Having a wonderful time

[catsittingstill]

I am having a wonderful time with my family over, though I am having trouble getting enough sleep.  Jake wants to stay up till all hours and game and I can't help waking up pretty early by local time (which is insanely early by Jake time since he lives 3 time zones over).  The weather has been... well, it has been nice and cool, I have to say, and we don't generally mind hiking in the rain, and I'm certainly happy for the farmers, but there are limits.  The day before yesterday it was so wet we didn't even want to go to the zoo.  Perhaps we'll do that today.

I got an iPad at our collective birthdays/half-birthdays celebration and I have gotten forScore and am absolutely psyched about it.  It makes putting together a set list ridiculously easy.  The app page only talks about sheet music, but it works with any pdf (well not HUGE ones but so far my 30 page King's Lute songbooks are no problem) so lead sheets work fine.  It can't display two pages side-by-side but turning a page is a matter of a simple tap on the screen.  You can associate a recording in iTunes with a given page.   You can set (haven't tried this yet) a starting pitch (like a pitch pipe, I guess) and a metronome for each piece.  You can highlight (tried this) type notes (tried this) stamp various music symbols (did this by accident) and set links in a long piece to handle things like flipping a couple of pages to get to the bridge (haven't tried this yet.)  It can take a picture of a score or something and treat it as a pdf and add it to your setlist or whatever (haven't tried this yet either.)

It can download files from my dropbox account.  That's how I got the songbook pdfs on there.  You can also use the browser to get pdfs on it (haven't tried that yet) or take them from e-mail (ditto).

No wonder people rave about this thing.  Obviously forScore is not going to be useful for people who don't care about music pdfs, but surely there are similar apps for other kinds of content.

Oddly, though, the iPad doesn't have a calculator, or an alarm, or a voice memo app.  Those strike me as oversights.  I mean, it's not a problem for me because my iPod is always in my pocket and it has those things but still.  Plenty of people are not going to have both.

Anyway, gotta run.  I hope you folks are having as happy a week as I am.

Comments

[laughingrat]

No alarm or calculator? Bizarre.

[sedge]

I know! They were the first two apps I installed on mine. Also, I found a front end for the excellent built-in dictionary, which for some reason doesn't come with a standalong app.

[catsittingstill]

Interesting; I didn't know there was a built-in dictionary, much less available front ends.

[sedge]

The dictionary is the one used for spell check, but it also has definitions and such.. I can't find the app I got in the app store; it appears to be unavailable now. Pity!

anyway, if you type a word in most apps, then select it, you'll see a list of choices:

Cut, copy, paste, suggest... And a right arrow to the right of "suggest". Tap that, and you'll see the define button—and that gets you into the dictionary.

Let me know if you want any app suggestions; I like GoodReader a lot. And I prefer the iCab web browser to Safari.

[catsittingstill]

Thank you for pointing this out. It's a pity the app you mention is gone. I looked into GoodReader and it does look like a good app; right now I'm using iBooks for pdfs because it was free but as I get more pdfs (I have a feeling a lot of our gaming stuff is going to become pdfs) I may need the organizational capabilities of GoodReader.

It's just that I can see there is a serious possibility of Kindle syndrome. Meaning where you drop enormous amounts of money because buying is so easy and no one thing is expensive enough to make you think twice. Not that this has happened to me exactly (I think I dropped 40$ one month, but I've been pretty careful.) But I think knowing it could is part of avoiding it.

[sedge]

Definitely. I noticed that potential early on and set myself a budget, because it's so easy to overspend if things are just a dollar or two.

[catsittingstill]

Kind of odd omissions, yes.

It also doesn't have a voice recorder the way the iPod does. I ended up taking this as an excuse to buy GarageBand, which is a bit low end for the kind of recording I do in the studio but will be fun for working out proof-of-concept arrangements. And it was only 5$.

[laughingrat]

Hmmm, it kind of begins to sound like a marketing ploy actually. Hmm. EDIT: The lack of apps, I mean.

[sedge]

I did go on a bit of an app buying spree when I got my iPad. On the plus side, since it's apparently impossible to delete the built in apps, I'm just as glad they didn't put in more that I didn't like—especially since I've bought some apps to replace several built in ones. Also, app prices are shockingly low compared to what I'm used to spending on a desktop: most apps are one or two dollars. I've spent five dollars on one, and spending $20 for a word processor gave me pause after that. And I'm saving up to spend $20 on a weaving design app.

[laughingrat]

*nods* It's really brilliant, as well as being user-friendly. I do tend to be (and sound) cynical about corporate strategies etc., but there's a reason the app thing is popular--it WORKS, partly because it's so inexpensive for many apps?

[mdlbear]

I really wish forScore was available on Android!

[catsittingstill]

I wish it was too; I now have both my songbook pdfs marked up in forScore with bookmarks for each song and everything. I'd happily put up a forScore version for people alongside the plain pdf.

Actually if I can figure out how to turn the TOC into links to each song in the regular pdfs, that might be a good thing to do. Surely Adobe Acrobat can do that. I just haven't had time to work it out.