[STEELBAS]

[*]Hey Zubersoft team,


I've been using the free version for about a week now and although I like the app, there's still a couple of features missing that I think would contribute to using Mobilesheets professionally in my musical rehearsals. The workflow is not quite ideal yet, and though I plan to buy it soon I'm still a bit hesitant to pay for the pro version. In sort-of order of importance:

1. There's some quite big black bars between pages when the Display mode is set to vertical scrolling. It would be nice if that could be an option or simply changed, I prefer the pages to connect seamlessly.
   
2. The Pen Settings could do with a number of changeable presets for different colours to quickly switch between them.
   
3. I read that you're already working on this, but the stamps could really do with vector images. Also a row of most-used presets to select with a single tap would be really helpful and of course the ability to add custom stamps. 
   
4. Tabs or another way to quickly switch between pieces I'm currently studying would be practical. (If there is already a way to do this I haven't figured out how it works yet, so perhaps this could be more intuitive in that case.)
   
5. The actions in the quick-action box should be editable. Especially with classical music, the audio playback feature will hardly ever be used.
   
6. Apart from the screen touch option to start/stop the metronome, there should also be an option just to show the metronome options screen. Also it would be helpful if, like the Pen Settings screen, some of the less-used options could be collapsed/hidden.
   
7. When in edit mode, for instance using the pen, it is very useful that we can still zoom in with pinching two fingers. However, it would also be useful if we could still pan the screen without changing out of the pen mode. Perhaps using three fingers?
   
8. As a classical singer, when I'm studying it's always useful to have a small piano or pitch pipe close. I now have the Pitch Perfect widget as a screen overlay using Overlays, but that's still a bit clunky. It would be nice if this could be included in the app, so that a metronome and a pitch are only a tap away.
   
9. The tool selection bar is a bit far away on the top of the screen. The smaller toolbox mitigates this issue somewhat, but it would be nice if we could choose the location of the larger bar.
   
10. The library in its standard form is not very classical-oriented, which might scare classical musicians off. I just found out that you can edit the tabs shown, but perhaps you could consider asking the user whether they prefer a layout with tabs oriented on classical music or popular music. (I.e. tabs like "Composers", "Pieces" (instead of "Songs")...)
    

[*]

I'm still waiting for them to arrive, but I'm hoping to use palm-rejection gloves like these with a simple stylus like this one to make easier notes. I don't have a special tablet with special stylus detection so hopefully this will work well enough, too.

Anyway I'll post more if I think of more features. Thanks for the app so far, I think it's important that apps like these exist on Android as well. There's an unhealthy Apple-fetish with musicians, especially classical ones...

[STEELBAS]

Well, I just bought the app, although the lack of response to this has not filled me with confidence that I spent my money wisely. I understand if my enthusiasm comes across as demanding, but a response would have been nice.

[Zubersoft]

I apologize for not responding to you sooner. There are a lot of emails requesting support along with feature enhancements, so I try to stay on top of it all but sometimes things fall through the cracks. There have also been a lot of serious issues I've had to investigate the last several weeks, so that has taken priority over handling feature requests. As for your requests:

1. There is an enhancement request that is being tracked to create a seamless vertical scrolling mode. I just haven't had time to implement the changes for this yet.
2. This is being handled with the annotations rework.
3. Same as #2
4. This requires a large number of changes to the application and how things are displayed and managed. I can certainly look into supporting this in a future update. My plan will probably be just to use the tabs like a bookmark. So switching between tabs will reload whatever song or setlist was loaded on that tab and will jump to the last viewed page. I will not leave everything in memory for instant switching though, because that could easily cause out of memory errors on devices, and also consumes resources in the PDF libraries. Hopefully that would be sufficient for your needs.
5. The right button is editable (long press it to change the action). Making all of them editable is certainly something I can look into in the future, but it would be through a different mechanism, because long pressing on those buttons brings up their respective controls (i.e. the audio player, metronome window, scroll settings, etc). An editor for this is definitely more complex than what is currently present.
6. I could look into adding layout options for the metronome, such as a minimal view to hide things. You can display the metronome by long pressing the metronome icon in the quick action box. That's probably the fastest way to get to it if you don't want to go through the song overlay. I can also look into adding a touch action to display/hide the metronome window if you think that is useful.
7. There is no built-in support for three finger gestures in Android. The three finger tap was something I had to write a fair amount of code to handle. Adding support for three finger panning is certainly something I can try to do, but it's not going to be easy, as code has to be added to stop the regular gesture detectors from processing the input when three fingers are down (i.e. if a pinch gesture is in progress but another finger presses briefly, this would cause chaos if three finger panning was in the mix and it immediately canceled the pinch zoom). These things sound easy from the outside, but when you have to start writing the code with all of these different detectors in the mix, it gets more complicated quickly. At the moment, you can perform a two finger tap to switch to panning mode, pan the page, two finger tap to switch back to the last control used and continue annotating. It's not perfect, but it's the fastest way currently available.  If you have a smart stylus and you enable stylus mode, then by default your fingers can pan and pinch zoom while the stylus annotates. This is by far the best way to use the app, but most tablets don't have a smart stylus available.
8. I do want to add a piano and pitch pipe. There are long term goals, but I need to get other important functionality in the app first. 
9. Hopefully with the annotations rework this will work a little better. I'm going to include a radial menu that can be repositioned easily. Hopefully this will be sufficient by itself, otherwise a toolbar may also be present.
10. It's not easy to just switch out "Song" with "Scores" or some other word because there are hundreds of translation entries that all reference the word "Songs". The app is translated into 11 languages, so in order to make some kind of change like that, it would take getting updates to all 11 translations, and I'm sure the translators would not be too happy about that. Making it configurable so you could use Songs or Scores would be horribly complicated, as every entry would have to be changed so that you could insert one of those words in it, code would have to be changed to dynamically insert the correct word and I don't know if that would work well with every language. I definitely get where you are coming from, and perhaps just a simple switch when the app is first loaded to change what tabs are visible would help. Users can control what tabs are used themselves at the very least (Settings->Library Settings->Tab Order).  If the tabs are the more important thing, I think that is something that can be dealt with without too much effort, but if the word "Song" versus "Score" is a big deal, I don't see any easy fix for that one.

I definitely appreciate your feedback, but many of your requests are going to require a fair amount of work and time. Zubersoft is a one-man show and I'm currently only working nights and weekends on MobileSheets, so progress is slower than I would like, but that will hopefully change next year as I'm aiming to go full time. This should help accelerate the handling of feature requests.

Thanks,
Mike

[STEELBAS]

Dear Mike,

Thank you for your detailed response. I apologise if I was a bit rude in my previous post—I admit I was a bit miffed when I noticed that you did respond to other posts but not mine. I see now that responding to my post was probably quite a bit of work in itself!

Sounds like the annotation rework will be worth waiting for!  As for some of your responses:

1. Great, looking forward to that!
4. I agree that the approach you describe is probably the way to go and should work fine. Different scores load fast enough on modern tablets to warrant not loading them into memory, I think.
5. I see. Well, glad I could at least pitch this idea to you!
6. It might be useful to add a touch function for the metronome, if just to have the option. Great if you could add a more minimal view at some point!
7. I did not realise 3-finger gestures are not supported by Android! Yes, I imagine having to hack those together is quite a hassle. I have dabbled in programming a bit myself and I realise how troublesome this could be. Unfortunately my tablet doesn't support a smart pen (in retrospect I should have bought one that does...), but I didn't know about the two-finger tap, so I'll try that out! Perhaps in due time some sort of tutorial would be a good way to alert users to these features, though I realise that's again quite a bit of work to produce! 3-finger panning would still be ideal, but the 2-finger tap might be the next best thing.
8. Of course, just glad to be able to alert you to the demand for it.
10. I see! Well, the song vs. score thing is mostly semantics anyway, so I agree it's probably not worth the hassle. Offering some presets for tabs could already be enough, I think, to make the app a little bit more classical-friendly.

I completely understand that my requests are many and sometimes big in scope, and I definitely don't expect you to add them quickly or even at all, I just meant to give you some feedback from the perspective of a classical musician to show you one of the ways in which your app is being used. You're doing a great job so far and Mobilesheets is definitely the best score reading app on the Android market at the moment!

[Zubersoft]

I usually try to respond to the easiest posts first and then progress toward the more involved ones. In this case, your post was in my list of things to do but the list kept growing before I got it, so I appreciate your patience. There is a lot of great feedback here which I really appreciate and I'll do my best to keep improving the app in a timely manner. It's always better to have too many great feature requests to improve the app than not getting any at all.

Thanks for the kind words!

Mike

[itsme]

@STEELBAS
4. creating setlists for the songs you're practising might be helpful
10. If you could get used to the existing wording within MSP you can help to avoid effort for Mike and confusion for long-time MSP users. Thank you.

@Mike
5. Making more of the quick-action box buttons editable would be very helpful and probably worth the effort.
This has already been requested a long long time ago.