[NeoCZ]

After update, dashed pen lines are fixes. I also like new crescendo style, thanks. 

I still see eraser crashes. It doesn't matter if I use pan or touch, theys still happen. It seems it doesn't require any special steps to reproduce on my Surface Pro 5. Are you getting any crash reports related to this? I didn't import my database and files from original MS, I started with blank one and use placeholders just for annotation testing.

[Zubersoft]

I do not appear to be receiving any crash reports from your device. I'm not sure why that is... It's very weird that I can't reproduce the eraser crashes. I'm currently testing on my PC and a very slow convertible laptop. I'll try testing again on my Surface Pro 4 with the stylus. Are you selecting the eraser tool and then just using the stylus normally? Or are you using the eraser on the stylus?

Thanks,
Mike

[NeoCZ]

I tried using both eraser on stylus and also selsecting erase tool but there seems to be no difference. It also happens if I use touch to erase annotations. 

Is there anything I can do from my side to fix sending crash reports?

[Zubersoft]

I decided to install the actual release build on my surface pro 4, started erasing, and encountered the same crash as you. I was not seeing it with a build that I could debug. I'll dig into this, but it looks like I'm not sending any crash reports either, which would indicate that this error may be in some Microsoft framework code and is crashing the app in such a way that it doesn't even hit the exception handler which logs the crash. Those are the worst kind...

Thanks,
Mike

[Cmart]

For me it also crashes more frequent when using eraser(back of pen), however it still crashes sometimes without using the eraser. It seems pretty random cannot figure out whats causing it,

I like this crescendo style much better.

A few other things:

There is no option for rounded edges on lines. I kinda liked those in old version.

Can you add more staff options? I can only find the piano staff.

When editing in landscape mode the lines get thinner in relation to the ones in portrait. For example if i draw a line in landscape and then change to portrait the same line looks thicker in portrait. This is also true if i zoom in BEFORE entering annotation mode. The line becomes very thin. If I however enter annotation mode and zoom in AFTER the line thickness becomes correct. This also happens in the old version but I didn't bother to mention it cause you were working on the annotation rework.

Keep up the good work!

[Zubersoft]

Yeah, I'm working on trying to track down the cause of the crashes with the eraser, but it's not going to be an easy one since it is only occurring in the optimized build.

Are you wanting the start/end points of lines to be round versus square? That's not a difficult thing to add, I would just need to add a new setting to the shapes dropdown as well as a new entry on the radial menu for it. I think the bigger issue is that whatever label I use for it, I won't have a translation. I suppose I could just reuse the old "Draw Mode" label, but next to the label, I would show two icons as toggles: a picture of a short line with rounded end points, and a picture of a line with square end points.

What staff options are you looking for exactly? It was a lot of work to even set up the piano staff. I had to design vector graphics for the start of the staff, the middle of the staff, the end of the staff with one line, and the end of the staff with two lines. It took a considerable amount of code as well to handle creating those (as well as the touch interactions to create them). I'm okay with adding support for more things, but it's not going to be incredibly high on the priority list due to the complexity involved. While I do want to support some basic editing capabilities, MobileSheets is not really a composition app, so unless adding more kinds of staves will be beneficial to a lot of users, I need to focus on other things first. As a side note, I'm not sure if you are aware, but there are multiple things you can do with the piano staff:

1) You drag first to position the piano staff, wait for a half second once it's placed
2) You can drag up or down to scale the piano staff up or down as needed.
3) Drag right to specify the length of the piano staff. Once you stop, if you release, it will create it as is. If you wait for a second, it will use an end with a single line. If you wait another second, it will use an end with a double line.

As far as the line, you must remember that everything is being created in relation to the raw coordinates of the PDF page. So if you create a line with 5 pixels of thickness in landscape orientation, it's going to figure out how much the page was scaled up to fit the tablet in landscape orientation, and divide the line thickness by that amount when it's saved. So if the raw document page was blown up by 1.75x, the line thickness relative to the raw PDF page is 5 / 1.75 ~= 2.86. If you now rotate to portait, the page will be scaled up by a different amount. Say that it's scaled up by 2.3x. Well that line is going to appear as 2.86 * 2.3 = 6.58 pixels thick. So on the screen, the line will appear thicker in portrait than in landscape. This is correct though, because the page size was increased more in portrait than it was in landscape. Compared to everything else on the PDF page, that line has maintained its relative size. Making it appear the same size on the screen regardless of how the page is scaled would be incorrect. So I don't believe there is any issue here - the annotations are designed to scale with the page so they always maintain their size relative to the other things on the page. This does mean that when you rotate the tablet, you may need to adjust the tool settings though to get the size you want. This is unavoidable - I thought about ways of potentially automatically adjusting the tool sizes when the orientation changes so that the size on the page appears the same, but this might also be confusing for users, and the tool sizes in the settings increment by whole numbers which I did to make it easier to use. So rotating the tablet may makeit difficult to get pixel-perfect identical sizes with each orientation. It's best for consistency to create annotations all in one orientation if you need that.

Mike

[MartinH]

I'm also seeing frequent crashes when erasing (I've seen it at least with drag across and box modes), but I've had crashes placing stamps and some other operations too.

I'm seeing some strange behaviour with the copy/cut tool. I can paste the copied part of the score, but the quality is somewhat worse than the original (not a big deal, but noticeable). But I can't select or delete the copied piece. I can select the white square blocks the original cut area.

Regarding the selection tool, it seems that when selecting lines or highlights, it will select all lines drawn when the pen tool was selected, not just a single stroke. This is ok sometimes, since maybe I wrote a word that I don't want to select one stroke at a time. But in other cases, I made multiple lines in many different parts of the sheet and don't want to move all of them together. Is there a way to individually select a stroke?

As requested, I tried exporting the score that's not loading, but it just says "Generating file, please wait..." indefinitely, until I cancel. I tried running the 'Find Missing Files' operation, and indeed it was missing. It's looking for it in the root of LocalState, where there is a 0kb file with the given name, but the actual pdf is stored in a subdirectory.

The library problems might not be related to the new build, though, since I had a lot of problems with this when I first set up my library months ago. I specified to create subdirectories for files, but sometimes some weren't created, or were created in folders that didn't match the file names. I still have issues backing up and restoring, where the locations of the files in the backup isn't the same as in my LocalState folder. I can put this aside for now if we'd rather focus on annotation testing.

[Zubersoft]

I think I finally found the error with the eraser. I'll put out another build very soon.

UPDATE:
I have fixed the crashes, but there are still more issues that need to be worked out before I can release the build. I'm going to wait until I have these all taken care of before uploading another build. Thanks for your patience while I work through it all.

Mike

[Cmart]

Are you wanting the start/end points of lines to be round versus square? That's not a difficult thing to add, I would just need to add a new setting to the shapes dropdown as well as a new entry on the radial menu for it. I think the bigger issue is that whatever label I use for it, I won't have a translation. I suppose I could just reuse the old "Draw Mode" label, but next to the label, I would show two icons as toggles: a picture of a short line with rounded end points, and a picture of a line with square end points.

How about a checkbox to the right of "dashed" that says "rounded"?

What staff options are you looking for exactly? It was a lot of work to even set up the piano staff. I had to design vector graphics for the start of the staff, the middle of the staff, the end of the staff with one line, and the end of the staff with two lines. It took a considerable amount of code as well to handle creating those (as well as the touch interactions to create them). I'm okay with adding support for more things, but it's not going to be incredibly high on the priority list due to the complexity involved. While I do want to support some basic editing capabilities, MobileSheets is not really a composition app, so unless adding more kinds of staves will be beneficial to a lot of users, I need to focus on other things first. As a side note, I'm not sure if you are aware, but there are multiple things you can do with the piano staff:

1) You drag first to position the piano staff, wait for a half second once it's placed
2) You can drag up or down to scale the piano staff up or down as needed.
3) Drag right to specify the length of the piano staff. Once you stop, if you release, it will create it as is. If you wait for a second, it will use an end with a single line. If you wait another second, it will use an end with a double line.

I had no idea it was so much work behind. Don't bother then.
Maybe just a empty five line staff when or if you get the time. I use this sometimes to write in an ornament or improvisation. I will try to add this as a custom stamp, that might work right?

[Zubersoft]

MartinH - If you using the snipping tool, that is going to copy an image from part of the page and insert that image into the underlying PDF itself. The reason it does this is because MobileSheetsPro can't store image data in the database (it would require too much space), so it relies on the PDF to store the image. If you want to be able to edit the image after pasting it, you have to go to the Settings popup and enable the option to edit embedded PDF annotations. Just be aware that this raises the complexity of what MobileSheetsPro has to do, as it has to convert the PDF annotations into MobileSheetsPro annotations (in a sense) so they can be managed in the editor. This can also result in slower saving, as the PDF has to be updated if any embedded annotation is modified. As far as the lower quality, I noticed that too - as far as I can tell, it's due to limitations with the PDF library I'm using. When I give it a high quality image and ask it to insert it into the PDF, it seems to lower the quality of the image. There really doesn't seem to be much I can do about it. I should mention that the same code on Android works much better (using the Android PDF library from the same company). I may have to bring this issue up with them to see if they can improve the Windows 10 implementation.

As far as your question about the selection tool, freeform annotations are combined when drawing (if the active tool is not switched) in order to make them easier to manage and to improve performance. If you don't like this, go to the Settings popup and uncheck the option to combine freeform annotations. Then you can select and modify individual strokes. If the freeform annotation is combined, I don't store the individual strokes - it's all one continuous section of data and rendered as one path.

As far as the file issue, it's definitely not good that it just displays "Generating file, please wait..." indefinitely with a 0kb file. I'll have to look into that. For now, let's focus on the annotations changes.

Cmart - Yes, an option like that should work. You can always add your own stamps (either image files or svg). If you can find a vector graphics file (svg) with the five lines of a staff, that should work well, as you can scale it up or down as needed without a loss in quality. Otherwise an image file will suffice.

Mike

[BRX]

The piano staff is great. But I can't figure out how to change size or length (or it's not working).

I concur it would be useful to have not only the piano staff but also just a treble staff, a bass staff and a staff without those for
the musicians who don't play piano. Can't you reuse the piano staff for these so it's not so much trouble?

[BRX]

(I posted this one in the wrong thread. Sorry and thanks Geoff)

Hi, I don't have crashes and bugs to report yet. But my first impression: Impressive rework of the annotations. 

I have been mostly using the pen feature with an rectangle and white fills to edit out unwanted parts before. I couldn't find it at the expected position any more and think you moved that to the marker section where you can achieve the same effect with white and opacity at 100%.

It's your design decision, but since there might be more people looking for it make some "forms" like rectangle, circle etc. in the pen section, too?

Also, not on topic of the annotations rework per se, but since I had to cheat again the unnecessary "internal move of the files" of MSP when I want to use an already existing data directory. Installing the beta on my devices made me wish again for an option to skip this moving process. It's so much quicker to use the existing data directory with the sheets and just to replace the mobilesheets.db than to backup and restore a big directory with many sheets (even if I have still to restore the preferences by hand). 

Currently I always have to remember first to rename the existing data directory and make an empty data directory with the old name, only then change the dir in MSP, then copy the mobilesheets.db to its destination and then delete the new directory and replace it with the old one with the old name. (I'm writing this up as a reminder for myself and advice for users who want to avoid complete backup/restore for setting up new or alternative installations of MSP).

[Zubersoft]

The pen tool is now only for creating freeform annotations as that is what the majority of users will need. If you want to create a white rectangle, you have two options - either use the highlighter tool, or go to the shapes and select "Rectangle" and then set it as white. If you look at the toolbar at the top, line is the default shape tool, but you can tap that to display the settings and switch to rectangle and then set it with a white fill. Then all you would need to do is switch between the pen tool and that. Don't forget that you can add the white rectangle to the favorites which are accessible both through the favorites dropdown/popup (if you click the arrow on the radial menu for favorites or long press it) or on the command bar. So there are lots of ways to get quick access to the tools you regularly use the most. I don't plan on adding a drawing mode to the pen tool, as it's more intuitive for new users to look for that under shapes (in my opinion).

I do plan on adding something to help users who want to be able to change the storage location without having to move the files - I just need to make sure I handle it appropriately and provide sufficient warnings to the user before doing that. This change is still present in my bug tracking system - I've just been trying to get all these annotations done first.

As far as adding additional types of staves - yes, I can certainly modify my current SVG files to give users those options. This just requires a lot of additional code and UI options to switch between them along with changes to the database to track the different kind of staff being used. If this turns out to be really important to users, then I can work on making those changes sooner. Right now, I really would like to focus on getting the current functionality ready for release so that users can start benefitting from the new design and other changes sooner. Users can always add their own svg files as custom stamps to solve this issue sooner.

Thanks,
Mike

[Zubersoft]

I've uploaded a new build with many fixes including:

1) Better memory management and fixes for random crashes
2) Previously, editing any annotation's properties (specifically those with sliders) would cause many undo/redo entries to be created. This would make it extremely tedious to undo changes made with the sliders. Now, only one undo entry is created once the user releases the slider.
3) Fixed song sorting issue where fields after title were ignored for sorting purposes even if "Use formatted title for sorting" is enabled
4) Fixed copying and pasting annotations between different songs. Disabled copying of embedded PDF annotations.
5) Fixed issue with resizing rectangle using bottom-right corner
6) Edit popup window now displays below the edit bar if there is room on the screen. This ensures that the popup window doesn't cover the annotation while properties are being changed.
7) Edit bar is now repositioned after resizing annotations
8) Fixed resizing of lines so that they now redraw correctly after the start or end point is moved.
9) Text now wraps in the settings popup for labels that are too long (which was happening with some languages)
10) Fixed radial menu to handle longer labels in other languages.
11) Fixed stamp dropdown so that if the application window is too small, it will shrink the preview or hide it entirely if needed so that the dropdown doesn't go off the screen.
12) Fixed issue with changing stamp colors for user provided bitmaps and svgs. Stamp color selection will also now correctly show the opacity.

Known issues:
1) Piano staff tool is no longer allowing it to be dragged around before dragging the width (most likely due to the changes to the crescendo tool)
2) Radial menu cannot be dragged to the edges of the screen when collapsed
3) Some toolbar items can be selected with a right-click when they shouldn't be (i.e. undo and redo)

Hopefully this build will be a lot more stable for users.

Mike

[MartinH]

Wow, impressive list of fixed in a short time!

I just tried the updated version. In a few minutes of testing, I haven't seen any crashes from using the eraser or other tools.

I am getting one consistent crash, though. About a minute after I start editing, a dialog with "Saving Annotations" pops up, and MSP crashes.