Documents

The documents list is always shown in the left column of the ScaleMaster window. Every document is listed with title, bpm and scale indicators as well as an icon of the document's instrument. A small orange dot as in the "My Recording" title above may appear to the right of a document's title to indicate that it has a recorded exercise (as opposed to the standard generated one).

ScaleMaster offers several methods to share, send and retrieve the exercises you create. It is important to understand that ScaleMaster differs from traditional document-based applications in the sense that it doesn't save file to user specified locations on the hard drive. Instead it keeps a register of all available documents and administers them in the application itself. That also means that once a document is deleted in the app it is gone for good.

From time to time, however, there may arise the need to share a scale document with a friend or maybe it is needed on another device that also contains the ScaleMaster app. For that scenario ScaleMaster has a share button which will be explained below.

Add / Delete

The very bottom of the document view houses 3 buttons. An Add, Delete and Share button. When clicking the add button (or typing cmd-n) a new document will be created in the document list. It will be named "Untitled" or the equivalent in other languages. In cases where a document with the name "Untitled" already exists ScaleMaster will append a number at the end. Please see the section below for ScaleMaster's duplicate title policy.

When deleting a document (or typing the delete key) ScaleMaster will produce a warning and on deletion confirmation delete the currently selected document. As of this writing it is not possible to delete documents that are not selected.

 

Sharing

When clicking the Share button the popup window above appears. With it we have several options to transmit the current document to another machine or send it via messages or email. When clicking the Mail icon a new email will be generated with the document as attachment. All that is left is to specify an addressee, sender and maybe formulate some accompanying text. When on the receiving end of such an email double-clicking on the attached document will automatically import it into ScaleMaster. This mechanism works similarly for messages.

AirDrop is available on newer machines and allows to directly place the current document on the receiver's hard drive. On the desktop in most cases. In these circumstances double-clicking the document will again automatically import it into ScaleMaster.

 

Duplicate Titles

When dealing with documents there is of course he possibility of duplicate file names. Typically apps will offer an overwrite dialog in these instances allowing a choice of replacing the existing file or canceling the import. ScaleMaster handles things a bit differently. It will import any song you select and rename it in cases of naming conflicts. If such a conflict exists ScaleMaster appends a number to the newly imported file. Thus if you import a song named "Steps" and such a song already exists in your list, the imported song will be renamed to "Steps 1".

 

Sorting

All ScaleMaster documents are sorted alphabetically and cannot be positioned in any other manner. Therefore the best way to move documents vertically in the list is to rename them accordingly.

Summary

File sharing is a feature often overlooked yet incredibly powerful, because it brings documents created on the iPad to the Mac. Of course most iPads are backed up in the cloud, but having important docs on the Mac as well is great for file security.