[Josephine]

Hi there,

I have started using MobileSheets Pro (for E-Ink) a couple of weeks ago on my Boox Max Lumi. It's a great app, thanks for all the work!
Unfortunately, I encountered a problem with the annotations: I imported the pdf of my music sheet and started to put in some notes (fingering, etc.) with the pen tool. If, following these annotations, I move the tool circle, some of my last annotations vanish. It might be the cross stroke of the letter H, it might be a whole number, sometimes it's one letter in a word. It seems random, I can't find a pattern to what goes missing and what remains. It seems the screen is registering the input and displaying it, but it's not actually registered in the app, so when the screen refreshes the pen stroke is gone. However, if an annotation "has survived" one tool circle movement it seems to be safe.

This behaviour only occurs in MobileSheets, not in the other apps on the Max Lumi.
I have made a short video to demonstrate. If this helps please tell me where to send it.
Is there a way to fix this?

Thank you,
Josephine

[Zubersoft]

Hello Josephine,

If you can share the video with me at mike@zubersoft.com, that would definitely help.  If you look at the optimizations for MobileSheetsPro on the main app tray, do you have them all disabled? Just long press on MobileSheetsPro, then tap the option (sometihng like "Optimize App"), and then turn off the optimizations if they are currently enabled. 

As a side note, the device has different modes you can switch between at the top right which control how the screen refreshes and can have a large impact on ghosting. I'm not sure if you changed the mode from the default, so let me know if that is the case. 

Thanks,
Mike

[Josephine]

Hi Mike,

thanks for the fast reply.
I put the video on Google drive (it's 71 MB) and will send you the link in a minute. In the video I made a couple of annotations then moved the tool circle and repeated that process. In the first go only the dot in the fermata vanishes, in the repeat the "1" and the small decrescendo go missing.

In the MobileSheetsPro optimizations only the "Whiten Apps Background" was enabled. I disabled it, but the annotations keep vanishing.
Regarding the refresh settings: I usually use Normal Mode, but I tried all the others as well - nothing changes.

Thanks,

Josephine

[Zubersoft]

Thanks for uploading the video Josephine. It's very strange what is happening - it looks to me like some of the strokes aren't really being registered on your device. Moving the radial menu causes the fast drawing mode to be disabled for a second (because the fast drawing mode stops the screen from refreshing which would stop you from seeing the radial menu move), but then it's re-enabled after you release the drag motion. So what's really happening is, you are making your strokes with the fast drawing mode (which is just flipping pixels to black but is not really showing you what things will look like in normal operation), you move the radial menu which refreshes the screen, and you are seeing what MobileSheetsPro actually registered afterward, which is missing some of the strokes. I have seen some users encounter problems like this in the past due to issues with the BOOX libraries, so I'm going to create a new build for you that uses a newer version of Onyx's library. I'll send you a link to the build to your email.

Thanks,
Mike

[palosanto]

Mike I can confirm that I encounter this problem (missing strokes) quite often. I'm not using the radial menu and it happens only on the bottom of the screen when trying to annotate the last staff on a score. It reminds me of the problem we had months ago when the whole bottom of the page wasnt able to get annotated with the pen tool, remember? 
It's not as bad now but there's still a problem lingering around that area.

[Zubersoft]

Let me know if you want to try the latest BOOX libraries to see if it improves the issue for you as well. I can email you a link.

Mike

[palosanto]

Let me know if you want to try the latest BOOX libraries to see if it improves the issue for you as well. I can email you a link.

Mike

Sure, I'll be happy to try it and report back.
Thanks

[Josephine]

Hi Mike,
thank you very much.
I was only now able to test it. With the new libraries strokes vanish less often (considerably less often!), but the problem isn't entirely gone. It does not seem to be dependent on the position on the screen in my case.
All in all, it is definitely much better, though.
Thanks for looking into it.
Josephine

[Zubersoft]

Do you have the option enabled to "Draw highlights behind content"? If so, can you turn that off and let me know if that has any impact on the issue for you? Another thing you can try doing is turning the option to "Combine freeform annotations" off, which would treat each individual stroke as its own annotation.

Thanks,
Mike

[Josephine]

No, "Draw highlights behind content" was not enabled.
I turned "Combine freeform annotations" off, but nothing changed. Strokes still go missing.

Best wishes,
Josephine

[Zubersoft]

So the way the code is written, I just process input the same way whether raw drawing mode is enabled or not. So if you turn stylus mode off, and draw some strokes (there will be a lot of lag), you will probably see that no strokes go missing. So if strokes are not being registered while the raw drawing mode is enabled, that means Onyx's device just isn't reporting them to my app. I'm not sure what to do about that. I can report the issue to Onyx, but I have no idea if they will be able to reproduce the issue and fix something for me. I can't reproduce the issue on my BOOX Max 2 Pro - all of the strokes I make with raw drawing mode on are registered properly. So I don't know if this issue only occurs with the more recent BOOX devices, or if you can get different behavior on every device. Have you installed the latest BOOX firmware?

Thanks,
Mike

[palosanto]

Let me know if you want to try the latest BOOX libraries to see if it improves the issue for you as well. I can email you a link.

Mike

Sure, I'll be happy to try it and report back.
Thanks

So far so good ... I haven't had any strokes disappearing and the bottom of the page seems much more responsive and snappy, (it used to be sluggish).
But I'll keep observing because sometimes it doesn't happen until after being annotating for a while. 
Thanks Mike.

[Josephine]

Hi Mike,
thank you for looking into this!
It was exactly as you said - I turned stylus mode off and the strokes stayed where they should.
So I installed the latest Onyx firmware update and your latest MobileSheets update and started testing again. It is much improved! From round about 500 strokes only one vanished. That's great! I will keep testing, but right now I am quite happy
Thanks again,
Josephine