10-19-2016, 01:06 AM
Thank you, ALL, for the civil discourse. I'm on other forums where posts like mine would have prompted virtual tar and feathers.
To the points about improving my workflow, I simply wanted to point out that not needing to make changes to workflow or spend an extra 1 minute (e.g. to convert a JPG to PDF) is what makes good software even better software. Arguments against changes that eliminate those requirements (for the user to change their workflow or spend an extra 1 minute on a task) are really only helpful if the proposed changes would have a negative impact on other workflows. The changes I proposed do not (I don't think) have any impact on other workflows, so I don't see why anyone would argue against them. Being handed sheet music during a rehearsal and wanting to quickly and easily snap a picture of each page and then use MSP with my BT page turner doesn't seem like an outlier use case. Not wanting to take an extra minute (or a few, for multiple pages) to convert them to a PDF, while the band is sitting there waiting on me to get ready, also seems reasonable. And wanting to be able to quickly set it to page correctly to handle a coda also seems reasonable. Sure, I can take the sheet music home, scan it to a PDF, and make it all nice and neat. But, that takes more time and I really don't like taking the band's sheet music home if I don't have to. It's just one more thing to keep up with - and one that would be outside my normal mental checklist for band rehearsal. I like only having to make sure I grab my bass, amp, and tablet.
Mike, I appreciate the time you take to consider my requests and I understand the cost/benefit prioritization you have to do.
One last point, I do still think there's a bug in this. Last night my band called a new (to me, anyway) chart. I have all the parts in PDF. In my chart (the Bass part), just after the beginning of the song, I have an 8 bar rest where the chart has just saxes with piano accompaniment. We don't have a piano player currently. So, I decided to pull up the piano chart to have the chords for that section and play along behind the saxes.
So, now my 1 song has 2 PDFs in it. What I need to do is see the first part of the Bass chart, then the first part of the Piano chart, then the rest of the Bass chart. Since we already covered how I cannot do that with a custom page order, I imported the Bass chart again, so my Files list has Bass, Piano, and Bass again (the same PDF as in the first Files slot).
What I need to do is select the first file (which is 2 pages), set the page order to "1", and crop it to only show the first part of the page.
Then select the second file (4 pages for the piano chart), set the page order to "1", and crop it to only show the middle part of that page.
Then select the third file (which is actually the same file as the first file), leave the page order as the default (1-2), and crop the first page to only show the bottom 2/3 or so of the first page.
There is definitely some problem with this. From what I can tell, the problem seems to be coming from having the same PDF in the Files list twice. It seemed to be confusing the Page Order setting between the two instances of the same file. The first instance should have Page Order of "1" and the second instance Page Order of "1-2". But, when I tap on each file in the list, it now shows "1" for the first file, "1" for the second file (the piano chart), and then still shows "1" for the 3rd file. But, it actually displays and pages through them all correctly - showing pages 1 and 2 for the second instance of the Bass chart.
Of course, if there was a Per Song Page Order field, I could have just imported the 2 PDFs and accomplished what I want with no problems. :-)
To the points about improving my workflow, I simply wanted to point out that not needing to make changes to workflow or spend an extra 1 minute (e.g. to convert a JPG to PDF) is what makes good software even better software. Arguments against changes that eliminate those requirements (for the user to change their workflow or spend an extra 1 minute on a task) are really only helpful if the proposed changes would have a negative impact on other workflows. The changes I proposed do not (I don't think) have any impact on other workflows, so I don't see why anyone would argue against them. Being handed sheet music during a rehearsal and wanting to quickly and easily snap a picture of each page and then use MSP with my BT page turner doesn't seem like an outlier use case. Not wanting to take an extra minute (or a few, for multiple pages) to convert them to a PDF, while the band is sitting there waiting on me to get ready, also seems reasonable. And wanting to be able to quickly set it to page correctly to handle a coda also seems reasonable. Sure, I can take the sheet music home, scan it to a PDF, and make it all nice and neat. But, that takes more time and I really don't like taking the band's sheet music home if I don't have to. It's just one more thing to keep up with - and one that would be outside my normal mental checklist for band rehearsal. I like only having to make sure I grab my bass, amp, and tablet.
Mike, I appreciate the time you take to consider my requests and I understand the cost/benefit prioritization you have to do.
One last point, I do still think there's a bug in this. Last night my band called a new (to me, anyway) chart. I have all the parts in PDF. In my chart (the Bass part), just after the beginning of the song, I have an 8 bar rest where the chart has just saxes with piano accompaniment. We don't have a piano player currently. So, I decided to pull up the piano chart to have the chords for that section and play along behind the saxes.
So, now my 1 song has 2 PDFs in it. What I need to do is see the first part of the Bass chart, then the first part of the Piano chart, then the rest of the Bass chart. Since we already covered how I cannot do that with a custom page order, I imported the Bass chart again, so my Files list has Bass, Piano, and Bass again (the same PDF as in the first Files slot).
What I need to do is select the first file (which is 2 pages), set the page order to "1", and crop it to only show the first part of the page.
Then select the second file (4 pages for the piano chart), set the page order to "1", and crop it to only show the middle part of that page.
Then select the third file (which is actually the same file as the first file), leave the page order as the default (1-2), and crop the first page to only show the bottom 2/3 or so of the first page.
There is definitely some problem with this. From what I can tell, the problem seems to be coming from having the same PDF in the Files list twice. It seemed to be confusing the Page Order setting between the two instances of the same file. The first instance should have Page Order of "1" and the second instance Page Order of "1-2". But, when I tap on each file in the list, it now shows "1" for the first file, "1" for the second file (the piano chart), and then still shows "1" for the 3rd file. But, it actually displays and pages through them all correctly - showing pages 1 and 2 for the second instance of the Bass chart.
Of course, if there was a Per Song Page Order field, I could have just imported the 2 PDFs and accomplished what I want with no problems. :-)