Newzik Updates — Hugh Sung

I wanted to update everybody on a response that I got from the co-founder of Newzik, the sheet music reader app for iOS that I’ve been very impressed with recently. When I posted my five recommendations for improving the app, Aurelia, the co-founder, got back to me and said that at least two of the things that I had suggested were already part of Newzik. How cool is that? And I'm sure she's going to have her team look at some of my other suggestions. But I wanted to update everybody because I think these things that they already have (that I didn't know were there) are real game changers. I'm very impressed at how they implemented them.

Setlist Navigation

The first thing that she pointed out was the fact that the setlist navigation that I recommended was already part of Newzik, and it's actually, if anything, I think it's even better than what I suggested. So let's take a quick look at the setlist navigation. From the home screen, go into Setlists.

After selecting a piece, tap the middle of the screen to bring up the toolbars on the top and bottom.

Now I was looking for a setlist navigation along the top menu bar, but it's actually located on the bottom left. Take a look, you'll see a small set of icons. The middle one looks like a note inside of a box, and then you have arrows on both sides of that box.

If I tap the arrow to the right, boom, takes me to the very next piece in my setlist. I can go forward in my setlist or backwards. If I want to see all the pieces, tap the icon with the note in the middle of it. There you go, I can jump to any piece instantly.

I love this! This is so much better than I was expecting.

Custom Half Page Turns

Now, the next thing that Aurélia was pointing out is that they already had advanced half-page turn capabilities, the customizing of half-page turns. This is another game changer. So let me show you how this works. First thing to keep in mind is that we're going to turn on the half-page turn capability and this is going to be a global setting. So in other words, this is going to apply to every single piece. It's not a big deal. You'll see why in just a second. Tap the middle of the screen, look at the Settings icon at the top right corner, tap on that, and then tap on Page Turn.

Now, by default, half-page turn will be turned off. Let's go ahead and turn that on, and now let's go back and I'm going to tap outside of that box to get back.

Now, if you'll notice there is a little blue dot that's just appeared on the right-hand side in the middle of the screen.

When I turn my page, you'll see that half the next page appears on the top and the previous half appears on the bottom.

Now, if I don't want to see this everywhere, I'm going to go ahead and do my first half-page turn, and then I'm going to use my finger and tap on that little blue hamburger menu bar, the little blue line, and drag it all way down to the bottom and then tap on “Apply Everywhere”.

What I've just done is I've made sure that all the page turns are now full-page turns just by applying that initial setting. So it's something you'd have to do in the beginning when you're first looking at the piece.

Now let's go to another page and let's say, all right, here's the second page and I want to go... I have one and I have a half page going from the second page to the third page because of that big jump there. Okay, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to the next page, tap on the half-page hamburger little box in the bottom right now, start dragging it up.

See where that's applying there? Let go. I'm not going to tap Apply Everywhere. I'm just going to let that rest over there. Now when I go back to that page and turn, I could see the bottom of the previous page and the top of the next page. You notice I customize it for just that bottom line. You can customize it anywhere you want. You can go to the next page and you can see now it's still the full page. I've only customized that one page.

I thought this was going to be super difficult to implement, but I love that “Apply Everywhere” setting. So it's just a little bit of an extra step to think about, but it's worth doing if you're dealing with a difficult piece with a few spots where you really need to look ahead. This is fantastic.

So thank you so much, Newzik. You guys are doing awesome, awesome jobs. Now let's see if you guys can work on some of my other suggestions, which were

a global search tool along the top
Bookmark graphics just to show where the bookmarks are, would love to see something along those bottom pages.
Remove the “delete from library” option in Setlist editing, and put in an option to “replace” with a different piece from the library

What's also really cool is the fact that I think sometimes we forget that apps are developed by regular people, and it's so great when you have customer support as responsive and as fast as what Aurélia and her team does. I mean, they just got back to me within hours of me posting that previous recommendation video. That's fantastic and just to know that they're watching, they're concerned, they're getting feedback and they're working on continuously improving their apps. This is what I love when you have a good close community that can communicate with each other and help each other improve.

So, Aurelia, Newzik team, thank you so much. I look forward to continued updates. And as you guys update your app, I'll update my videos as well.