As you’re beginning to mark up your special music for your Christmas services, Music Stand for iOS comes with a new update that uses Apple’s latest technology called PencilKit! Now when you add annotations, you’ll notice a richer set of tools and a smoother experience. If you use an Apple Pencil, you can simply tap it on the screen to instantly activate annotation mode which brings up these new drawing features. You can still manually tap the pencil icon, too.
New Tools to Create With
✏️ Pencil and Refinement Settings
In the drawing toolset, you'll find a new Pencil to draw with. When you tap on each drawing tool, you'll be able to set thickness level as well as specify the opacity in case you want some of your chart to show through a little more.
🎨 Richer Colors
The color-picker has now been given an unlimited amount of options. Now, you'll see a much wider array of colors to choose from, and can even create your own custom colors.
New Ways To Edit
⭕️ Lasso
Sometimes, the drawing might not be in quite the right spot. Now you can use the Lasso tool to draw a rope around that drawing and move it over to where you want it.
📏 Ruler
Drawing lines just got easier with the new Ruler to let you draw those perfectly straight lines, every time. Drag with one finger to move the ruler around, and use two fingers to rotate it around to exactly the right angle.
A Smoother Experience
Drawings now store more points per stroke, so making your notes will feel a lot more fluid, responsive, and natural. Each line will have more definition and higher quality. This update also handles palm rejection so you don't have to be extra careful of making accidental drawings when your palm is resting on the screen.
🚨 Converting Existing Notes
This update will convert any previous annotations you have made to a new format. However, existing Eraser annotations cannot be converted. If you see a Warning about this, and you choose to convert your chart, things you previously erased will be visible again.
Notes made in the new version can still be seen in older version as well, but since the old version doesn't have a Pencil, those will show as Pen notes.
🎄 An Update During Christmas Season?
Normally, we don't release big new things during the Christmas season, but we decided to make an exception for this. We know that this is actually the time of year people are doing more new songs, and more complicated songs than usual, so improving the annotation experience also is most valuable right now.
We've been developing this new version for many months, and it's been with beta testers for the last 2 months or so as we've ironed out all the bugs we could find. But, we did build in a safeguard. If for some reason you aren't ready for the new annotation tools, you can open the sidebar, go into settings, and disable PencilKit at the bottom to revert to the previous annotation tools.
We hope this update arrives in time to make it easier than ever to annotate your music, especially for the Christmas season!