[Harry777]

Here's a video of my lack of success with the annotations. Everything you see done is with the Surface Pen, not my finger, as I'm in Stylus mode. I don't know why one time the 'l' in hello moved, I didn't do anything differently from the other times. Please tell me it's not just me!

https://imgur.com/ZrVXazC

[Zubersoft]

Go into the annotation settings and enable "Combine freeform annotations". Is there a reason you unchecked that setting? That will group all of the drawings into one annotation which you can then move all at once, instead of having to move each individual stroke as a separate annotation. I added that option in case there were some users who prefered not to have that automatic grouping, but as you can see, it makes managing the annotation much more difficult. 

Also, be aware that in order to drag a freeform drawing, you need to press on one of the strokes and drag it. Pressing inside the bounding box but not on a stroke will result in the annotation being deselected, because you didn't technically tap directly on it. It's implemented this way because otherwise it would be impossible to work with annotations that are all close to each other.

Mike

[Harry777]

I unchecked the combine annotations option because I always find that when I want to move something with it enabled, it ends up grouping two different sections of annotations as one group. For example, if I write a fingering in that spans across two lines and try to just grab some of the fingerings from the second line, it gives me the whole thing, and ends up making rewriting the whole thing faster. I'll try it with the option enabled and see if it makes it any better!

[Harry777]

I wanted to let you guys know about something I discovered. It seems obvious, but I never tested it before, and I'm not sure what the cause might be, or if it may mean anything positive for the future.

When I use MobileSheets in fullscreen mode, I still get minor slowdowns, and it behaves somewhat laggily. But if I make MobileSheets a smaller window, the performance speed goes up drastically, no lag whatsoever. I guess it's because the computer has less to render?

I know it's not a huge discovery, but I don't know if it just means my Surface Book 3 really is just too slow to run MobileSheets in fullscreen mode at 100% speed (which is pretty pathetic considering it was $2200...) or that there's some kind of bug with rendering that slows it down as the display area gets bigger.

I usually use my Surface Book in clipboard mode, without the body attached. In this mode, it should be using the Intel graphics. It doesn't seem like Windows will let me tell MobileSheets to use the Nvidia card built into the keyboard, even if I have the base attached.

All of this is really just to say that I hope there will be continued performance improvements in the future. I just can't believe a $2200 computer can't run a program like this at full speed :/

[Harry777]

I mean, even with every graphic setting on the lowest setting possible in MobileSheets, it still lags basically any time I do anything. Is it really that the computer is that slow? I've played graphically intense games on this thing and not experienced any noticeable lag like I do in MobileSheets. I was even able to configure it to use the Nvidia GPU instead of the Intel one, and it ran even worse, somehow. Does anyone have any idea if I'm doing something wrong? Is this really a "the computer is just too weak" issue?

Don't get me wrong, I love this program, and I don't regret buying this device or the program, but something has to be wrong here. I refuse to believe that this is how it should be running. My girlfriend has an iPad Pro 12.9 and uses forScore for her music, and there's never even a single hint of lag on that. It just frustrates me that I'm on a device that cost twice as much, yet runs half as fast.

If someone has any insight to share, please do. I would love for MobileSheets to work as fully intended for everyone, all the time, and I'd be happy to help with testing to achieve that!

[Harry777]

I mean, look at the lag when I go to zoom in. It's completely unusable, and I don't think I should be told to just not zoom in, just because it makes the program work better. Again, this is with every MobileSheets graphic setting as low as possible, my PC on Best Performance, and plugged in, with a PDF that's only 5 pages and is only 166kb. Shouldn't it be flying through this? Does anyone else get lag like this?

https://imgur.com/dJlhy3S

[Zubersoft]

Harry - I assume you are on version 3.0.8, correct? Please try something for me - go to Settings->Display Settings->Image Quality, and set it to Low and see if that impacts the performance at all for you. I already drop the image quality down when zoomed in more than 200%, so this will probably not have a large impact on the issue you are encountering. As far as what is going on, I believe there are a couple of issues:

1) The Surface Book 3 has a 3000x2000 resolution screen, and MobileSheets will try to scale up the images to fit the screen. If you zoom in 2.5x, for example, MobileSheets is increase the size of the page by 2.5x, so suddenly it is dealing with a container that is 7500x5000, and the image that is rendered is 7500x5000 pixels as well. 
2) With each movement while annotating, the page is being rendered as part of the normal drawing, but this means a 7500x5000 pixel image may be rendered over and over, which is requiring a significant amount of processing power

My hope with Win2D is that it would automatically only render the part of the image that is actually visible on the screen, but it doesn't work that way unfortunately, so if I want it to only render a chunk of the page, I would have to implement that code myself. So there are a few things I will probably need to do to improve the rendering speed while annotating:

1) If "Draw Highlights behind Content" is disabled, I don't have to worry about blending the rendered image with the highlight annotations, so I can just render the annotations separately, meaning the page won't have to be re-rendered each time. This alone would probably eliminate all the performance problems you are experiencing. 

2) If "Draw Highlights behind Content" is enabled, then I still have to do a considerable amount of image processing in order to blend the annotations that are visible on the screen with the rendered image of the page. Having said that, if I can find some way to properly cache the blended pixels, then it might be possible to prevent the redrawing of the page each time, and only render the non-highlight annotations on top of the page. 

On Android, I'm able to draw the annotations separately from the image on the page, but I can still blend the pixels properly without having to redraw the image every time due to some of the advanced drawing techniques that are available. Unfortunately, I don't have anything like that in Win2D.

I'll work on implementing these changes for the next update. Thanks for your patience.

Mike