Ehler

Ehler

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  • On Subscriptions (Part Two)

    In my last post, I laid out a lot of subscriptions for apps that I pay for quite happily. In that article, I laid out some of the logic behind why I found those particular apps to be worth the money, and in this one, I wanted to lay out some apps I’m not subscribing to, with one in particular I want to touch on.

    There are all sorts of reasons not to be willing to subscribe to an app — it’s a simple question of whether the value proposition is there. But I think it’s significant that it’s a different value proposition than whether it would be worth it to buy an app outright or not.

    I consider apps that I’m thinking of buying like some people buy books or others kitchen gadgets. “Will I ever get use out of this?” I live an enchanted life in that regard — yes, I was in a dire situation in which I absolutely needed the newest version of Roxio Toast to burn DVDs once. I use all sorts of text transformation tools to make my life easier. I have silly iWork and Office templates collection apps that I will occasionally search through before being disappointed that there’s nothing quite right.

    But with subscriptions, it’s a very different question. It’s really “is this functionality (or the increased functionality over the free version) going to be worth the money over the next year?” That’s a much harder yes, and while I did describe a number of my “yes”es, now I want to dig into the “no”s. Most of these are great apps, just…not great enough for me for their price. Most of these apps are also ones that I’ve actually bought prior to their transitioning to a subscription model.

    Capo is the first one that comes to mind. I never had The Amazing Slow Downer or anything in that space prior to Capo, and I think it was one of the first major purchases I made on the Mac App Store after owning a Mac. It was the first app I had that could modify tempo independent of pitch or vice versa. It’s also got some neat isolation features, but at the end of the day, it’s really made for guitarists which I am not. It’s alright for identifying the chord changes of something, but that’s not a real need I have. Even independent of its subscription transition, I found that for serious use, AnyTune Pro+ was a better fit for me.[1] So while I hope the best for Capo’s team, it was very easy for me to decide not to jump onto at $20/yr.

    Instapaper and Pocket are services I’ve gotten amazing use out of that I’ve never been able to justify the premium versions for. I started off on Instapaper originally during the period of time it was owned by Pinterest (well after Marco Arment sold it). At that point in time, it actually rolled in the features that had previously been on its premium tier for free, and there was no option to pay money. They’ve since gone back to that model with a transfer in ownership again. For unrelated reasons, I’ve actually moved to Pocket in the last year. There’s only one really strong reason,[2] the rest is all sort of amorphous preference, and I could easily transition back if I were so inclined.

    Both offer pretty similar premium features at $45/yr on Pocket and $30/yr for Instapaper: Full text search for articles and a removal of limits to highlights and notes. Each app has a few more distinguishing features on top of that (some speed reading and text-to-speech features on Instapaper and fancy fonts on Pocket), but at those prices, those features aren’t worth it to me. I’d love to support the development of them — both show some serious age — but I can’t justify those prices for those features. Instead, if I want to mark up an article in a serious fashion or save it to search later, I’m better off putting it into DEVONThink where it can live with all sorts of other content anyway.

    PDF Expert is my PDF app of choice on macOS and iOS. I bought it upfront on both platforms, and there’s actually no subscription associated with the Mac version at all. While it lacks the OCR features of an app like PDFPenPro (or DEVONThink where I’m actually doing most of my OCR these days), it’s a much smoother experience for me for just about every other kind of PDF manipulation under the sun. It kind of breaks my heart that it’s gone to a subscription model, because it’s not just not right for me, but I don’t think it’s worth $50/yr for anyone. I didn’t lose any features with its transition to a subscription model, but I did lose my go-to recommendation for a PDF app for friends and family on iOS.

    There are two more apps that I hesitate to include at all, because they haven’t migrated to a subscription option — they both offer it as an alternative to buying the app outright — but I think it’s worth highlighting that I think buying them outright continues to be the best option. The first is OmniFocus, but really all of the OmniGroup’s apps. I won’t break down the full offering of their different subscription options, but I’m not sure who it makes sense for unless someone is really inclined to feel that they shouldn’t have to pay for upgrades to apps, yet they don’t mind subscriptions. I don’t think that imaginary person exists. Maybe for someone who’s using OmniPlan plus all of Omni’s other apps the math works out. I don’t know. The other is DEVONThink To Go, and the subscription is only even an option on their mobile app, and is a totally optional alternative to buying it upfront. Again, I’ve just bought each outright, but I have no objections to this model.

    In a similar vein, I’ve seen lots of smaller developers who started subscription only — with prices points in the $1015/yr ranges — come out with “lifetime access” options well after the fact for about 22.5x the price of their yearly subscriptions. This is exciting to me to see, and makes me more willing to look at their premium versions in the first place if I was making do with their free versions.

    But the fun is over on this post, on to the whining.

    The Trouble with Sibelius

    Out of the big three commercial notation applications in 2021 — Sibelius, Dorico, and Finale — Sibelius is the only one to offer a subscription option..[3] They’ve been offering a subscription version for a while now, and for a time, it was basically easiest to just ignore it if you wanted to be using a perpetual license. And today, it’s still not the only option.

    The only real difference between the models for the big three programs (if you were on the perpetual license), was that Sibelius had an “upgrade plan,” rather than charging you for occasional ‘major’ version changes. You would basically buy a year of updates for a single price, and you could keep renewing that or just buy a new upgrade plan down the road when you were ready/incentivized by the features. It was frankly, very user friendly.

    But in 2019, they made a change to the upgrading of perpetual licenses. If your upgrade license ever lapsed, you couldn’t get a new one without buying a brand new, full-price perpetual license. This is incredibly user-hostile.

    By the time Sibelius made this change, I was using Dorico and my Sibelius upgrades had lapsed and I didn’t hop on, so I would have to buy it at the full education price of $300 again. The only benefit I can possibly get for previously buying a license of Sibelius compared to someone who has never given Avid money before, is if I’m willing to shift to a subscription at a discounted rate, and that subscription discount returns to the normal rate after a period of time.

    In fairness to Avid, I understand why they did this. Before, I’m sure many users were letting go of their upgrade plans waiting for a feature that was lucrative enough to bring them current, meaning that Avid was getting very little money from most of their user base. But this is too far in the other direction.

    I don’t actually use Finale for anything these days, but because I used to and because we live in a connected age, I regularly keep an eye out for deals on Finale upgrades and have given MakeMusic more money after ceasing to be a real Finale user. This is what I planned for Sibelius as well, but that’s off the table now. I’m not willing to pay full price all over again for the updates since it lapsed for me, and because of that, there’s no chance I ever become a Sibelius user again unless Dorico completely drops the ball (and I don’t see that happening — they’re the best team in this business right now).

    I do want to contextualize my complaints, as being an educator and a notation software hobbyist.[4] For professional composers and engravers, it was probably much easier to never let it lapse, and the importance of Sibelius to their workflows (and the disruption that it would cause to change software) means that it’s worth it to suffer Avid’s abuse and user-hostile behavior. And I know that sounds overdramatic, but I think it’s also accurate — Sibelius is still the most popular software in the industry by my estimation, and they can get away with this solely because it’s so important to people’s work. Some people are getting by with their work on old versions, but as someone who doesn’t have a career-level dependence on Sibelius, I’m completely done with Avid.

    As I mentioned, I’m using Dorico now, and I’ll be sharing soon on here just why I think it’s the best option for educators right now.


    1. Credit to Robby Burns for recommending AnyTune.  ↩
    2. I’m quite colorblind, and I also happen to prefer dark mode on just about every app. In Instapaper, the dark modes make it incredibly difficult for me to to tell links from their surrounding text.  ↩
    3. It’s actually a bit confusing keeping track of their current product offerings, but Scoring Notes has done a pretty good job of breaking it down. In addition to that podcast episode, they’ve got a number of good articles explaining it.  ↩
    4. I think they used to have a label in the DSM for “notation software hobbyists.”  ↩

    Ehler

    2021-06-30
    Technology
    notation software, sibelius
  • On Subscriptions (Part One)

    Over the last few years, the number of subscriptions I have for apps has grown by quite a bit, and a lot of apps that I’d previously bought on their own have transitioned to subscriptions. I wanted to spend some time on my thoughts on what I’ve found worth it and why that might be; perhaps as an encouragement to others to try certain apps in spite of their subscriptions, or maybe as a bit of catharsis to justify what I spend on apps that will just go out to the void.

    As it was well-put on Mac Power Users, there’s a lot of good reasons for an application to change their business model to be based on subscriptions. It creates sustainable income for developers when the current models are failing. Apple takes quite a bit of blame for this in their lack of support for the traditional model of versions and upgrades with the App Store on both Mac and iOS. Additionally, Apple has encouraged it via a better revenue split for developers on the second year of any subscription.

    But as a user, each subscription has to be justified. In theory, any purchase should be justified, but up to a certain amount, I personally have a pretty low bar for an app purchase if I think I ever might get use out of it. But if I have to pay for it again next year, I have to ask myself if it’s worth that money this year.

    And even for apps I know I get use out of, it’s not always an obvious slam-dunk for a subscription. If I can see how the feature roadmap benefits me, then I might be more inclined to go forward with a subscription. Or if I can see where the recurring costs (usually in server hosting) for a developer are, then I’m more sympathetic. But I know I’m not totally consistent in my reasoning — and my choices might be totally different from someone else in very similar shoes, and if someone were trying to break these down as a market study, it might be totally useless data.

    Great Subscriptions

    The first app I can remember subscribing to is Bear. I was unhappy with how I was using Apple Notes, and an article on The Sweet Setup persuaded me to give it a whirl. At $15/yr, Bear became a somewhat unfair measuring stick for the value of other apps. It’s usable without that subscription, but only technically — sync is locked behind that paywall.

    Bear doesn’t run its own servers for that sync, but rather syncs through iCloud. The subscription entirely goes to the cost of development, but it’s a totally reasonable fee to me. Bear launched originally as an upfront purchase app before being one of the earlier popular apps to have a subscription fee. I never got in before it was subscription-only.

    Some Bear users are a bit upset that updates aren’t faster, but the developers are actively working on a major rewrite of the editor and are very responsive. Many users want to see a web version which is apparently coming, but is probably more than a year off. I’m very happy with the way things are in Bear, though, even if I will appreciate a lot of the new features coming.

    Overcast is the app I could most easily get away without subscribing to. Its free version is more than comprehensive, and if I needed to save the $10/yr all of the sudden, I could live without its premium features. It’s supported by some very reasonable ads without the subscription, reasonable enough that back when I was on an iPhone 6 Plus, I actually kept the ads on after I was subscribing because I felt the UI was more balanced with them on. Since upgrading to an XS Max in 2018, I’ve turned them off, but they’re just ads for podcasts.

    I don’t pay that subscription to get rid of the ads, obviously. I pay it for the very useful feature of being able to upload any audio file I want and listen to it with Overcast’s powerful Smart Speed (and other audio adjustment) features. This is most useful in using youtube-dl to pull the audio from a video that I really only want to listen to, and being able to consume it faster and without giving it more attention. There’s a post brewing on that workflow.

    Jumping up in price, Drafts has, since moving to a subscription model, been $20/yr, but starting in 2021 is now $30/yr for new subscribers (I’m grandfathered in at $20/yr). I wrote at the end of 2018 about the place I found for Drafts in my workflow, and it’s an app that I’m not done writing about. I can’t really do it justice on my own to explain, and I don’t have easy links compiled to break down why it’s so useful, but Robby Burns wrote a great review when it launched version 5, and did a recommendable podcast episode with its developer Greg Pierce.

    The subscription funding of Drafts has allowed Greg to go nuts with his development pace. It’s now his full-time job, and he’s put in incredible and powerful features regularly. The features that this subscription adds beyond the free version are really essential for anyone who’s serious about pushing the app to its limits.

    I have a love-hate relationship with my email app of choice, Airmail. When I started using it during my student-teaching, it helped me get my email life under control. The number one feature of it to me is that you can extract a URL scheme for every message on both macOS and iOS.[1] This is incredibly valuable for being able to point to a message from another app; I can have a Bear note on a certain topic and reference the emails on it. I can have an OmniFocus task to reply to an email or follow up on the action of an email (when that’s the appropriate way to manage it, which it often isn’t). Airmail has a bunch of other features I like, but none of them are as important as its URL schemes.

    It has a Markdown email composer (on Mac but not on iOS) which lets me write long informational emails to families in Drafts with appropriate links and styles in Markdown, tag them and archive them in Drafts (rather than deleting the Draft) so I can look at it in future years and reuse parts of it, and then send it off with as little friction as possible. The only problem is that there’s terrible bugs in both their raw HTML editor and Markdown composer; I’ve solved the Markdown bug, but fixing the bug requires me to go through an annoying process every time Airmail updates.

    When I started using Airmail, it was a one-time purchase, and despite its many flaws, I was happy to pay a subscription of just $10/yr (in hopes that it would solve some of the flaws and keep development ongoing; only the latter has worked out). When I bought it, it worked great with Alfred’s incredible file attachment actions (thanks to custom work from Alfred’s devs), but it has been broken for some time now and is another reason I’ve thought of leaving Airmail.

    Day One isn’t one of the top apps I use, but it has changed how I think about buying apps. I bought it on macOS as a standalone app initially, and after trying to push myself to get into journaling, gave up on it. At first, I felt a bit stung by the app; I thought it was essentially just a glorified notes app, storing text files as a “journal,” not really seeing the utility in it. I wasn’t yet into Markdown, and I didn’t bother to pick up the iOS app, feeling that it wasn’t worth another $10 to me.

    Somewhere down the road, though, my feelings about it changed. It was that Sweet Setup article I’d already mentioned, and something about the notion of being able to just take pictures of birthday and Christmas cards into Day One and chuck the physical versions sounded freeing. The notion of going back really began to click, and on top of that idea of putting physical things into Day One, I started to actually get into journaling.

    In between I had originally bought it and had this change of heart, though, Day One shifted to a subscription model. Having not picked up the iOS app originally, if I wanted it to sync with iOS, I had no choice but to go forward with the subscription. I think at the time, my calculus was that if I had bought the iOS app originally, the subscription wouldn’t be necessary for my needs at all, which has made me much more willing to jump on upfront purchase apps I see. I’ve seen a lot of them, whether they were of interest to me or not, move to subscription pricing over time, and there’s often a benefit to previous purchase-users if it later goes to subscription pricing. I’m paying $25/yr for Day One; for those who had bought the initial Mac app, they have offered that as a discount from their standard $35/yr for everyone else, which I appreciate.

    Which brings me to Fantastical, the app that initially inspired to write this article quite awhile ago.[2]

    Fantastical

    When I was growing up, I had an email address from around the age of seven, I would guess. I remember loading that email address into Microsoft Outlook the day I finally got it (I played with Eudora instead of Outlook Express as a child on the versions of Windows that had it), and I was hooked. I fantasized about being an adult who could actually get to use the cool features involved in Outlook’s calendaring system for comparing availability. It seemed so neat.

    I was a weird kid, but it might have something to do with how much I love apps like OmniFocus today.

    For the longest time, I used my calendar app on my smartphone and then eventually on my Mac (usually the stock calendar app) I used it just to manage events that were exceptions. I needed to be able to see at a glance when I’d have a doctor’s appointment coming up later in the month, or when a concert was. There was, in essence, one way I could manage my calendar effectively, and that was the most worthwhile one to me. I knew my daily schedule, so I wasn’t going to use my calendar for that; if I did, I would wind up ignoring my calendar app most of the time, and it would be a slog to find the exceptional events that I needed to stay apprised of.

    When I bought Fantastical for Mac, it changed the way I was able to actually use calendars in my life. There are a whole host of great features in the app, but the biggest to me has always been its calendar sets feature. One set could be for the events I just described and another could be for my class schedule. Or for timeblocking.[3] Or my school’s activity calendar. Or, you know, all of the above with me quickly jumping between each one with an easy shortcut.

    There’s other great features to Fantastical too — its natural language input and support for dumping into that natural language input from outside sources like Drafts saves a lot of time — but calendar sets on its own made it worth the $50 cost of Fantastical 2. When Fantastical 3 came out and pivoted to a subscription, they also brought a bunch of other great new features, including calendar sets on iOS, and it was a no-brainer. Some of these features require a server-side component on their end (like their new “proposed date” feature) or API access to third-party data that the developers are paying for (like integrated weather data), which further helps me justify the cost to myself, but I think I had subscribed before I’d read about those features. Recently they also added access to the new premium features in their excellent contacts app Cardhop to the same subscription bundle at $40/yr.

    I wanted to lay these out for a whole host of reasons including trying to help others justify subscribing to apps that they might have, but my greater motivation was to lay out the case for what I don’t subscribe to, with one app in particular in mind. Looking at my word count, though, I better split that off for a separate post.


    1. For brevity’s sake, I won’t name iPadOS separately from iOS, but I mean to include it every time I say iOS.  ↩
    2. Somewhere over a year ago. It’s been hard to write.  ↩
    3. I’m not doing timeblocking in any super meaningful sense, but I’ve dabbled a bit over the last few months. I have a dedicated calendar and calendar set for it, regardless.  ↩

    Ehler

    2021-06-22
    Technology
    drafts
  • Daft Punk’s Break-up

    I’ve had friends reaching out to me all day today about Daft Punk’s break-up, and there’s a lot to say about it.

    Daft Punk is one of the most important bands I’ve ever listened to. They are one of a very small number of groups that defined my relationship with music from the time I branched off from what my parents listened to (Stray Cats and the Ramones), as I started to explore my own tastes. I got into them around the time their Alive 2007 tour was starting, largely consuming them through MySpace. Around the time, Stronger (the Kanye West one, not the Kelly Clarkson one) was really popular on the radio.

    I was playing a lot of online games on the computer at this age (and not practicing very much on my instruments), and Daft Punk was the soundtrack for me at the time. I’d load up albums in a World of Warcraft music player add-on, and I remember a small community of shoutcast radio stations popular with my internet friends we’d stream through Winamp, and I’d incessantly request Daft Punk.

    It was all magnificent to me. At that age, Discovery was my favorite. Some of Homework’s more abrasive tracks I forced myself to love until I appreciated the whole album. Even Human After All was good to me. I didn’t understand what made Musique a different album, but I remembered listening to the Daft Club album and especially the Aerodynamic remix from Slum Village on my Motorola KRZR in Boy Scouts, thinking it was the coolest thing ever. I put on an image of being really into “Techno” at the time, and while I did branch a bit off into artists like Basshunter, it was always centered on Daft Punk.

    Alive 2007 remains to me their masterpiece. It so perfectly synthesizes their entire body of work up to that point, and I spent years wishing I could see that performance. Daft Punk, in all their mystery, set up a pattern: From 1997, it was an album every four years and a tour every ten it seemed. 1997, 2001, 2005, and 2009’s Tron: Legacy (which I never got into very hard, but now that it’s all we’ll ever have, I’m going to be listening to it a lot more).

    2013’s Random Access Memories was the “album of the summer” after I finished high school, and what an incredible album to have for that time. While I didn’t expect that I’d have a lot of extra spare change, I was so eager for 2017 to bring the next album and the tour that I’d been waiting for. And it never came.

    Four years later, it’s over. It’s not really a painful blow; their silence in 2017 was wholly unexpected, and this is just the answer to the question of “what next” that went unanswered four years ago. It’s hard to imagine them doing a “reunion” tour down the road, or anything of the sort, but this is the final nail in the coffin, and it’s being hammered pretty gently given the relative silence since featuring with The Weeknd on Starboy.

    I don’t know what it really is about them that worked so well for me, but it did. I don’t really care for anime, but I enjoyed the heck out of their movie for Discovery, Interstella 5555. I never watched D.A.F.T. and I never had the patience to finish Electroma (their movies for Homework and Human After All respectively).

    Daft Punk’s music set me up to connect to music in a whole host of ways. In all honesty, it probably wasn’t anything particular about Daft Punk that did it, but the repetition — especially of those first three albums — feels tangentially related to how much I loved learning about hypermeter and phrase rhythm in college. Maybe another band would’ve filled the place Daft Punk did, but something about their distance from their music, the lack of anything “edgy” or seemingly counter-cultural — while never feeling mainstream to me as a youth — let me make the music mine in a way that I can really appreciate now as an adult.

    Would I be a band director if Daft Punk weren’t an honest obsession (for a part of my life) and a continued love (to this day) for me? Sure, maybe. But the fact that Daft Punk was the band for me that they were is one of those “nurture” things that make me the person I am.


    To be a bit less navel-gaze-y I wanted to share a cool interview from 2001, shortly after the release of Discovery. The interesting thing in here is their appreciation of Napster from an artist’s standpoint. While I’ve gained a much better appreciation for copyright when it works well than I had as a youth, it’s interesting to see this free of an attitude from such successful artists.

    Ehler

    2021-02-22
    Personal
  • Fantastical Drafts Actions

    I absolutely love Fantastical 3 and happily pay the subscription fee. One unfortunate part of its update though was a change to its URL schemes which broke the actions for it I was using in Drafts. So today, I happily crossed off my to-do list updating the actions. The original actions were made by Greg (AgileTortoise) the maker of Drafts:

    • Drafts to Fantastical Event
    • Drafts to Fantastical Reminder

    Really simple Drafts actions, but no one else had yet updated them on the Action Directory.

    Screen Shot 2020 11 23 at 4 15 42 PM

    Ehler

    2020-11-23
    Technology
    drafts
  • Making Remote Learning Smoother

    My district has just gone to distance learning, and I figured it was time to share some of my thoughts (that I’d originally begun formulating in the spring) about what I”m using to make the process as smooth as it can reasonably be.

    In rehearsals, I find Loopback to be really valuable. I can pipe in audio from Logic or AnyTune for students to hear. I’ve got a MIDI controller that I’ll use with Logic to give them individual notes, and with AnyTune I can easily adjust the tempo of the piece(s) we’re working on.

    There’s obviously no great solutions for running rehearsals in terms of being able to hear the kids’ actual progress.

    For lessons, I’m having students sign up through Calendly. Calendly lets students grab a 20-minute block within the times I’ve set, but automatically filters out any times that I already have calendar events (as meetings throughout the day pop up). Once they sign up, it automatically adds to my calendar and I get an email notification, and the students get the same.

    I then open the event on Fantastical and use Fantastical’s native handling of Google Meet or Zoom (depending on what students selected on their Calendly form). I have a TextExpander snippet that I send with the Zoom/Meet link along with a link to some quick video directions for configuring Zoom audio to better facilitate a music lesson. I have another TextExpander snippet after a lesson that sets a template for their next assignment, and in the Spring it instructed them how to sign up for another lesson.

    (I actually use Airmail’s Markdown mode so that I can totally avoid Rich Text snippets.)

    TE Snippet for Lesson Confirmation

    If I were paying for Calendly, I could skip this step because it’d integrate with Zoom and add the meeting automatically, but I pay for Fantastical anyway, and I’ll take any excuse I can get to make some new TextExpander snippets.

    When I was teaching general music last spring, I prepared an asynchronous video lesson each week. It was definitely overkill, but I used Final Cut Pro X to prepare the videos. I was able to use transparent .png files to overlay music notes over myself and transition them in on top of a video of me speaking. Using QuickTime’s ability to capture an iOS device’s screen, I did a video demonstration of what I wanted students to do in GarageBand. I also captured a bit of Dorico running on my screen to highlight some rhythms. To pipe the audio back in to the screen capture, I was using Loopback again. I also tried a bit of Screenflow towards the end as well over QuickTime; there were compromises (using the free version) and it didn’t make showing my button presses as easy as I”d hoped, but it was okay.

    I’ve tried Reincubate Camo, but I don’t really need a better camera. What I’d love is the ability to add an image overlaying my video when I’m on Zoom, and I’ve started to explore some of those rabbit holes. It might be more trouble than it’s worth, though.

    Ehler

    2020-11-18
    Music Education, Technology
    mac, textexpander
  • Fixing MultiMarkdown QuickLook Preview on macOS 10.15.4

    I’ve made great use out of a QuickLook from Fletcher Penny to preview Markdown files (which I use a lot of). Without this, you’re previewing the raw Markdown which is still readable, but usually I find this lending clarity to whatever I’m trying to preview over the plain text.

    Unfortunately, with macOS Catalina 10.15.4, I’ve been unable to use it. The day I updated, it started rejecting the quicklook generator because it couldn’t verify the developer. It took a bit of digging, but I found a solution on the GitHub page for an unrelated project (that is also a QuickLook generator). There might be a ‘better’ way of doing this by the book (building it yourself in Xcode, etc.) that is a bit beyond me, but this worked for me.

    From this link

    Permissions (Quarantine)

    If you run into issues with macOS not letting you run the plugin because it’s not signed by a verified developer you can follow these steps:

    1. Install the plugin using one of the methods above
    2. run xattr -cr ~/Library/QuickLook/MultiMarkdownQuickLook.qlgenerator (sudo if needed)
    3. run qlmanage -r
    4. run qlmanage -r cache
    5. Restart Finder by…
      • Restarting your computer
      • or holding down the option key and right click on Finder’s dock icon, then select “Relaunch” from the menu

    (I just tweaked the path in those directions so it actually points at MultiMarkdownQuicklook.qlgenerator instead. It might also be titled MultiMarkdown QuickLook.qlgenerator or be in /Library/QuickLook/ instead of ~/Library/QuickLook if you grabbed a similar utility from someone other than Fletcher Penny.

    Ehler

    2020-07-26
    Technology
  • Using Database Software in Your Band Program

    I’ve gotten a lot out of listening to the Class Nerd Podcast and lots of the things that Robby Burns puts out. I was insanely jealous in the Class Nerd episode where Robby described his use of FileMaker in his band program. Unfortunately, I don’t have the chops with a program as complicated as FileMaker to make the best use out of it, nor do I have the resources for a deployment of it in my band program to the extent it would be as useful as I desire for something similar to Robby’s use of it. I tried other solutions, like Airtable, but they didn’t feel like the right fit.

    At NEIBA this year, I caught Dave Anderson’s awesome talk that he gave at IBA last year (and described to me in person earlier in the year) about using Google Forms with an add-in essentially as a database for producing email reports to parents on lessons that I’m going to be looking at implementing eventually.

    But a bug caught me the other day, and on a whim, I got sucked in to setting up a Ninox database for my band program. I have some insights to share from what little I’ve been able to do with it so far, and why it’s already paid dividends for me in tracking information.

    The first question is ‘Why Ninox?’ I’m looking for something about in that budget range, but I don’t want to be paying for a regular cloud service fee. When I caught this bug awhile ago, I tried a few products without success before throwing in the towel. I picked up Tap Forms at that time, but didn’t invest the same amount of upfront work as I just have with Ninox to put it though its paces. Before I’m too far along in Ninox, I might wind up giving Tap Forms a more fair shake, just to see if it does some things better. Obviously, there’s also the band-focused software out there like Charms or Cut Time, but I want to try rolling my own system first.

    The main goals I had with a database program were tracking program-level information. I wanted to be able to have a central hub of student information that I could easily extend to cover new vectors (in database parlance, tables). The two primary things I wanted to extend tracking for was instrument rentals and tracking information related to solos.

    At my school, I have happily maintained my predecessor’s tradition of requiring all students to prepare and perform a solo at a local solo & ensemble event. After year one, I saw how much some of our students grew (particularly our first-years) through the event. It was also a lot of valuable feedback for me as someone new to the profession.

    The only downside is the work of selecting a solo for every student in my program, managing our library, keeping track of payments, and coordinating accompanists without much time in my schedule to do it.

    Enter Ninox

    After getting a table set up in Ninox with core student information (emails, lesson time, what bands they participate in), adding another table for their solos was a cinch. It’s made it easy to track the information I need to submit for the contest coordinators, and it’s already saved me a lot of time.

    Before, I threw together a spreadsheet from information I copied over, and then got to work filling it out, and trying to keep some things up to date. It’d be organized in a different way than my other spreadsheets of student information, and there’d inevitably be friction throughout the whole process.

    Being able to link information together in Ninox has saved me a bunch of sanity already when I’m running on less sleep than is ideal. It still has a few friction points in terms of shortcuts and some minor bugs, but I’m getting the hang of its core functionality quite well. It’s also easy to keep the information up to date on my phone (essential when I’m in the workroom on a different floor, and much more reliable than having my fingers crossed that the right spreadsheets have synced in the right folder).

    It’s because of these small friction points that I’m hoping Tap Forms might have a bit more for me than I’ve currently seen, but if not, I can live with Ninox.

    If you’re looking to give a database program a serious whirl, I highly recommend starting by importing all of your student records from your grading system (Schoology, Canvas, PowerSchool, etc.) Adding students piecemeal is not an effective way to see if a database program is a good fit for you. You’ll also just wind up importing some of those things (like parent contact info) later anyway.

    I’m hoping to scale it for some lesson-related tracking as well, but I’m not sure if it will handle the exact needs I have without throwing extra money at it. I’m also not sure how well it could integrate in my current physical set-up for lessons and the needs of my program, but I’ll continue to update regarding this journey.

    Ehler

    2020-02-23
    Music Education, Technology
    database, mac
  • Dorico 3 SE Announced

    I pivoted over to Dorico last year, and have had great results. I still get a bit of use out of Sibelius[1] for specific needs, but Dorico has become my primary driver. Someone on the Facebook groups for Dorico has worked out some of the kinks to the only limitations I’m feeling with Dorico, and I’m looking forward to exploring his ideas.

    What’s very exciting, though, is that Steinberg has just released a free edition of Dorico, titled “SE.” I’m very excited for my students to be able to tap into the raw power of Dorico, compared to anything else available. It’s not just that it’s great software for someone doing serious work, but its treatment of music stands to be so much less in the way of a student than anything else on the market. I remember as a student fighting with Finale NotePad, and struggling to get results that looked passably professional. Nowadays, the engraving you can find on Musescore’s web portal is straight-up gruesome. Dorico acts as a mediator for the intent, though, in a way that I feel much better setting my students up with.[2]

    While the limitations are definitely significant, Dorico SE, I think, is the ideal tool to have most of my students inputting actual music they want to have printable as something to play. Whether that’s things they’re trying to share that they’ve learned by ear or something they’ve found online[3]. I’m looking ahead towards being able to produce some aids for them to learn the basics. Dorico’s guided tour feature isn’t a bad start, but the learning curve to music notation software – even when I’d argue Dorico is relatively intuitive – is still steep.

    UPDATE: Dorico’s Daniel Spreadbury reached out on my mention of Dorico’s limitations with MusicXML. I was mis-remembering some things, and for that I definitely apologize. Dorico does a pretty good job of importing MusicXML, though I would still actually recommend using MIDI export from MuseScore’s site. That’s not because Dorico can’t handle the import of the MusicXML well; it’s because by importing it as MIDI, Dorico will use its smarts of taking the intended lengths of the rhythms and the notes as pitches and make smarter choices for how to notate the rhythms and the enharmonic spellings than you’ll often find on the MuseScore portal.


    1. Which, coincidentally, just announced a really disappointing change in their upgrade policy that means I won’t be getting any new features until/unless it changes again.  ↩
    2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGeAm3YBgFc  ↩
    3. Musescore’s portal is actually a pretty good source for just finding music, even if its engraving is poor. Exporting to MusicXML into Dorico SE would be a good workflow for my students trying to get any music that has few enough instruments to support this behavior, but Dorico has had some standing issues with MusicXML – it’s one of the real strikes against it as a program right now.  ↩

    Ehler

    2020-01-16
    Technology
  • Configuring SSH and rsub Without a Config File

    I picked up an AWS Lightsail instance to play with while trying to learn a few things for personal hobbies. I’ve really taken to using Sublime Text, and one of my favorite features may be rsub. rsub piggy-backs off of a technology developed for TextMate called rmate. While BBEdit is able to open an entire FTP directory, and of course FTP clients are able to open whatever editor you please, there are times it’s nice to be able to launch into editing directly from a shell.

    I got the basic setup from Keyrus for installing rmate on my Lightsail server. Briefly, it’s:

    sudo wget -O /usr/local/bin/rsub https://raw.github.com/aurora/rmate/master/rmate
    sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/rsub
    

    rsub is installed locally through Package Control for Sublime Text.

    Unfortunately, I’ve had some issues with my SSH config file, so I was unable to get rsub to tunnel back. If you follow the instructions on the linked post, you wouldn’t have to deal with this. I, however, needed to establish this in my ssh startup command (loaded into the iTerm profile for my Lightsail instance).

    I got the answer on fixing the tunnel from Stack Overflow, using the bind address option. On top of that, I declare the identity file of my private key in the SSH command[1] when I’m loading the server, and I wasn’t sure immediately what order to handle those in.

    The final command was:

    ssh -R 52698:localhost:52698 -i FILEPATHTOPRIVATEKEY username@instance.url
    

    Loaded in that manner, I can just load text files using rsub with ease.

    I wanted to share this just to lay out the solution for anyone dealing with the same thing, and because I haven’t had an excuse to post in awhile. None of this would be hard to figure out for anyone doing this on a serious basis, but that doesn’t describe me at all.


    1. This should also be done in the SSH config file. After trying to configure SSH in Sourcetree with Github, I started having issues SSHing elsewhere through iTerm and deleting the config file solved all of those problems. I have no idea what I’m doing.  ↩

    Ehler

    2019-08-09
    Personal, Technology
  • 2018 Recap: OmniFocus 3 and my Fall Hardware Bumps

    I’ve recently written to end out 2018 about apps that finally stuck this year and the most important book.

    The two changes in my workflows this year that made me happiest were my Fall hardware upgrades and OmniFocus 3.

    When I got into OmniFocus 2 last year it changed the game for me. To put some numbers behind that, I’ve kept track of 3,211 actions since getting OmniFocus, and completed 523 since the beginning of November alone (when my actions last archived). I keep everything that I’m trying to keep track of in OmniFocus, from new habits and routines, to whatever level of detail I need to break up a bigger project into. I use it to keep emails of things I need to do out of the way (with Airmail links), grading, and just having a list of the things that need to happen before I go home.

    OmniFocus 3 came out first on iOS and then on the Mac. The best feature for me on iOS was initially being able to attach notifications that were unbound from due and defer dates. Unfortunately, this still hasn’t made its way to the Mac version, so its usefulness has started to dissipate. But the new tags feature and the accompanying custom perspectives have been awesome.

    The custom perspectives feature as it exists today is exactly what I hoped it was back in OmniFocus 2. Now it supports a huge list of arguments, and nested AND/OR functionality that gets me the exact task list I need. With good tagging, this is even more useful (for example, a filter of items that contain the tags that mean something takes place at school, organized by date).

    OmniFocus on iOS has become way more useful to me though, with my far more useful XS Max. I felt guilty spending this much money on a phone, but I’ve been holding out for it since its first leak in December 2017. The additional screen size makes it vastly more useful for keeping track of all the information I’m handling on my phone, especially in OmniFocus. Because I was coming from an iPhone 6 Plus, I had a ton of other upgrades along with that screen size including (by my likely faulty math) 240% better processor performance, 3D Touch, Face ID, and an OLED screen, among other things. (As an aside, 1Password’s new AutoFill features that iOS 12 enabled with Face ID takes all the friction of using a password manager away, and actually makes it faster than my bad password practices ever were).

    I also picked up an Apple Watch this fall. They were a hard enough tech item to grasp from others’ accounts and using demo models that I really didn’t have a great idea of what to expect. I’m surprised by how easy it is to get drawn into the fitness features, and in love with keeping media controls on my wrist. It’s also changed the way I handle a number of apps (and finally gotten me into using Due to pester me to make sure I get something run down the hall for another teacher between classes or remember a special announcement at the start of class.)

    Ultimately, technology is something that I do get enjoyment out of. It’s part of why I decided to blog, and it dominates my podcast feeds. I remember being a kid and playing with the calendar on Outlook wishing I had a job so I could have coworkers to schedule meetings with and use the availability features. As an adult, technology does find its way to make work easier, and some challenges become a bit brighter because of the tools I get to use to solve them.

    Ehler

    2018-12-31
    Technology
    hardware, omnifocus
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