can read more about them and buy them here. 

Conclusion

OmniFocus has challenged me to think about my own productivity and capacity to focus. Through Perspectives, I am able to build windows into my work that help me to see only what I need to at a given time. 

You can read more about OmniFocus here and learn more about building Perspectives from learnomnifocus.com here.

Brainstorming ways teachers might be more productive with Microsoft’s New Fluid Framework

Microsoft kicked off a developer conference earlier this week. The Verge writes about a very cool set of forthcoming productivity features.

Microsoft’s new Fluid Office document is Google Docs on steroids - The Verge

Microsoft is creating a new kind of Office document. Instead of Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, the company has created Lego blocks of Office content that live on the web. The tables, graphs, and lists that you typically find in Office documents are transforming into living, collaborative modules that exist outside of traditional documents.

Microsoft calls its Lego blocks Fluid components, and they can be edited in real time by anyone in any app. The idea is that you could create things like a table without having to switch to multiple apps to get it done, and the table will persist on the web like a Lego block, free for anyone to use and edit.

This is obviously very cool, but it’s the next part that gets me excited.

Fluid is designed to make those tables, charts, and lists always feel alive and editable, no matter where you create them and regardless of how you share and copy them into other apps. Instead of getting a static and dull chart you copied from Excel, you’ll get a chart that can be edited anywhere you paste it, and you’ll see everyone making edits as they happen. That might be in the middle of an email chain, in a chat app like Microsoft Teams, or even third-party apps eventually.

So certain parts of Office documents can be shared between multiple spaces, or with multiple users, across multiple apps. If I am understanding this correctly, I can instantly think of 25 ways this could make my job easier. Here are a few...

1. Copy tasks from a Microsoft To Do project called Field Trip into an email to my music team and have everyone check off tasks in the email as they do them. Status of those completed tasks syncs back to my project in To Do.
2. Say I am logging a spreadsheet of student concert attire orders and I need some data for a few choir kids. I can copy and paste just those cells, email them to the choir teacher, he can fill out the data right in the email, and I watch as it syncs back to my spreadsheet.
3. Similar to that last one. My school district sends me an updated list of recommended private teachers. I email just the flute teachers to my flute students and it stays up to date when the data is edited by those who maintain the list.
4. No more putting the same student names in multiple different documents. I can have one Word document that acts as a primary roster. All concert programs, student lists, sectional roster documents, etc. are just snippets of text from my primary roster document, that automatically update when I update the primary roster. No more misspelled names, inconsistency, or duplicated work.
5. Various data from documents can be clipped into media rich notes in OneNote where I can access them alongside one another without thinking about document management. For example, a short list of Concert Attire tasks could coexist in the same note as a portion of a payment spreadsheet, and both could update in real time when I edit their respective documents in To Do and Excel.

For the reccord, I don't use any of Microsoft's apps as my default tools, but I can certainly see myself using them more often if I can leverage this kind of power out of them.

Some questions I have:

• Will this be web only or will it eventually roll out to Microsoft apps on all platforms?
• Will Microsoft stand alone apps like Excel continue to exist or will they be replaced with one app (like the iPhone which now has an "Office" app that combines features of the whole suite)
• Will this actually catch on with people who are used to saving files to places on their hard drive? It seems ahead of its time.
• Will it compete with Google Docs? Someone needs to. Google Docs gets a only a few things right, but they get them really right, and that's why I think it has been so pervasive. Personally, I would far prefer that my work and personal circles relied on great native apps like Office.
• Will third party apps be able to embed the modular Microsoft elements inside of them, create modular elements to be able to insert in Microsoft docs, or both?
• Would Apple ever consider participating in this framework with their iWorks apps? Would they recreate their own version?

My very straightforward and very successful setup for teaching virtual private lessons

Edit: I have received numerous Instagram and Facebook questions about this post and thought I would clarify some things. Scroll to the bottom for more information on choosing the right voice app, my studio set up, and links to the extra gear I use if you want to level up. I am adding these details because some people want to take it beyond the basics. That said, my point stands that you really only need an internet connected cell phone and a voice chat app to teach online.

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I’m seeing a lot of questions from teachers flying around social media fussing over new voice chat apps, microphone set up, and elaborate private teaching workflows. 

I have moved my private teaching studio of 22 students to live video over the past three weeks. For or better or worse, the technical demands of teaching remote are very simple. 

1. Use a phone (the quality is way better)
2. Use FaceTime (unless you can’t then use Google or Skype)

I made a video about it below. I am being kind of sarcastically dry in my tone, but my points are absolutely true. And if you watch it all the way, I actually do have some hardware recommendations to improve the experience. You do not need to be fancy. Most phones already have a voice chat app installed on them.

Zoom is the new hot thing. They are also in the news a lot this week for concerns over privacy (though its arguable that they are doing no worse than any other company out there.) There is absolutely no reason to make your students download a new thing just because it is being talked about. For what its worth, I hear from many educators that Zoom has poor audio quality compared to some of the others. If you want to read more on Zoom, I think this article from The Verge explains their rise to success and the risks that come with it.

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I’m still seeing a lot of questions from teachers flying around social media fussing over “new“ voice chat apps, microphone set up, and elaborate private teaching workflows. For or better or worse, the technical demands of teaching remote are very simple. 1. Use a phone 2. Use FaceTime (unless you can’t then use Google or Skype)

A post shared by Robby Burns (@_robbyburns) on Apr 2, 2020 at 3:50pm PDT

Virtual lessons are going very well for me. No one gets into music to learn and play together remotely, but the human connection of music is something that we are just going to have to reinvent for a little while.

There are some real benefits to doing lessons remote. Seeing a student in their own practice space, using their own tools, is instantaneously valuable. I have noticed poor posture, inefficient instrument set up, wacky music stand placement, and more. It is also eye opening to ask a student to use a pencil, tuner, or metronome, and hear them tell you it is in another room! These are things you can’t coach in your own environment. And they spend way more time practicing in theirs than in yours.

Furthermore, a lot of my students need so much coaching on practice process that I am instructing mostly the same way I would in my studio. Teaching them how to break things down, assigning exercises, discussing long term practice goals and pacing. These are ideas I tell them verbally and are therefore not lost over the poor quality of an internet connected call.

I am fortunate that percussion technique has physiological components that are seen out of the body. I can see stick height, movement, placement, and grip, no matter how good or bad the audio quality is.

Many musical features can be heard just as adequately over a voice call: rhythm, style, tempo, and accuracy, to name a few. The major musical qualities I continue to miss out on are dynamics and tone quality which do not translate well over the compression of most smart phone microphones. These are, of course, two of the most important things to a musician. Like I said, this isn’t ideal for the long term, but it is viable for a time.

This is an uncertain time. Technological changes cause us to to question the nature of our work and personal engagements. But you do not need to reinvent your profession. If you have a smartphone and an internet connection, you have everything you need.

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Common Questions:

1. Is that Shure MV88 the best Mic for the money? No! It is actually very cost inefficient compared to other stuff on the market. But it is very convenient! It plugs right into the bottom of the iPhone without adding a cord or significant weight to the device. Click here to buy it. If you want something for a little more money that is way better in audio quality, check out the AKG P120, which I think sounds better than the wildly popular Blue Yeti and Snowball mics. It is also on sale right now.

2. What tripod do you use? Amazon Essentials. It’s cheaply built, but effective. It will hold together if it doesn’t leave your studio.

3. Why are you so opinionated about voice apps? I try to use what works for my students. If we both happen to have an iPhone, I prefer FaceTime because it has the best audio and video quality of all the apps I have tried. Google apps are second best, followed by Skype/WhatsApp. Zoom was by far the weakest audio/video quality and required the most fussing around to set up.

4. Do you have connectivity issues? Rarely, but most of my students have more than one of the voice chat apps installed and we can usually get the second attempt up and running.

5. What is your studio set up like? Lately, I position the iPhone on my desk like a webcam so that I can see my sheet music (on iPad) and notes (on Mac) and make eye contact with students at the same time. I keep a snare drum to my side and bring the camera with tripod around the room in my studio to model on other percussion instruments. See picture below.

6. Wait! That picture is complicated! You said all I need is a phone and a voice app! Yes, this is all you need. I also choose to share my students notes with them over a Google Calendar and read my music digitally. You don’t have to use technology for those things. If you do, you can use secondary devices. Alternatively, you could start a voice call on the iPad or Mac and then use other apps on the screen while the voice call keeps running in the background. Your phone is going to give you the best quality video though. 

First Impressions of StaffPad for iPadOS

Introduction

I remember seeing the introduction of StaffPad for Windows Surface tablets back in 2015. Applications that convert handwriting to music notation were not widespread yet and I was absolutely shocked by the demo videos.

My amazement was immediately followed by frustration when I leaned this was a Windows only product. It was a tough pill to swallow, but I understood. The iPad was (and is) widely held as a superior tablet for consumer and professional use, but iOS did not have proper stylus support at the time. There were only third party options, and none of them leveraged the operating system for the level of accuracy that the Apple Pencil now provides.

When the iPad Pro launched months later, I thought "surely StaffPad will now be possible." Turns out I was right. Though it has taken many years, the StaffPad team has been hard at work, and the product is now available for iOS.

I have been beta testing StaffPad for the past month. I consider myself to be testing it largely from the perspective of a music educator, specifically a middle school band director, which means that I am doing things like...

• Reconstructing missing flute parts from my music library using the original score

• Arranging extra percussion parts for works that are sparse in percussion writing

• Writing short folk melodies to use in our sectional curriculum

...pretty basic stuff. If you want a very balanced and comprehensive review of all the StaffPad features, not just the ones I depended on, I strongly recommend you check out the Scoring Notes review by David MacDonald.

TL;DR: If you want to skip this review, I'll get to the point:

StaffPad is an exceptional tool for music educators. It is elegantly designed, astoundingly intuitive, and makes exactly the right trade-off for what a teacher would and would not need in a pro-level score editor. It is a best-of-class example of what a professional 'iPad-first' app should look like. It legitimizes the platform by being a tool that executes tasks that no other computing device can.

While I believe StaffPad near-perfectly conceived, it's hand writing recognition is a headache to use at times, and it needs to improve a lot in this area for me to consider it rock-solid-dependable. Fortunately, I got better at it as I wrote this review.

Ok, let's get to it.

UPDATE: I spoke at length about my experiences using StaffPad on my pocast. Listen and subscribe below.

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Design and Features

The design of StaffPad is one of the most impressive I have ever seen. It is undeniably professional, but maintains the elegance and simplicity you would expect if you are familiar with Apple’s native iOS apps. It manages not to be overbearing with buttons and knobs, yet none of the tools seem too far away or too many menus deep.

Let's look at the home page.

Everything is beautifully laid out in a way where my eyes naturally gravitate towards the information relevant to me. There isn’t any information on this screen that doesn’t need to be.

Home shows just recent documents, Library shows all of your stuff, templates shows the customary templates you would expect from a score editor, and Collections shows some pre-made StaffPad scores designed to show off the sound library. I appreciate how the Templates page is not bogged down with dozens of rare options like Mariachi Band.

The Store button takes you to a screen where you can buy sound libraries and other extensions. More on that later. Discover takes you to some helpful introduction videos.

I am going to get into note input in a bit. Before that, I want to pontificate the nature of writing notes with a pencil  on a touch surface.

At launch, the iPad made a promise to simplify computing for every person, allowing you to touch directly what you want to do on the screen and removing the abstraction of pointing and clicking, the preferred interface of personal computers for decades.

John Gruber, amongst other Apple commentators, have recently had a lot to say about the original promise of the iPad; about how it has maybe lost its way as it has tried to become more like the Mac, introducing inscrutable multitasking gestures and imitating professional PC software rather than leveraging the strengths of a touch interface. There is a great conversation about it on his podcast, which makes special reference to how revolutionary the original GarageBand app was for iPad.

I mention all of that here because I think StaffPad perfectly fulfills that original iPad promise. Writing notes directly on the screen really is the way to write music, as it removes all abstractions and lets you just touch where you want things to go. It also exists in a category of rare, niche, and professional iPad apps that a) cost real money, and b) could not really exist on a Mac. I already wrote about this a little bit here.

So what features exactly does StaffPad have? If you want an exhaustive list, check out StaffPad's help page. It is very detailed and straightforward.

Though StaffPad’s website has a great introduction video, the help page lists everything StaffPad can do in a concise manner.

If you need specialty engraving features and every editing feature money can buy, you need Dorico or Sibelius (but choose Dorico). If you need a sketch app for music notation, that can make 90% of your score needs come true from the comfort of your couch, StaffPad has you covered.

There are trade-offs. But for my basic purposes, they are just the right trade-offs. For a handwritten sketch app, StaffPad strikes exactly the right balance of what it does and what it doesn't do, especially considering the quality of the resulting scores. There aren't a lot of ways to customize your score's layout, but StaffPad makes really good default choices about how to stylize the final product.

I appreciate that everything StaffPad does is very discoverable and not buried too many layers deep. Most things, you can just write directly on the screen with the pencil (though I had a lot of trouble with articulation, and especially with dynamics). StaffPad attempts to solve the problem of organizing features by using what I call a "double tool bar." I am sure they have a technical name for it. Basically, the tool bar shows one set of tools, and when you tap the upward or downward facing arrow on the upper left corner of the screen, it shows another set of tools.

If I knew the logic behind how StaffPad has organized these tools, I would probably be able to find them better, but because the options are selectable from two sides of the same toolbar, I often get confused which "side" of it I need to be on to get what I want. At least changing it over is only a tap away. 

One side of the tool bar has buttons which contains the following...

Play, pause, forward, backward buttons.

Button to trigger Reader mode.

Button to toggle a metronome.

Options to change the voice (of which there are four).

Button to toggle an annotation mode. This mode allows you to scribble freely on your score and highlight certain sections. This mode is necessary because regular strokes draw notes on the staff by default. I can’t think of any standard notation editor that allows freeform annotations with a stylus since most of them are not designed for a tablet.

A loop tool. This tool is great but buggy. It does what you would expect. It allows you to circle a section of music and then copy, paste, or duplicate it. This is a nice way to solve the problem of there being no keyboard shortcuts for selection, copy, and paste, in the app. Sometimes StaffPad crashes when I use it.

The famous three-dots button. (which in most apps means "more") This button takes you to most of the notations that you cannot write on the staff directly with the Apple Pencil - trills, fermatas, rehearsal markings, etc. This button is so frequently accessed that I kind of wish it showed up on both sides of the tool bar. Furthermore, it would be great to be able to edit the order the options appear, rather than scrolling to the right every time I need a rehearsal marking.

Fenby. - a digital assistant that you can talk to. Fenby is wicked cool. Similar to digital assistants like Siri, however, it works really well only when it works. I got used to telling it to "add strings" or "transpose" the score, but there are other commands listed on the StaffPad website that I could not get to work.

The other side of the tool bar includes buttons for...

Undo and redo buttons. Which, again, are so commonly needed that I wish they showed up on both sides of the tool bar. You can use the new text gestures introduced with iOS 13 to three finger pinch (copy), three finger spread (paste), three finger swipe left (undo) and three finger swipe right (redo). Once you get the hang of these, you really start to fly.

Also, a bonus note (and my favorite take away from Paul Shimmons' StaffPad review): copying a selection of music in StaffPad, and pasting it into another app results in a beautifully formatted score excerpt. It’s nice touches like this that make StaffPad a delight to work with.

Copy and paste using the new three finger gestures in iOS 13 is very natural. 

Button add/remove instruments. This screen is super elegant and I love it.

Automation layer. You can actually draw your automations right onto each stave with the pencil. It is too bad this is a feature I will not use that much, because the implementation is really slick. I hope that all iOS DAWS consider adding Apple Pencil support for automation layers.

Button to toggle transposing vs. non transposing score.

Playback buttons. Again, these are on both sides of the toolbar but I use them far less often than some of the other options.

Button to access version history.

Share button. The share menu is ridiculously elegant and straightforward. It has all of the export options you would want, and appears very clean. My only complaint is that it does not work the way standard iOS share buttons work where once you share something, the share menu is no longer active. In StaffPad, it is more of a "mode" that you enter in to. I don't prefer this, but it is also not the end of the world. 

Home button to go to the main screen.

Settings button. This screen is really straightforward and easy on the eyes. This is the one case where I do wish StaffPad would add more options. The screen is designed nicely enough that I would not mind scrolling downward for more options.

For example, I would like to be able to customize the tool bar or choose for the Apple Pencil's double tap gesture to do something other than initiate a lasso select.

Fenby. I do not think this feature is useful enough to put on both tool bars.

Note input

Ok so here’s where the rubber meets the road. StaffPad only accepts note input through the Apple Pencil. I have written about this elsewhere. I would love for StaffPad, like Notion, to have a Mac counterpart. But it’s not designed that way. Because Windows operates on a tablet, Surface users of StaffPad do not need to distinguish between tablet and PC operating systems. StaffPad runs on Windows, period. macOS is a different operating system than iPadOS, so there is no way I can run StaffPad on my Mac.

Interestingly, the main PC score apps, Dorico, Sibelius, and Finale, have made no attempts at an iPad app. I find that we are in this weird fragmented stage with Apple software where nearly any productivity app (I am thinking iWork, the Omni apps, even now Photoshop) can run on any Apple platform and even sync your work between devices, meanwhile niche pro apps still tend to exist on only one platform (Pro Tools/Ableton on the Mac and forScore/StaffPad for the iPad for example). These niche pro apps take unique advantage of platform conventions (the ability to work with complex audio streams in the case of DAWS on the Mac, and the Apple Pencil in the case of iPad).

Maybe its for the best. But I can’t help but feel like StaffPad would be superior if I could snap my iPad into the Smart Keyboard Folio and enter notes from there, or boot up a Mac version and enter notes with a MIDI keyboard..

Because I can’t do that, it is imperative that StaffPad’s handwriting recognition is air tight.

Simply put: it doesn’t register for me all the time. While I am getting better at it after a month of practice, it has a way to go. Sometimes I write really messy and get surprisingly great results on first pass. Other times, I write as slowly and neatly as I can and StaffPad doesn’t convert the notation.

Fortunately, StaffPad’s rules for notation conversion are very thoughtfully considered. Unlike Notion, notes do not convert until I tap somewhere outside the current measure I am composing. This means I can stop and think as long as I want before moving on. StaffPad also leaves anything that it doesn’t recognize in my own handwriting while converting the rest. This means I do not have to worry about an ambiguous pencil stroke being converted into StaffPad’s best guess, and I can go back and fix it later. Speaking of fixing things later, there isn’t a need to be too careful, because notes that end up a line or a space to high or low can be held with the pencil tip and dragged wherever you want on the staff.

This video shows off the design, features, and note input of StaffPad in action. 

StaffPad’s design ingenuity continues to shines in the details. You are allowed to write whatever you want in a bar, regardless of if it fits in the time signature or not. StaffPad also allows you to drag the bar line to the right with the pencil if you run out of room. These considerations work well for my brain, because there is less cognitive overhead. I feel like I am writing with a pencil and paper, not a computer.

Still, there are times that I  have to try numerous attempts before achieving success. The StaffPad support team recommended that I do notes in one pass, articulations in another, and dynamics in yet another, until I gain confidence with the system. They also recommended that I try to write the notes at approximately the size they will appear once converted. This advise helped but I am still making more mistakes than I would like.

My wife is a professional artist. She uses the iPad Pro to do illustrations and design mock ups. In other words, she has way better control of a pencil than I do. I asked her to spend some time writing various different musical symbols, at varying speeds and sizes. She, too, was perplexed at which of her pencil strokes worked and which ones didn’t.

StaffPad’s help documentation (again, excellent) makes it look really easy. The examples of handwriting are really loose. As a percussionist who detests how other score programs handle drum set notation, I would love to be able to write drum parts as easily as the support documentation illustrates. No matter how hard I try to imitate it, I am getting inconsistent results enough so that I am reluctant to try these features again in the future.

While I am reflecting on note input, I need to acknowledge that StaffPad has, by far, the best implementation of erasing that I have ever seen for the Apple Pencil. There is no double-tap, or need to tap a button on screen to turn on the eraser. You simple press harder! It takes a little getting used to, and it is easy to press too hard when attempting to compose and erasing by mistake. But overall, I wish all apps would adopt this style. It is truly a dream.

Hard press to erase in @StaffPad is by far the best implementation of erasing with Apple Pencil I have seen in any app. It is even more seamless than if the Apple Pencil added an eraser to the other side. I’m seriously ruined for eraser tools in all other software. pic.twitter.com/fTJxDpsgVB

— Robby Burns (@robbyburns) February 13, 2020

Most of my testing for StaffPad included preparing for my recent band concerts. My Concert Band has 10 percussionists and some of my music had only three or four parts. I also have some flutes in my Jazz Band this year, and planned some repertoire that does not have original flute parts. Arranging these additional parts took place while I was on leave for the birth of my first child and was awaiting a return to school, where I would have only two weeks to prepare this concert before the performance date.

Headaches aside, the lightness and simplicity of StaffPad’s design, mixed with its direct note input, made this an indispensable tool for me in the past month. Projects that would have had more overhead using a heftier score editor like Dorico were a breeze using StaffPad and iOS. The iPad’s portability made it easy to sneak little additions to my work into busy days of carrying, holding, and feeding a newborn in one arm while sitting on the couch in my living room rather than at a desk.

Between pencil input and the tool bars mentioned above, there are a handful of features that are hidden beneath contextual menus that are achieved by long pressing on various places in the score. Long pressing in a measure allowed you to change the time or key signature. Long pressing on bar lines allows you to change their style or add measures to the music, add lyrics, text, or chords. These menus are very tastefully done, and as I have already mentioned, they have just enough features that they are confusing to dig through, but just enough that I was never wondering where something was. The lyrics and chords options are not as in depth as other score applications, but they were just right for my needs.

iOS-ness

There are features available to third party apps that I believe should be in every app. I was disappointed that StaffPad did not follow a few of these conventions.

Specifically, I wish StaffPad supported Split View. iPad apps can now share half the screen with another app. StaffPad only works in full screen.

This was frustrating for me, particularly in my arranging project mentioned earlier. I wanted to be able to open forScore on one half of the screen for a reference of the full score, and then compose in StaffPad on the other half of the screen. StaffPad customer support informs me that they experienced weird multi-touch results when StaffPad was on half of the screen and that it doesn’t work. But I would still like to see it happen.

You can use other apps in slide over view, which is where you drag an iPhone-sized version of an app over top a full screen app for quick reference. You can see if the screenshot below that this is really too small to be tenable for score reference.

Referencing a score is awkward because StaffPad doesn’t support the iPad’s splitview feature.

Playback 

Spitfire and cinesamples audio libraries, amongst others, are available as inn-app purchases. They sound fantastic! Given how seamlessly they work with StaffPad, it is astounding how easy it is to get good sounding playback. If only using advanced audio plugins with score apps was this easy on macOS and Windows.

That said, I am extremely hesitant about buying these plugins. These samples, once purchased, only work with StaffPad on iOS and cannot be used with any other program like they can be if you purchase the PC versions of these plugins directly from the companies that engineer them.

Conclusion

StaffPad is a unique composing application that leverages everything unique about the iPad to provide what I anticipate will be an indispensable tool for my work as a music educator. While the handwriting recognition doesn’t always work as I expect, it gets better with each update and also as I practice it.

StaffPad is elegantly designed and makes trade-offs that position it as perhaps the most natural score editor I have ever worked with. I am so glad that this app exists both as a tool for my professional work, and as a statement about what the iPad can be. I would recommend it to anyone who is looking for a score app that balances power and ease as long as they acknowledge that there is a learning curve and a price.

Want other opinions? Check out these reviews:

Scoring Notes: StaffPad wows with long-awaited iPad release and new free StaffPad Reader

Technology in Music Ed | Chris Russell: Working with StaffPad

iPadmusiced | Paul Shimmons: A Revolution and Turning of the Tide - Music Creation is Changing for the Better With StaffPad for iOS!

StaffPad Comes to iPadOS (Reflections on App Store Pricing and Touch Screen Operating Systems)

Five years ago, StaffPad came to Windows Surface tablets. StaffPad is a professional music notation application that turns handwritten notes into beautiful music notation. It is built around the stylus being the primary input, and because the iPad did not have stylus support at launch, StaffPad remained Windows only.

Multiple years into Apple supporting its own official stylus, the Apple Pencil, StaffPad is finally here on iPad!

StaffPad’s intro video sells itself, so I am not going to write much about the app here. Instead, I point you to…

StaffPad’s Introductory Blog Post

Download Link to the App Store

Scoring Notes Review - a must read if you are interested

Since the features of StaffPad are covered in the links above, I want to comment on two interesting aspects of this release.

First, the price. At $89.99, this is no impulse purchase. I find it refreshing to see a professionally priced app like this on the App Store. For years, the App Store has seen a race to the bottom type approach for grabbing sales. Users are so used to <5 dollar apps that the idea of paying for software has diminished from reality.

Increasingly, developers are finding that subscription based pricing is the only way to maintain software and put food on the table. There was a big discussion about this in the Apple community last week when beloved calendar application Fantastical released their version 3 and went to subscription pricing. As is customary when an app goes to subscription pricing, users of the application and bystanders alike were enraged at the idea of a calendar costing four dollars a month.

I couldn’t resist sneaking my love of Fantastical into this post. The interface is beautiful.

And the natural language input is one of many essential features that helps me get my work done more efficiently.

As a user of Fantastical, I was happy to keep supporting development. It is one of my most used applications on a daily basis and its features are essential to me having a full time teaching job, while also scheduling gigs, 25 private students, speaking engagements, and all of my other personal events.

Fantastical is what I would call a prosumer application. It offers more power to someone looking for an advanced and well designed calendar, and it has a wide appeal (everyone needs a calendar!). Four dollars a month is steep, but manageable. Now that the price is reoccurring, I do think it will appeal to a smaller audience, as each user will have to reevaluate on a monthly or yearly basis whether or not this application is continuing to be worth the cost.

StaffPad is very different. It is a professional creation tool. Much like Photoshop is essential to designers and photographers, score editors are essential to the lives of most musicians, composers, and music educators. By charging 89 dollars, StaffPad follows a long history of apps in its field, which are often priced between 200 and 600 dollars.

I have to wonder… if the iPad had more software like this, and from an earlier point in time, would users have adjusted their expectations and would more expensive professional apps be more viable? And if so, would the viability of such professional apps lead to more (and better) professional apps on iOS?

And furthermore, would Apple adjust to these trends? Apple still offers no free trial for apps (something that will definitely deter a lot of my music teaching colleagues away from giving StaffPad a chance). Not to mention that professional creative software has a tradition of volume licensing and educator discounts. Educators who would normally be able to afford a program like this for themselves or their class are going to be stuck if they are looking for the same options with StaffPad.

App developers get around to this in number of ways, an example of which is to offer a free app where you have to buy it as an in-app purchase after a week. Of course there is also the subscription model. I am glad StaffPad went with a more traditional model than a subscription because it fits within the tradition of how its class of software is priced. And my hope is that this just might convince more developers to bring their own apps to iPadOS.

Which brings me to my second point…

StaffPad doesn’t, and probably wont, have a macOS app. It is built entirely around stylus input. This is why it could only exist on Windows Surface tablets at first. I am thrilled it is on iPad, but this presents an interesting question for users of Apple products.

A Windows Surface user notices no distinction between whether or not StaffPad operates on a touch-based OS or a traditional point-and-click OS, because they are one and the same. Even as macOS and iPadOS move closer and closer together, this distinction has lead them to be products with very different potentials.

On the other end, all the other players in the score-editor field (Sibelius, Finale, Dorico) remain “desktop” applications that run on traditional point-and-click operating systems. With the power of the current iPad Pro, there is no reason these applications couldn’t exist on iOS, other than that developing for iOS is very different. None of these developers have shown any signs of bringing their programs to iPadOS any time soon, and I would suspect StaffPad has no plans for a Mac version.

I admire how Apple has held their ground about the iPad being the iPad and the Mac being the Mac. It has made both platforms stronger. But as the iPad becomes a more viable machine for getting work done, Apple has got to get a plan for how to solve this essential “input” question.

Planning Band Rehearsals with MindNode, A Mind Mapping App for macOS and iOS

I am starting my third week of paternity leave tomorrow. And while I am doing my best to ignore work at all costs, I am also reminded that when I return I will have three weeks with my students to work on their band assessment music. My long term sub (who is incredible) will have been working on it with them for three weeks by the time I return. Naturally, there is still a lot I want to accomplish with it on my own time.

To that end, I decided to get organized. When I organize large projects, I like to create a mind map.

In my brain, there are a lot of ways I want to keep kids engaged with our current repertoire. I have score study and lesson planning tasks, music and videos I want to inspire them with, strategies for rehearsal, alongside stories and verbal illustrations to communicate abstract tonal and phrasing ideas. I also have some behavioral concerns that need to get locked down so that our focus is at 100 percent. Personally, I don’t know any way to dump out these interconnected ideas and see how they fit together without a map.

MindNode is a mind mapping application for iOS and macOS that lets you easily dump ideas quickly into a beautifully structured map. A MindNode document starts with a single bubble in the middle of the screen from which you can create “nodes,” or branches, off from the middle. It is possible to create a vast tree of hierarchical concepts, topics, and ideas, without even taking your hands off the keyboard, much like typing a quick bullet point list into a note.

The nodes can later be dragged around freely anywhere on the map. When you move one branch, all of the others adjust around it dynamically, ensuring that your map is balanced.

Dragging a node adjusts the map.

MindNode has a ton of features that are beyond the scope of this post. You can add notes, images, and tasks to nodes, which you can see I have done in the map above. You can apply various different themes to the way the nodes look, or even customize your own theme. You can also view your map as a linear outline. The new version, MindNode 7 has even just added a visual tagging feature to help you better organize your nodes. You can read about that here.

MindNode is full of tools to conceptualize your map and format it so that it looks great.

One of my favorite new features is the Apple Pencil support. When you screenshot a mind map you can choose to annotate it like a normal screenshot or you can select 'Full Page' and MindNode will fit the entire document into view and cut out all of the user interface elements like menus and buttons. This way, you can mark up a clean copy of the file which you can then export as a PDF to an app of your choice.

This is what annotating a normal screenshot looks like.

MindNode uses Apple's PencilKit API to strip away buttons and menus, leaving you with a clean document to annotate.

MindNode's export tools are amazing. In the next screenshot, you can see all of the options. You can export the document itself as an image, PDF, or outline, just to name a few choices. But what I love is the option to export the nodes to the task manager OmniFocus or Things as a project.

Next, you can see a screenshot of Apple Notes with an exported MindNode PDF (left) alongside todo app Things (right). MindNode has neatly formatted my map as a project in Things with headings and checkable todos that I can later give due dates and deadlines too. Awesome!

In that screenshot, notice another PDF beneath my MindNode document. It is another PDF I exported. It is a score map of Greenwillow Portrait by Mark Williams which I am performing with one of the bands.

One of my goals for the quarter is to spend more time in the score. I like to occasionally study a score starting with the big picture and later moving to finer details. To help establish this big picture, I will occationally make a map that serves as a rough guide to a piece. One of my problems with drawing maps is running out of screen space on any of the four ends of the iPad. To solve this, I used Concepts, an open canvas drawing app.

It's full of features, but I am most attracted to the style of the pen tools and its ability to keep drawing in any direction, without being limited by the four walls of the iPad's screen. The document just keeps adding room to whichever side I keep drawing on. It's worth checking out if you have a need for this kind of drawing tool.

When I started this document, I ran out of room on the side of the screen at measure 19. All I needed to do to solve that problem is zoom out and keep drawing.

Happy winter and good luck preparing for your spring assessments if you are taking a performing group to one!

My Favorite Music and Apps of 2019

Things have been quiet on the blog lately. My wife and I bought a new house in late October and are expecting our first child any day now. Once I can find some time again, I have some very exciting work I am looking forward to here.

In the meantime I wanted to squeeze in a few annual posts I usually do around this time. I have had plenty of time to reflect this year, just not as much time to write. So my descriptions will be more brief, if not absent. I always find it easier to write about technology because of the matter of fact way I can describe what it does.

Favorite Albums of 2019

Johann Sebastian Bach - Víkingur Ólafsson

The Other Side of Air - Myra Melford's Snowy Egret

Origami Harvest - Ambrose Akinmusire

Vibras - J Balvin

re:member - Ólafur Arnalds

Finding Gabriel - Brad Mehldau

BEAT MUSIC! BEAT MUSIC! BEAT MUSIC! - Mark Guilana

The Fearless Flyers II - EP

Motivational Music for the Syncopated Soul - Cory Wong

Favorite Live Shows

Ghost Note at Creative Alliance - When you take the percussionists from Snarky Puppy, Mono Neon on bass, and other members of the backup band for Prince, you get unbelievably funky.

Nickel Creek/Punch Brothers at Carnegie Hall - Beautiful hall to see two of my all time favorite bands performing together for the first time.

Louis Cole at U Street Music Hall - Just Louis Cole, a MIDI keyboard, drum set, and Logic Pro. It was fun in such an intimate venue to see how he uses Logic to handle all of his arrangement tracks. His keyboard playing was FUNKY and his drumming was technically impressive.

Favorite Apps

Home and home apps - I would consider my current favorite hobby to be automating my home. When we moved to the new house this year, I added some of the following stuff to my home automation setup: smart dimmers for the lights, baseboard thermostats, floodlight cameras, garage door openers, diffusers, smoke detectors, and more. The Apple Home app is my master control center for all of these devices, but I also really like Home+ 4 as it offers a superior and more customizable interface in some respects.

I also love HomeRun for customizing my Apple Watch watch face so that it always knows which scenes I want to run at my house based on time of day.

Peleton - I didn't think this service could be worth the hype but I am really buying in. We have a little bit of space in the new house to lay out some yoga gear and do some body weight working out. We are undecided on the bike so far, but the Peloton app is full of classes for strength, meditation, yoga, functional training, running, biking, and more!

There are always new classes, many are live, and they are highly specific. I can filter 5, 10, 15, and 20 minute classes when I only have a little bit of time. There are restorative yoga classes and body weight strength classes that just need a mat. Best of all, the iPhone app can send to my Apple TV and Apple Watch simultaneously so I can watch the instructor on the big screen and track my heart rate on the watch.

FileMaker - I live by this app. I only know the scripting well enough to program my own keyboard shortcuts. But for tracking students, musical repertoire, assignments, and everything else, this is the power app solution for every problem.

AnyTune Pro+ - This iOS and Mac app has finally replaced Transcribe! for me in most cases. It has great Music app integration, native keyboard shortcuts, and a rich user interface. I love using Downie to take YouTube videos from the internet and then slow them down in AnyTune so that my band students and private percussion students can practice to a superior performance at a reasonable speed.

Timery - This is a super impressive and scriptable time tracking app for iOS that has a great widget and Siri Shortcuts support.

Reeder 4 - Reeder is still the app my thumb reaches for first when I have some free time. I love reading my RSS subscriptions in its clean user interface. Now that it has Instapaper support, I don't need to leave the app to catch up on my read later list.

Cardhop for iOS - This is the contacts app replacement you NEED to install on your iOS devices. It takes the frustration out of adding to and updating your contacts. You must see it to believe it.

IDAGIO - This subscription app and service takes the metadata problem out of classical music by properly tagging composer, arranger, soloist, orchestra, and performer information and allowing it to be filtered. You can filter by year, ensemble, composer, conductor, and even soloist.

GoodNotes for Mac - One of my most used iPad apps is now on the Mac. The Mac version uses Apple's Catalyst technology which allows developers to port iPad apps to the Mac. For this reason it exhibits some weird behaviors. But I don't need to spend tons of time working in it as much as I just need to be able to view my synced documents from a Mac. I use the iPad version to annotate my band seating charts. I write down things about posture, behavior, participation, and then compare it against a weekly rehearsal rubric at the end of every week.

It is a lot easier to input grades into our district's LMS, Canvas, on Mac, so it is helpful to now be able to see my annotated charts on macOS, rather than having my iPad and my Mac open side by side.

Which music and apps were most compelling to you in 2019?

Things might be quiet here for a while longer. In early 2020, I look forward to getting cozier in my new home, and learning what it feels like to be a father. I wish you a great year of music making, with all the best technology tools by your side. Happy New Year!

NPR Best Albums 2019 - Apple Music and Spotify Playlists

Things have been quiet on the blog lately. My wife and I bought a new house in late October and are expecting our first child any day now. Once I can find some time again, I have some very exciting work I am looking forward to here.

In the meantime I wanted to squeeze in a few annual posts I usually do around this time.

NPR Music Best Albums of 2019

I love compiling this list every year. I usually publish it earlier, and have a lot more to say about it. I will be shorter this year.

NPR Music Best Albums of 2019 - Apple Music

NPR Music Best Albums of 2019 - Spotify (I did not compile this one)

So far, my favorites off the list include IGOR, Diatom Ribbons, and Caroline Shaw: Orange (which I already knew).

Off last year's list my favorites have turned out to be Johann Sebastian Bach, The Other Side of Air, Origami Harvest, Vibras, re:member, soli, Heaven and Earth, and Dirty Computer.

I hope these albums help your spring forward into the new year with some new tunes! Happy Holidays!

Indexing Real Books in forScore (Christmas Edition!)

Those of you who follow my blog may have seen my YouTube tutorial and blog post demonstrating how to index long PDF files in the forScore app on iPad.

I realized earlier this week that I had never moved my Christmas fake books to my iPad and figured it was worth a start. In the past, I found pre-existing CSV indexes from the user forums but today I manually added the song titles inside of the forScore app. Fortunately there is a new (?) button inside of the bookmarks menu called Index that offers to look for a table of contents inside of your pdf and guess some of the song titles and pages numbers for you. This worked well! I had to go in and fix a few things but overall it was a good start.

Of course, I want to practice over the changes of these songs so I pulled up my favorite jazz practice workflow on iPad — sliding iReal Pro into split view — so I could see the chords and play along to practice tracks. Turns out someone on the iReal Pro user forums has made play-alongs for most of the Christmas Real Book that you can download into your library. Here is the link.

Happy Holidays and enjoy!

The automatic Index button in action.

Songs are now searchable by title!

Running forScore and iReal Pro side by side in split view.

App of the Week: PDF Expert 7

Readdle Launches PDF Expert 7, Free Update for iPhone & iPad

Today we are incredibly excited to launch PDF Expert 7 — our vision of what the ultimate PDF experience for every iPhone and iPad should be.

This week’s update to PDF Expert secures it as my favorite PDF app on iOS. The one and only problem I have been having with it for the past year or two was its lack of integration with the iOS document browser, which shows you the same interface as the Files app when selecting which PDF you want to work with. I wrote about this last week with reference to the OmniGroup’s apps getting support for the native file browser this fall.

Accessing the the document browser is a tap away at all times. A ‘recent documents’ option is also one tap away. This is helpful because PDF Expert does a great job of integrating different options for managing your PDFs. It has Dropbox and Google Drive support. It also allows you to store PDFs locally within the app. This is useful for me when I am creating new PDFs or temporarily making copies of them for the purpose of editing the order of pages, the text of my documents, etc...

The PDF Expert 7 interface. ‘My Files’ are locally stored documents which do not sync to iCloud. They can be viewed in the Files app through the PDF Expert file provider.

I like my ‘one true’ copies of my documents to live in iCloud. I will often take a scan of a stack of concert band parts, drag it into PDF Expert, extract the individual pages into separate parts (Flute 1, Flute 2, etc.), and then save these parts back to iCloud. I don’t want any of the extra files generated during this process cluttering up my documents folder, so its nice to have a quarantined area of PDF Expert where they can live.

The old PDF Expert interface.

The PDF Expert file provider, accessed through the Files app.

These local files can also be accessed from the native Files app as PDF Expert is a file provider.

Furthermore, PDF Expert gets its own iCloud folder where you can store documents by default. This is becoming less necessary because of how easy it is to access the Files interface, regardless of where your PDFs are stored.

As mentioned above, the ‘recents’ option makes it more streamlined to find what you want, no matter which of these methods you have used to store documents.

I am focusing a lot on the file workflow here because PDF Expert 6 already had the best feature set of any PDF app I have used on iOS. A clean interface, great editing tools, the ability to edit the text and images of a PDF (for real!) and more. These features are now all free. PDF Expert 7 introduces some pro features that come at the cost of 50 dollars a year. Some of these features include converting to PDF from Word or Excel files, and the option to customize the look and feel of the editing tools at the top of the screen. I am glad PDF Expert chose these features to put in the paid tier. It is just enough that it will be worth it for some users, but all of the good stuff is still in the free version.

I will probably try the one week free trial but will most likely stick with the free version.

These PDFs are stored inside of iCloud Drive, inside a folder called PDF Expert. Though this is becoming less necessary now that the Files app is integrated more directly into the app.

The new PDF Expert interface puts the iOS document browser. In this screenshot, I can directly access PDFs that are stored in my musical Scores folder, which is in my iCloud Drive.