[BobBard]

First of, I absolutely adore MobileSheets. Without a doubt it is my favorite app!

In my church I play multiple instruments in multiple bands so I was looking into how I can organize annotations on my sheet music to have different annotations for each band/instrument. In the fantastic PDF manual I found out about annotation groups which is exactly what I need. But my use case is slightly different from how the function currently works.

For my use case it would be useful to have the annotation group be present on all pages. Currently if I make two groups on page one, I would need to make those same groups in the same order on page two to make sure that they don't get mixed up. For my use case an annotation group should be tied to all pages instead of to a single page, and it would be perfect if I could bind an annotation group of a song to a setlist so that when I arrive at the song I don't need to scroll to a different annotation group. To me this does sound like quite an architectural change that might break the current implementation, but I am interested to hear your thoughts!

Also it would be helpful if, when switching between the Annotations Editor and the Song Display, the currently selected annotation group would be synced. Currently when I switch to group 2 in the Song Display and then go into the Annotations Editor the group resets to 1. And when 2 is selected in the Annotations Editor and I click "Save" to go to the song display the group again resets to 1. It would make my annotation workflow better if the group stays synced when switching between these views.

[Zubersoft]

Things are going to be changing with the annotations redesign. I'm moving away from the concept of groups and changing to a concept of layers where you can turn on and off individual layers. The previous actions to switch between groups are still supported in a sense - when you press a pedal to switch to the next group, it will turn off all layers but the layer being switched to. When creating a new layer, you must provide a name (the default is Layer 1, Layer 2, etc), and an option is present to add a new layer with the same name to all pages of the song. So you would be able to do what you asked for. There is no connection between groups/layers and setlists though. I don't really plan on adding something like that, as I'm not even sure where you would assign the layer you want to use with a particular setlist. For something like this, I think you would be better off utilizing the song versioning feature which is coming in a future update that would let you use different versions of a song in each setlist. Then instead of using annotation groups/layers, you would just have multiple versions of the song with different annotations in each version.

Mike

[BobBard]

Awesome Mike! That sounds perfect, it is even more flexible than what I was thinking about!

The songs versioning feature also sounds really useful, I'm looking forward to that update!

Do you have an estimate when these updates will come! Are we talking about in a month, in a quarter or in a year?

[Zubersoft]

I have everything finished for the annotations redesign except for four things that I'm working through right now:

1) A snipping tool that lets you copy/cut content from a page and paste it (only works for PDFs)
2) A zoomed-in preview when placing stamp annotations to make it easier to see what is under your finger. I'm thinking I will hide this when a stylus is used as the same problem doesn't exist when using a smart stylus. I may make that configurable.
3) Conversion between embedded PDF annotations and MobileSheetsPro annotations so that you can edit existing annotations in the file, and optionally save all annotations back to the file (instead of saving them in MobileSheetsPro itself). 
4) Replacement for the nudge tool (still working through the details)

I was hoping to have this all done last week, but I keep finding additional things that have to be fixed and/or adjusted. I also have a considerable amount of testing to do with all this. Once I'm ready, I'm going to release a beta of it for interested users to test. My goal is to have the beta available sometime in the next week or two. The timing of the official release will depend on how many changes are necessary during the beta test. I also have to convert the changes over to the Windows 10 version along with a change of the rendering framework to Win2D. I'll probably look for a group of users to help test the Windows 10 changes as well. I want to make sure the transition to this new design goes smoothly, so I'm not going to rush anything.

Mike

[soenke]

Hi,

regarding

... There is no connection between groups/layers and setlists though. I don't really plan on adding something like that, as I'm not even sure where you would assign the layer you want to use with a particular setlist...

I think something like this would be very useful. I play trumpet and conduct brass ensembles.

Same songs often are used in different concerts. Setlist "local"/specific comments are required, e.g. if we agree in a concert to delete a repetition, in another concert the conductor wants to add different dynamics. Or I need to note the current players and their parts or who plays the solo this time.

"Global" comments to a piece/song are required, e.g. if you want to correct a mistake or add a general hint in a piece.

Hope that helps and that something like this can be achieved with the layers/versions update.

Best regards, Sönke