03-26-2013, 02:15 PM
This is probably an Android problem rather than an issue with MobileSheets, but I figured I should ask about it anyway just in case there's a way to work around it.
Tonight I used my new Toshiba Excite 13 tablet for the first time in a two-hour concert band rehearsal. Prior to that I'd been using a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1, which worked really well, but I wanted the larger screen.
The Excite 13 also works well in general, and (despite the stupid 16:9 aspect ratio) the screen width in portrait mode is a full inch wider than the Galaxy Note, but I had problems turning pages with my Airturn 105 bluetooth pedal.
The page turns worked, but they were s...l...o...w... -- so slow that more than once I counted two full bars going by between the time the pedal press registered and the time that the screen was fully redrawn. The delay wasn't consistent; sometimes pages turned quickly, but sometimes they really, really didn't.
Interestingly, in the slow cases the redraw occurred in distinct stages, and annotations from the new page were the first items to be drawn (initially appearing on top of the current page!).
When I turned pages by tapping on the screen, the redraw was (consistently) so close to instant that I couldn't measure the difference, but that negates the point of having the pedal.
...although I may end up having to ditch the pedal anyway (and perhaps try a USB version?), for a different reason. It seems I was unknowingly spoiled by Samsung's interpretation of Android 4.1 on the Galaxy Note -- the Excite 13 still has 4.0 and is as close to vanilla Android as anything that isn't a Nexus-branded product. In particular, when Bluetooth is enabled at all, the virtual keyboard is unusable; apparently this is expected behaviour, but it didn't work that way on the Galaxy Note.
I know that MobileSheets has an option to automatically disable Bluetooth while viewing the library, but that doesn't help me, for two reasons: first, it's not the library screen that I care about, it's the ability to type text annotations on the virtual keyboard; secondly, at least on the Toshiba, once Bluetooth is disabled by it, it doesn't get reenabled unless I go into the Android settings screen and reenable it manually, which isn't viable in the middle of a rehearsal.
I don't know enough about Android to propose anything reasonable, but is there no way that it can configured to accept input simultaneously from both the virtual keyboard and a Bluetooth pedal masquerading as a keyboard?
Meanwhile, the plus side of the 13" screen and 16:9 aspect ratio is that there's /always/ extra room above and below the displayed page -- so much so that it would actually make sense to leave the overlay permanently enabled. Is that a reasonable feature request (as an option, of course, to avoid disturbing people who prefer the current overlay behaviour)?
...and while I'm asking about features anyway :-), one item that would help a lot is an arrow style for line drawing in annotations mode.
Thanks,
- Steven
Tonight I used my new Toshiba Excite 13 tablet for the first time in a two-hour concert band rehearsal. Prior to that I'd been using a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1, which worked really well, but I wanted the larger screen.
The Excite 13 also works well in general, and (despite the stupid 16:9 aspect ratio) the screen width in portrait mode is a full inch wider than the Galaxy Note, but I had problems turning pages with my Airturn 105 bluetooth pedal.
The page turns worked, but they were s...l...o...w... -- so slow that more than once I counted two full bars going by between the time the pedal press registered and the time that the screen was fully redrawn. The delay wasn't consistent; sometimes pages turned quickly, but sometimes they really, really didn't.
Interestingly, in the slow cases the redraw occurred in distinct stages, and annotations from the new page were the first items to be drawn (initially appearing on top of the current page!).
When I turned pages by tapping on the screen, the redraw was (consistently) so close to instant that I couldn't measure the difference, but that negates the point of having the pedal.
...although I may end up having to ditch the pedal anyway (and perhaps try a USB version?), for a different reason. It seems I was unknowingly spoiled by Samsung's interpretation of Android 4.1 on the Galaxy Note -- the Excite 13 still has 4.0 and is as close to vanilla Android as anything that isn't a Nexus-branded product. In particular, when Bluetooth is enabled at all, the virtual keyboard is unusable; apparently this is expected behaviour, but it didn't work that way on the Galaxy Note.
I know that MobileSheets has an option to automatically disable Bluetooth while viewing the library, but that doesn't help me, for two reasons: first, it's not the library screen that I care about, it's the ability to type text annotations on the virtual keyboard; secondly, at least on the Toshiba, once Bluetooth is disabled by it, it doesn't get reenabled unless I go into the Android settings screen and reenable it manually, which isn't viable in the middle of a rehearsal.
I don't know enough about Android to propose anything reasonable, but is there no way that it can configured to accept input simultaneously from both the virtual keyboard and a Bluetooth pedal masquerading as a keyboard?
Meanwhile, the plus side of the 13" screen and 16:9 aspect ratio is that there's /always/ extra room above and below the displayed page -- so much so that it would actually make sense to leave the overlay permanently enabled. Is that a reasonable feature request (as an option, of course, to avoid disturbing people who prefer the current overlay behaviour)?
...and while I'm asking about features anyway :-), one item that would help a lot is an arrow style for line drawing in annotations mode.
Thanks,
- Steven