macOS

New Software Coming from Apple (And What You Can Do With It)

Its been a busy few weeks as I have been wrapping up the end of a tough school year. While I am late to getting this week’s podcast episode out, I have been working on this site and have a bunch of content to share in the coming week.

I managed to sneak in enough time during the last week of school to watch Apple’s WWDC Keynote and to talk about it on Music Ed Tech Talk with Craig McClellan (cohost of my other podcast, The Class Nerd).

It was an opportunity to take a nice break from the challenging end-of-year procedures, and to think about how Apple’s fall software updates will impact how I get work done in the classroom. Listen below.

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Robby and Craig break down the announcements from Apple's Word Wide Developer Conference and discuss how teachers might use the upcoming features to their latest software updates.

Show Notes:

Album of the Week: Robby - Bones by Michael Mayo Craig McClellan - Sour by Olivia Rodrigo

App of the Week: Robby - Timery for the Mac Craig McClellan - Music Harbor

Tech Tip of the Week: Robby - Transpose Chrome Extension Craig McClellan - Feedbin

Where to Find Us: Robby - Twitter | Blog | Book
Craig McClellan - Twitter

Please don't forget to rate the show and share it with others!

🔗 New Version of Final Cut Pro X Has a 90 Day Free Trial (Which You Can Renew Even if You Already Took Advantage of the FCPX 90 Day Free Trial!)

New version of Final Cut Pro X out!

From Apple Newsroom:

Final Cut Pro X updated with significant workflow improvements:

Today Apple is updating Final Cut Pro X with powerful new features designed to enhance remote workflows and speed up editing for content creators. Improvements in creating and managing proxy media provide editors with portability and performance when working with large resolution formats, or when collaborating remotely. New social media tools automate video cropping in square, vertical, and other custom sizes for popular social media platforms, and new workflow improvements enhance the versatility and performance of Final Cut Pro — making the Mac stronger than ever for all video editors and motion graphics artists.

Teachers rejoice! If you are looking to make online lesson content or virtual band/orchestra/choir/whatever videos this school year, look no further than Final Cut Pro X.

If you were already taking advantage of their 90 day free trial, guess what? They just released a new version, and you can renew your trial with the update!

And if you decide to buy, don't forget to purchase it with Apple's Pro Apps Bundle for Education.

My Favorite Music and Apps of 2019

Things have been quiet on the blog lately. My wife and I bought a new house in late October and are expecting our first child any day now. Once I can find some time again, I have some very exciting work I am looking forward to here.

In the meantime I wanted to squeeze in a few annual posts I usually do around this time. I have had plenty of time to reflect this year, just not as much time to write. So my descriptions will be more brief, if not absent. I always find it easier to write about technology because of the matter of fact way I can describe what it does.

Favorite Albums of 2019

Johann Sebastian Bach - Víkingur Ólafsson

The Other Side of Air - Myra Melford's Snowy Egret

Origami Harvest - Ambrose Akinmusire

Vibras - J Balvin

re:member - Ólafur Arnalds

Finding Gabriel - Brad Mehldau

BEAT MUSIC! BEAT MUSIC! BEAT MUSIC! - Mark Guilana

The Fearless Flyers II - EP

Motivational Music for the Syncopated Soul - Cory Wong

Favorite Live Shows

Ghost Note at Creative Alliance - When you take the percussionists from Snarky Puppy, Mono Neon on bass, and other members of the backup band for Prince, you get unbelievably funky.

Nickel Creek/Punch Brothers at Carnegie Hall - Beautiful hall to see two of my all time favorite bands performing together for the first time.

Louis Cole at U Street Music Hall - Just Louis Cole, a MIDI keyboard, drum set, and Logic Pro. It was fun in such an intimate venue to see how he uses Logic to handle all of his arrangement tracks. His keyboard playing was FUNKY and his drumming was technically impressive.

Favorite Apps

Home and home apps - I would consider my current favorite hobby to be automating my home. When we moved to the new house this year, I added some of the following stuff to my home automation setup: smart dimmers for the lights, baseboard thermostats, floodlight cameras, garage door openers, diffusers, smoke detectors, and more. The Apple Home app is my master control center for all of these devices, but I also really like Home+ 4 as it offers a superior and more customizable interface in some respects.

I also love HomeRun for customizing my Apple Watch watch face so that it always knows which scenes I want to run at my house based on time of day.

Peleton - I didn't think this service could be worth the hype but I am really buying in. We have a little bit of space in the new house to lay out some yoga gear and do some body weight working out. We are undecided on the bike so far, but the Peloton app is full of classes for strength, meditation, yoga, functional training, running, biking, and more!

There are always new classes, many are live, and they are highly specific. I can filter 5, 10, 15, and 20 minute classes when I only have a little bit of time. There are restorative yoga classes and body weight strength classes that just need a mat. Best of all, the iPhone app can send to my Apple TV and Apple Watch simultaneously so I can watch the instructor on the big screen and track my heart rate on the watch.

FileMaker - I live by this app. I only know the scripting well enough to program my own keyboard shortcuts. But for tracking students, musical repertoire, assignments, and everything else, this is the power app solution for every problem.

AnyTune Pro+ - This iOS and Mac app has finally replaced Transcribe! for me in most cases. It has great Music app integration, native keyboard shortcuts, and a rich user interface. I love using Downie to take YouTube videos from the internet and then slow them down in AnyTune so that my band students and private percussion students can practice to a superior performance at a reasonable speed.

Timery - This is a super impressive and scriptable time tracking app for iOS that has a great widget and Siri Shortcuts support.

Reeder 4 - Reeder is still the app my thumb reaches for first when I have some free time. I love reading my RSS subscriptions in its clean user interface. Now that it has Instapaper support, I don't need to leave the app to catch up on my read later list.

Cardhop for iOS - This is the contacts app replacement you NEED to install on your iOS devices. It takes the frustration out of adding to and updating your contacts. You must see it to believe it.

IDAGIO - This subscription app and service takes the metadata problem out of classical music by properly tagging composer, arranger, soloist, orchestra, and performer information and allowing it to be filtered. You can filter by year, ensemble, composer, conductor, and even soloist.

GoodNotes for Mac - One of my most used iPad apps is now on the Mac. The Mac version uses Apple's Catalyst technology which allows developers to port iPad apps to the Mac. For this reason it exhibits some weird behaviors. But I don't need to spend tons of time working in it as much as I just need to be able to view my synced documents from a Mac. I use the iPad version to annotate my band seating charts. I write down things about posture, behavior, participation, and then compare it against a weekly rehearsal rubric at the end of every week.

It is a lot easier to input grades into our district's LMS, Canvas, on Mac, so it is helpful to now be able to see my annotated charts on macOS, rather than having my iPad and my Mac open side by side.

Which music and apps were most compelling to you in 2019?

Things might be quiet here for a while longer. In early 2020, I look forward to getting cozier in my new home, and learning what it feels like to be a father. I wish you a great year of music making, with all the best technology tools by your side. Happy New Year!

Integrating Luna Display Into the Classroom

My wife gave me a Luna Display for my birthday and I have been really impressed with it so far. Luna is a USB-C dongle that plugs into a Mac. Using the companion app on iPad, you can access the entirety of macOS, wirelessly. 

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I cannot wait to use this device this coming school year. I teach in about five different classrooms which makes transporting my Mac cumbersome. It is heavy, always running out of battery, and is missing some of my iOS music apps like forScore and Tonal Energy. The light form factor of my iPad Pro is perfect for toting around the building in one hand.

There are a few problems with this. I am still faster on macOS for one. And more importantly, there is software on the Mac that I cannot take full advantage of on the iPad. I depend heavily on FileMaker for a tracking student data, assessments, and assignments. I have discussed that workflow on two episodes of The Class Nerd podcast. This episode on tracking student data and this episode, which is a bit miscellaneous. For whatever reason, keyboard input on certain parts of the user interface is slow on FileMaker Go, the iOS version of the app. Even though I can do 90 percent of the things I need to with my database on iOS, the typing speed slows me down.

Luna Display puts macOS right on the screen of my iPad.

Luna Display puts macOS right on the screen of my iPad.

It is for reasons like this that I am thrilled to use Luna Display in school next year. The experience of using the app is so smooth that at times I forget I am not using my Mac. Are there issues? Tons. But I stop to wonder every now and then why it is again that macOS can’t work with touch.

I also use a score editing app called Dorico on my Mac. Not as often as FileMaker, but enough that it is sorely missed on iOS. I have not tried to operate this application on the Luna Display but in full screen mode I suspect it isn’t so bad. Once I give it a shot I will report back.

iOS apps I would love to see come to the Mac, a musician’s perspective

There has been a lot of buzz lately around ‘Marzipan,’ a set of developer tools that Apple is making to help third party developers more easily port their iOS apps to macOS. It is heavily rumored that Apple will detail this initiative at their developer conference, WWDC, this June (during the keynote on June 3rd).

Last year at WWDC, Apple unveiled four Mac apps that use this new set of tools to bring iPad-like versions of iOS apps to the Mac. The apps launched were Home, Stocks, Voice Memos, and News. The apps have been met with much criticism for their lack of Mac-likeness. For example, when you double click a news article in the News app, you can't see an article in a separate window, a behavior you would expect from the Mail app or Notes app on Mac. Likewise, the Home app, when setting up a time based automation displays they iOS style date picker, with scrollable numbers, rather than the calendar like interface that you would see when selecting a date in traditional Mac apps.

I agree that these four Mac apps are garbage, but I would much rather have the utility of them than not. Even if all these Mac apps do are act like iPad apps that accept input from a cursor instead of a finger, I would still kill to have any of the following on macOS:

-Tonal Energy Tuner. There are no tuning drone based apps, even on the web, that do 1/100th of what this iOS app does. My Mac is my primary device for sharing audio and visuals with my students during class. This would get used every single day.

-forScore. I have a weird way of managing my digital sheet music using the file system of my Mac, but then importing duplicate copies into my iPad’s forScore library. It would be really nice to have one place where this is all managed across all devices. Of course, this would require forScore to sync a library across devices, which the team has told me is too difficult a task to prioritize currently.

-Twitter. Twitter killed their Mac app recently and as someone who recently started using their app on iOS (Tweetbot is still far better but Twitter no longer provides the proper APIs for them to stay up to date on modern features), I would really prefer to not use the web browser on the Mac.

-Apollo. To my knowledge, there has never been a good Reddit client on any non-mobile device. Apollo is great.

-Facebook Messenger. I hate Facebook but it is a necessary communication tool. I would love to use it for that without going to their stupid website ever again.

-Overcast. My favorite podcast player. Would love to have it on Mac.

-Health. An app that excels in showing me data on graphs and charts sure would be useful on the big screen of a Mac.

-Due. My favorite reminder app is already on Mac but it looks gross.

-Instapaper. I use ReadKit on the Mac as an Instapaper client on Mac now, but would not mind something more minimal. Instapaper is the perfect candidate for a Marzipan app for its simplicity.

-Instagram. Who wouldn’t want this on Mac?

-Tempo. There is only one good metronome app on the Mac (Dr. Betotte). Opening up UIKit to Mac developers would bring a whole lot of competition in this space. Frozen Ape’s Tempo would be my first choice to get ported over.

-AnyList. Their Mac app is already just a gross port of their iOS app. Using Apple’s tools would surely make it prettier and more responsive.

-Ferrite Recording Studio. My podcast audio editor of choice is only on iPad. It sure would be cool to use these tools on a bigger screen with keyboard and mouse.

🗒 Road Trip!!! Off to the Tennessee Music Educators Association Conference!

I am pumped to be spending the next four days in Nashville to present at the Tennessee Music Educators Association Conference. I am presenting three sessions tomorrow, Friday, April 13th. One of these sessions is brand new and focused entirely on teaching intonation to student musicians with the support of the Tonal Energy tuning app. Scroll down for links to all of my session notes.

Road Trip!!!

My wife and I are making a road trip out of this event. In addition to eating and drinking our way through the city over the next few days, I am excited to be seeing old friends and new. Tomorrow night we will be seeing the Nashville Symphony Orchestra performing a program of Elgar, Mozart, and Bach. I will get to watch a friend of mine from grad school, Joshua Hickman (Principal Timpanist), performing with the ensemble.

I will also get to meet friend, Craig McClellan, in person for the first time. Craig has an awesome education/technology blog called The Class Nerd and has been a recent regular on my podcast. (Listen here and here).

Craig and I may or may not have a very special project we are cooking up for teachers later this year...

Session Notes

Here are the session notes for my three sessions. Check them out!!!

Going Paperless with iPad (April 13, 9 am)

Working with Digital Scores (April 13, 10 am)

Teaching Intonation with Tonal Energy (April 13, 3 pm)

🔗 Microsoft Office for iPad now supports opening files from the Files app more directly

Microsoft Office and the Files App Finally Play Nice Together:

Today Microsoft updated its Office suite for iOS, with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint all reaching version 2.12. Office updates rarely receive detailed release notes, and today was no exception, but user Teddy Svoronos discovered that the updates brought 'Open In' capabilities to the share sheet, which previously only enabled making a copy of an Office document. The 'Copy to' option has now been removed, replaced by the more convenient 'Open in.'

After seeing Teddy's tweet, I did a little playing around in the Files app and discovered that, while Excel and PowerPoint documents accessed in Files will load Quick Look previews and require tapping 'Open in' from the share sheet, the experience is even better with .docx files. Those Word-associated documents open directly in the Word app with just a single tap from the Files interface – no need to open the share sheet first.

It is really nice to see proper use of the Files app user interface being adopted into apps by third party developers. The more time passes, hopefully we will see this adoption so wide that opening documents using the native file browser will feel no different on an iPad than it does on a Mac. It always feels jarring on Mac when the “Open” option doesn’t show the Finder. On iPad, custom “open” UIs have been standard since its beginning. Hopefully the Files app introduced this past fall with iOS 11 will continue to change that. 

What I really thought was interesting about this article was something I have been wondering about the Files app since the summer. 

Update: One of the developers working on Office has confirmed my suspicions: the reason Word files open for me with a single tap while Excel and PowerPoint files do not is that I haven't opened those files enough for iOS to know that I would prefer to bypass the share sheet.

I had noticed that tapping on files in the Files app could open them within third party apps but I never understood how iOS knew which apps to use. (For example, standard text files were opening in Byword on my iPhone and 1Writed on my iPad for a time.) It seems that the user can to some extent control these apps by using the “Open In…” option from the Files app and choosing the desired app frequently. Still though, I would love the option to set default apps on iOS. I can tell my Mac which app I want to open PDFs. Why not on my iPad Pro?

🔗 Looking for a cheap, powerful alternative (or replacement) for Photoshop on Mac. Pixelmator Pro might be for you.

Pixelmator Pro:

Pixelmator Pro is an image editor packed full of innovations. From a reimagined editing workflow and simplified editing tools to machine learning powering all-new, intelligent image editing features. So the tools at your fingertips are smarter and more powerful, yet more intuitive and easier to use than ever before.

I have not updated to macOS High Sierra yet so I cannot download this, though I will say that I have had tremendously positive success with the standard Pixelmator on Mac and iOS.

This all leads to the inevitable moment that I cancel my Photoshop subscription.

Download here.

🔗 macOS High Sierra is out! Make sure you know which notation software is compatible!

The Scoring Notes blog is keeping track of High Sierra compatibility updates for all the major notation editors…

Music notation software and macOS High Sierra:

Today Apple is releasing macOS High Sierra (10.13), the newest iteration of its Mac operating system. High Sierra’s most significant change is its use of a new file system, Apple File System (APFS), for computers with all-flash storage. High Sierra brings a number of other new features, too, but on this blog we’ll focus on its compatibility with desktop music notation software: Sibelius, Finale, Dorico, and MuseScore.

 

What did Apple check off on my WWDC wishlist?

A few weeks ago, I detailed my wishlist for WWDC. Below, I have reposted it with what Apple actually announced. My assessment over whether or not a feature was announced is based on whether or not the feature was announced verbally during the keynote, not on a slide or later discovered within the OS.

MACOS

-News app to mirror the one on iOS NOPE

-improvements to pro apps (Final Cut Pro X and Logic Pro X) and additions to the Photos app NOPE

-splitting iTunes up into separate apps like what is on iOS: separate app for Music, TV, Podcasts, and iTunes Store NOPE

IOS

-default apps (won't happen) NOPE

-serious overhaul of iPad productivity (better file system, better home screen, drag and drop, better multitasking, more control over audio ins and outs) YESX100

TVOS

-PiP NOPE

-Ability to watch TV content from two apps at once NOPE

-ability to command with Siri without the Remote app (for example, I want to say to my phone, “hey Siri watch Game of Thrones,” and have it turn on the TV, launch the HBO app and start the most recent episode) NOPE

-ability to sync all Apple TVs in the house so that they show the same video at once (for parties...also, this won't happen) NOPE

WATCHOS

-smart contexts: ability to change Watch face, complications, and notifications based on sensitivity to time and location CHECK, Siri watchface

-better audio controls (easier to access Now Playing screen, complications to play and pause audio, ability to scroll the crown for volume and use hardware buttons for control whenever audio has recently been playing) CHECK, sort of with swipe to audio controls within Workout app

GENERAL

-Siri improvements (more reliable, faster, more open to third party apps, better integration with tvOS, local dictation and basic commands CHECK

-AirPods with always listening Siri NOPE

-improvements to iCloud Drive (shared folders, files, and URLs) CHECK definitely to shared files, but not sure about others

Here are some of my favorite features that reddit users replied with:

-Multiple iOS user logins NOPE

-Hey Siri on Mac NOPE

-custom watch faces NOPE

-open CarPlay up to more developers (pasrticular third party maps apps and messenging apps) NOPE

-iOS dark mode NOPE

-Workflow integration NOPE

-Open up NFC to third party apps CHECK

-Apple Pay your friends and family over iMessage CHECK

-Apple Music continuity NOPE