Need graphics app for music reference sheets

[stubbsonic]

For many years I've used to (and still do occasionally) use AppleWorks to create music reference sheets for my music students. These include things like guitar scale/chord sheets, practice cycles, conversion tables, blank tabs, manuscript, rhythm exercises, etc. etc. Lots of variety.

AppleWorks just did all this work very well and reliably.

Pages is terrible for this kind of thing. Though it has some cool new features; it crashes all the time, no snap-grid, dragging multiple shapes is broken. MS Word is even worse, very unstable. Shapes & images just vanish from view, also very slow.

What I need is an affordable mac app that allows me to add shapes, text boxes (any font), position images, draw lines; and be able to move, copy/paste, all of the above with great freedom & precision. It should be easy to add new pages to a single document, drag duplicates of text & shapes between subsequent pages. And above all have a highly configurable ruler/snap-grid. For example, if I have a bunch of lines on the page, to be able to select only the left end of multiple lines, and drag them all relative to their current positions. -- which brings up another point, ease at selecting shapes that might be overlapping or covered.

AppleWorks is still the best program I've ever used for this kind of work. Even though it wasn't perfect, it still works WAY better than Pages or Word.

If I get into the world if Photoshop, it seems like over-kill for cost & features.

Anyone have any suggestions for me?


Thank you!!!

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Not cheap. InDesign from Adobe or photoshop.

[stubbsonic]

Thanks, MLC. Unfortunately, I'm not making the kinda money where I want a monthly charge for an app. Though it is perhaps less painful than a lump sum.

I was kind of hoping for a recommendation of a cheaper, "sleeper", preferably an old-school, resides on my drive, kinda app.

My plan B is just to keep an old Mac around for AW.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Have you checked the App Store for DTP or desk top publishing? Seems there should be a simple app. Then again that's what I thought about printing labels.

[stubbsonic]

Good call. I searched "desktop publishing" in the App Store® and there was one very promising looking result called "Swift Publisher".

They have a demo, so I'll be giving that a try. Thanks for the guidance, man.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Cool! I hope it's like $6.99.

[bayswater]

Pages is terrible for this kind of thing. Though it has some cool new features; it crashes all the time, no snap-grid, dragging multiple shapes is broken. MS Word is even worse, very unstable. Shapes & images just vanish from view, also very slow.

For example, if I have a bunch of lines on the page, to be able to select only the left end of multiple lines, and drag them all relative to their current positions. -- which brings up another point, ease at selecting shapes that might be overlapping or covered.

I kept V9 of Pages and whatever the corresponding version of Numbers and Keynote is because of similar problems. I don't have crashing problems with these in ML or Mav. For some of the things you want to do, you can group a number of objects so they copy/paste/drag/drop as a single object. Some of these things are easier to do in Keynote than in Pages.

iWork never lived up to it's potential, so I've ended up using a number of more specialized applications depending on the specific sort of document, like TurboCad and GraphicConverter, and leaving iWork for the simpler stuff.

[stubbsonic]

Thanks, Bayswater. I appreciate the confirmation of glitches in iWorks.

I'm demo'ing Swift Publisher now, and finding it to be more than adequate for my needs.

It appears that both Pages and SP have replaced the concept of the snap grid with other alignment tools. I can probably figure out how to do most things. However, it is not a model that I can relate to as simply as the idea of a snap-grid which made everything easy. It's still quite early in my tinkerings. It may be that there is some version of a snap grid that will do the same thing.

There's a sister app called Art Text which also looks very useful for this kind of work.

[stubbsonic]

After buying Swift Publisher 3, I'm kinda kicking myself.

It lacks a snap grid, and it's "guide line" functions are very limited. If you create/drag a line, you can snap to a guide. If you hold SHIFT, you can lock the line to horizontal or vertical. BUT... you can't do both. I usually need to snap a horizontal line or vertical line to a guide. Not possible. You must choose between aligned ends or horizontal/vertical. Can't have both.

Selecting objects, especially multiple lines gets wonky, as it won't show you which lines are selected and which ones aren't. Guide lines interfere with selection. You can't drag or otherwise edit the end-points of multiple lines.

This is a very powerful app, but it is just lacking in this one crucial way. None of the things that I would do with a snap grid are possible with work-arounds in this app. Their support response was slow (a few days) and offered no work-arounds or hope for updates; just "it won't work that way."

Since I bought it through their store, I can't leave a bad review on the Apple App Store, so I'm just venting (thanks- to whomever read this!).

[mikehalloran]

iWork never lived up to it's potential,

I couldn't agree more. I use it so that my iPad Air, iPhone and Mac can share certain documents but that's it.

I still have the v9 versions but don't use them anymore.

For those things that still work best in AppleWorks, I have this old G4 that boots in OS 9.2, 10.411 or 10.5.8 depending.

[stubbsonic]

I have a G4 that I can use with Appleworks and will use it to revise whatever materials I have in that format and convert them to PDF.

I'm looking at iStudio Publisher, which looks better that Swift for what I'm doing. Also has a booklet function which will be quite useful.

iDraw also looks interesting, but I'm leaning toward iStudio (which has a demo).

[mikehalloran]

I recently stumbled onto Macintosh Garden, an archive for what they term Abandonware. Although very little of this works on an Intel Mac, there are hundreds of old apps that work in OS 7, 8, 9 and PPCs running versions of X.

http://macintoshgarden.org

I maintain a G4 running OS 9.2.2/10.4.11/Classic on one partition and 10.5.8 on another. Since my Beige G3 died years ago, I lost the ability to install my old floppies--most external readers do not like Mac 400/800K disks. With this site, I was able to download copies of MacWrite, ClarisDraw and a couple of other apps in forms that install on my computer allowing me to finally read and convert some very old files.

[bayswater]

I recently stumbled onto Macintosh Garden,

I found it too and got a fully functional free version of MS Office that runs on my old Mini under 10.6.8 that fills in for those times when you have to have the real thing. There's lots of stuff there for those with a Mac running Rosetta.

[mikehalloran]

Yes. I saw Office 2004 in there. I have a bunch of old copies unless I've given them all away by now. It was one of the best versions,IMO. With the converters still available free from MS, you can read and create files compatible with the latest versions of Office.

I confess to being one of those who think that Word 5.1 was the best word processor for the Mac ever. I'll never use it again but it was fun to play with last night. It's on MacGarden but I found my old copy with all of the converters, exporters etc. including an old copy of Screen Style, the $15 shareware for Word and MacWrite that morphed into Final Draft -- the included macro version for Word 6 can be opened and saved in PPC versions of Office (Save As) and still works in the latest version of Word. Being a Final Draft customer, I can attest that FD is not that far advanced over Screen Style.

All of which begs the question: Remember when fiddling with your Mac was fun? Opening old apps in OS 9 or Classic, getting the extensions in order, trying to make things work so I can convert old files, playing with icon creation tools and ResEdit ... It takes me back to those days. I don't miss downloading through a modem, however... Nosir!

[bayswater]

Remember when fiddling with your Mac was fun?

I remember that, but I'm feeling much better now. I used a lot of Macs prior, but the first one I bought and paid for myself was a PM 8600. I got it home and was all excited. Power on, and within 5 minutes, everything was set up and working perfectly. What a disappointment.

BTW, you're entirely wrong about Word 5.1. WordPerfect 5.1 was the best.