🔗 Black Friday App Deals

Every Black Friday, tons of apps go cheap or free on the App Store. I always use this opportunity to score a bunch of apps I have been waiting on, particular higher priced apps.

The best resource I have found for keeping track of every deal is MacStories. Check out their blog post on The Best Deals for iPhone and iPad Apps, Games, and Accessories. They have already started collecting apps on sale and will be updating it all throughout tomorrow and in the coming days. It catalogues apps ranging from iOS apps to Mac apps to tech deals on Amazon.

Happy app purchasing!!!

🗒 MMEA Session Notes – Working With Digital Scores

Tomorrow I will be presenting at the Maryland Music Educators Association’s Fall Conference. The session I am presenting is all about Working with Digital Scores. I will be covering file management, scanning, and score reading software such as forScore. I am also going to be digging in to some of the new iPad productivity features that shipped with iOS 11 last month. If you are going to be at the conference, come say hi!

Here are the session notes for the session…

Click here to view the session notes in Evernote!

Working with Digital Scores Session Notes – Robby Burns – MMEA In Service, October 20, 2017

Apps for Scanning:

Apple Notes App

Apps for Managing Files:

Files App

Apps for Working with Scores:

Notes on forScore:

Link to my blog post on creating indexes with forScore

My Book:

Digital Organization Tips for Music Teachers

Buy on Amazon | Buy on Oxford University Press

View the video trailer

About Me:

Robby Burns

Twitter | Blog | Podcast | Email

🔗 Why every orchestra is going to scrap sheet music and go digital

Why every orchestra is going to scrap sheet music and go digital | David Taylor Music:

This summer, my orchestra took a risk. Yorkshire Young Sinfonia became the first youth orchestra in the world to become 100% digital, using iPads and an app called Newzik instead of sheet music.

Cool story. Interesting that they are using Newzik and not something like forScore. Newzik is a really cool alternative but I personally do not have a huge need for reading XML files on my iPad. Most of the scores I work with are scanned copies of original paper. There are a lot of cool things you can do with XML though, like resizing the music and having the entire layout of the score adjust itself to the size you prefer. Neat stuff.

The 6 Best Automation Apps for iOS

UPDATE: I address my favorite automations and advanced workflows in a recent episode of my podcast. Listen and subscribe below…

Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify RSS Feed

Interested in learning some apps this summer that will make your school year easier in the fall? Here are my favorite automation apps for iOS and a very brief explanation of each. Don’t worry, I am planning on blogging about a few of these at length later this year.

Note: All of these apps take a little bit of an investment to learn but the payoff is HUGE. You will find yourself doing things on your iPhone and iPad you never thought were possible. If customizing your own automations seems daunting, every one of these apps has a user-submitted gallery where you can download actions that other people have already made.

1. Workflow

Download here

Workflow is an automation tool that allows you to string together various different actions so that they can be initiated with a single tap. The list of actions you can choose from is dense and many of them are easy to understand without any coding experience. You could do something as simple as open the camera, take three pictures, and generate a .gif file all in one tap (see below). This idea is novel of course. The real power is in figuring out how to take tedious actions that require multiple taps and apps and string them all up into one tap using Workflow’s rich list of integrated apps. One of my favorite Workflows looks into my Dropbox folder for a PDF of a seating chart, generates a copy, and opens it in Notability on my iPad, where I can scribble information about my student’s progress with an Apple Pencil. (See this workflow depicted below).

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Apple just purchased Workflow earlier this year. My hope is that this will allow users to better automate Apple’s own apps and even system level actions down the road.

2. Drafts

Download here

Drafts is a clean and minimalist text editor that allows you to send text to other apps. Think of it as the starting point for all text on you iPhone or iPad. It functions like a simple, text based, note taking app, until you swipe left and reveal a series of actions you can perform on the text. You can perform actions as simple as posting your text as a Facebook status, Tweet, text message, or email. You can also create actions so complex that they can include JavaScript. One of my more basic Drafts actions takes a list of items I have typed in a rush and imports them all into my Grocery list, which is a list I keep in the Apple Reminders app.

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3. IFTTT

Download here

IFTTT (If This Then That) is a web service that allows you to create If-Then statements that trigger actions to happen in apps. First, the user logs into all of their connected services (Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Philips Hue Lights, Gmail, etc…). Then the user creates “Applets” where something that is done in one service can trigger something to happen in another service. For example, I could say “IF I am tagged in a Facebook post, THEN save that photo to my Dropbox. Or “IF I favorite that YouTube video, THEN save it to my Evernote notebook and tag it videos.” Of course, you can get really crazy with home automation apps and do things like “IF someone mentions me on Twitter, THEN flicker my Philips Hue light bulbs red.”

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4. Editorial

Download here

Editorial is a text editor meant primarily for longer form writing. If you have a blog and an iPad, this app really shines. The app supports plain text, Markdown, and TaskPaper. Markdown is a syntax that allows users to create formatting like headings, bullet lists, tables, and expressions for the web without actually using HTML. For example, when I wrote this blog post, I did not click around in the toolbar to make each of the sections of this post into headings. Instead I just typed ‘##’ in front of each of them, and my blogging service of choice, Squarespace (which interprets Markdown), automatically did the formatting for me. See below for an example.

TaskPaper is an amazing app for Mac that allows you to create checkable todo lists using only plain text. The syntax that the app uses also goes by the same name – TaskPaper. It is a really friendly way to work with checklists without taking your finger off the keyboard to format things. See the example below to get an idea what TaskPaper does. TaskPaper doesn’t have an iOS app, so the fact that Editorial works with TaskPaper files is great!

Much like Drafts, Editorial also has powerful user customizable workflows that you can perform on your text. You could have it post to your WordPress blog in one tap, for example. My favorite Editorial Workflow takes a list I wrote in the TaskPaper format and uses it as a template for reoccurring projects in my task app of choice, OmniFocus. Certain projects that I perform over and over again contain similar tasks. For example, I always do the same fifteen to twenty things every time I put on a band concert at my school. I keep a checklists of these tasks stored in Editorial so that every time I have a concert, take a sub day, or go on a field trip, I tap one button in Editorial and it imports the list into OmniFocus, complete with due dates, flags, and tags.

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5. Launch Center Pro

Download here

Launch Center Pro is kind of like a springboard (the screen of apps you see when you unlock your iPhone) only it launches actions instead of apps. Actions can do almost anything. In fact, all of the apps in this post can be launched from within Launch Center. For example, I can publish my Workflows as buttons in Launch Center. I can create buttons in Launch Center that trigger IFTTT Applets. Launch Center actions can also launch apps, turn lights on and off in my house, take me into specific lists within my todo app, and more!

Launch Center Pro took me a little more time to get my head around because it assumes that the user knows a little bit about something called x-callback-url. This is a protocol that most of the apps in this post take advantage of but don’t quite expose to the user. With Launch Center Pro, I felt like I really had to learn this system before digging in. Fortunately, MacStories has a great tutorial that you can read here.

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6. Launcher

Download here

Launcher is a much simpler and friendlier version of Launch Center Pro. Setting up actions is very straightforward and a number of them are available as pre-built templates. Launcher lives entirely inside of a Today Widget, which is a special widget that you can invoke on iOS by dragging down from the top of the screen or by swiping to the right of your first screen of apps. Launch Center Pro also has a widget available that does much the same thing, but you might find that you prefer Launcher if the learning curve for LCP is steep.

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🎬 PDF Converter – an app for turning stuff on your iOS devices into PDFs

In the second most recent episode of my podcast, Paul Shimmons and I discuss apps for working with PDFs. One of the apps I mentioned, PDF Converter by Readdle, is an excellent solution for for turning content in apps into PDFs. PDF Converter turns a variety of data (websites, articles, documents, photos, etc.) into elegant PDFs and is available as an extension on iOS so it can be accessed from within any app. See the video below.

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The result doesn’t look incredibly elegant in this case because PDF Expert struggled with the ads on the website. In most cases, it does a decent job and even with stuff like this web article, I now have a text searchable copy of that article on my computer’s hard drive.

🔗 Gvido Music E-Reader

Just this past week I was recording a forthcoming episode of my podcast with Chris Russell (which should be posted within the next few weeks) on working with digital scores. We got talking about stand alone sheet music reader devices, in particular how previous devices were made instantly irrelevant when the iPad came out.

Click the link below to read about a new device in this class, the Gvido Digital Music Score. The article goes into depth about the technical details of this device. I still cannot see how something like this is going to take off when even the top of the line iPad Pro is only hundreds of dollars cheaper and can do way more. I have a Kindle Paperwhite and I do think that E Ink is beautiful and far easier on the eyes during extended lengths of use. Still though, I think I would choose my iPad over this any day of the week.

Early impressions of the Gvido music e-reader from the 2017 MOLA conference

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🎙 New podcast episode! – Working with PDFs, featuring guest, Paul Shimmons

In this weeks episode, I am joined by Paul Shimmons (band director, music tech in education blogger, and podcaster). We have a great time talking about our various workflows for reading, editing, annotating, and organizing our PDFs. This episode was recorded shortly after the announcement of iOS 11 which will bring a lot of new productivity features to the iPad. Naturally, we had to discuss these announcements and how they might reshape our PDF workflows next fall.

You can listen to the episode here.

🔗 iOS 11: The MacStories Overview

The best news from WWDC 2017 (in my opinion) was improvements to iOS 11, particularly the iPad productivity features. MacStories has a really good overview of all the primary features that are coming with iOS 11 in the fall.

iOS 11: The MacStories Overview:

Alongside the storm of iPad-specific features, the next version of iOS will also bring advancements to the Lock screen and Control Center interfaces. Built-in apps and services such as Maps, App Store, Notes, Messages, Podcasts, Music, Siri, and more received individual updates — some more comprehensive than others. The new ARKit and Core ML frameworks were announced as well, giving us our first tangible examples of Apple’s investments in AR and developer-friendly machine learning.

Despite a decade in the wild, in many ways iOS is still a young operating system. It’s good to see Apple not resting on its laurels, but instead continuing to reevaluate and redesign the areas of the OS that need it — such as iPad productivity features and the App Store. The ground-breaking potential for iPad users in iOS 11 shows just how much that aspect of the system has been neglected, but many of the other changes show how Apple’s slow refinements over years are paying off.

Below you’ll find a detailed look at what Apple is unabashedly calling “turning iOS up to 11.”

🔗 GarageBand on Mac Now Syncs Projects with iOS

Read Cult of Mac’s overview of the new GarageBand update for macOS. I think this is essentially adding the feature to the Mac version of GarageBand that Logic added a few months back. I played around with it for a few minutes last night, trying to sync a project between the Mac and iOS version of GarageBand. Unless I am missing something, this workflow runs into all of the same issues as the Logic feature that I wrote about when it was released. The process is not direct as you still have to manually prepare the file for syncing and create a duplicate copy whenever you go from Mac to iOS or iOS to Mac. And I really wish I could edit the audio on my iPad too. My iPad Pro is powerful enough!!!

🎬 Adding an Index for Your Real Books in forScore

forScore 10 adds a feature that allows you to add indexes to large scores by uploading a CSV file that links the song titles to specific page numbers of the PDF. This is especially useful for real and fake books that have hundreds of songs all associated with one giant file. A competing score app called unrealBook pioneered this feature to my knowledge. I used to keep it installed on my iPad just for that one feature, but now, I can do everything I need to in forScore.

I created a video tutorial of how to accomplish this. See below:

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You can find the index files I reference in the video here.

I don’t have a full technical understanding of how this feature works, so I tried to avoid explaining what is going on with the file. I think I am explaining it well enough that if you imitate my steps, you will be successful in most attempts. If there is anything unclear, let me know and I will try to clarify it in a future post.

One thing I did not cover in the video are the page offset settings at the bottom of the index settings screen. I have attached about 10 indexes to my forScore library and only twice did I need to use those buttons. In some cases, the CSV score may be offset by a few pages leading to the index not linking you to the correct songs. In these cases, I simply fiddled around with the plus and minus buttons until I got the result I wanted. I would be happy to redo the video with that step included if enough people are interested.