app reviews for Mac and iPhone
iPhone Apps
Time:Calc
$1.99
Some people reviewing on the app store don't seem to get this. "Why would you need a calculator to work with time? Just do it in your head." These people obviously don't understand that there are people who suck at math, or the enormous amount of time calculations a stage manager does all day long, and moreover, that there are stage managers who suck at math. This app is so amazing, I use it all the time. I've gotten pretty good in my career at calculating in 1hr 20 min blocks (the standard Equity break schedule), but for more difficult calculations, like running time down to the second (i.e. 8:05:30 - 9:21:35), there is much more room for error. Some conductors, directors, etc. will drive themselves crazy over a few seconds variation in the running time, no need to freak everybody out with bad math when it can be done with instant accuracy on the calculator. This is of course for situations where you don't enter the run times in a report that calculates it for you, but even then it can still be handy for other calculations. This app is attractive, cheap, and works exactly how you think it should.
OmniFocus
$19.99
This app is pretty expensive at $20, but I find it worth the cost. I actually used it for about a year before buying the even-more-expensive desktop companion. It also backs up to my iDisk, which is great, and when you use it with the desktop, it does a nice job of keeping your tasks in sync. You can use it for simple to-do lists, or for managing complex projects according to the well-known GTD (Getting Things Done) method of organization. I won't go into all the details, but the app is location-aware (so you can see a list of tasks based on which are closest to your current location), very powerful with multiple ways to organize projects and contexts in multiple sublevels, and it's a neat and clean interface that's very finger-friendly while containing tons of information. Considering I stopped using Todos altogether with Windows Mobile because the app was such a pain, I now enjoy setting goals and completing them because the software is so easy to use. If you just want something that will do a basic shopping list, you don't need all this power, but if you enjoy further categorizing your tasks, this is pretty much the gold standard. See under the Mac apps section for more about the desktop app.iTransNYC
$2.99
This app contains a very clean subway map, on which you can tap on a station to see a list of the trains that stop there and their schedules (which are never right, but I blame that on the MTA, not on the app!). It can put your current location on the map. It gives you service changes as well as very current alerts, like trains skipping a station because of police activity. It can also do directions from one station to another, and it will tell you where you need to transfer if necessary and give you a time estimate. I have no idea if the time estimate is accurate, probably not, but again that's the MTA's problem. It's got my daily commute at 23 minutes, which is pretty damn close to my estimate of 25 minutes, on a good day. But if all estimates are assumed to be on a good day, at least that gives you an idea. The best part of the app is that most of the features (including the route calculation, impressively) can be used offline, which is essential for anyone living in New York, where the majority of the time I'm looking something up on my phone I'm underground. The service advisories are cached, although you have to remember to open the app above ground and download new ones if you want them to be up to date. I can go home either on the A or the 1 train. Especially on weekends, one of them is surely screwed up. Checking this app beforehand has saved me countless wasted hours by warning me which one I should take at a given time. Weatherbug Elite
$.99
I don't trust the built-in weather app for a second -- literally I don't trust it to tell me what's going on right now, much less in an hour or tomorrow. Weatherbug is more detailed and also gives advisories on serious weather conditions. Last summer at Reagle I used it to warn me when I was about to get struck by lighting in the parking lot. This isn't exactly job related (unless you're doing outdoor theatre, in which case it might be the most important app you have), but I feel it's one of those secondary jobs of the stage manager to have an answer for everything, including whether it's going to rain on our day off.UPDATE: Although this is my chosen weather app, I recommend it with some reservations, as I upgraded excitedly from the free Weatherbug to Weatherbug Elite the day it was released, and then a few days later they "upgraded" regular Weatherbug by removing a bunch of its original features and adding more ads, so that the free customers would have to buy the new app to get what they had before. Not cool! I was going to suggest the Weather Channel app instead, but apparently they just did the same thing, and made their paid version $3.99! I guess if you don't already own a weather app, you can just accept that all the good ones will cost money now, but it sucks for the people who were happily using a free app only to have it ruined by an update.
Files
$4.99
When I was looking for an app to put documents on my phone, I had three requirements: doesn't require a proprietary desktop app, displays the documents well, and has a pretty interface. This app has all three, so I'm happy. If you've got your phone on the same network as your computer, it tells you what address to put in to mount your iPhone in the Finder (I assume it works on a PC, probably not as simply). I keep a PDF of the Equity rulebook for whatever contract I'm working on, the script, calendar, schedule and contact sheet for my current show, and whatever else I need.Wikipanion
Free
An app to easily search Wikipedia without having to load the rather phone-unfriendly web page. I suppose this could be used for legitimate rehearsal research, but what I find myself using Wikipedia most for while working is looking up trivia that comes up while running a show. It can be hard to do while calling some shows, but generally you can find someone on the crew who plays on their laptop while doing their not-so-demanding job. For example when I was doing Annie, during the cabinet scene Morganthau is introduced as "Acting Secretary of the Treasury." One day we wondered, why was he acting secretary, and what happened to the real Secretary of the Treasury? Wikipedia can tell you. I expect this app to make it much easier to answer these kind of burning questions when it's not practical to have a laptop backstage. There is also a paid version called Wikipanion Plus, which is $4.99.MobileFotos
$4.99
This is more of a fun app -- it's a Flickr upload client, which I'm sure you could justify as a work-related app if you used Flickr to upload and share work photos of some sort -- which now that I think about it is not a bad idea for things like documenting the proper look of light cues or scenery on stage. I use the app to update my Flickr stream, which is linked in the sidebar. It also is a nice way to pass the time by looking at other people's photos. They have just recently updated it to take the GPS coordinates directly from the photo (it used to be taken from where you were standing at the time of the upload, rather than when the photo was taken). LCD Clock
$.99
This app is used for one thing in my world: it tells the time down to the second. For some reason the iPhone doesn't seem to have an app or an option somewhere that can show the time in seconds. A minute is a very long time when your director wants to know why the 2nd act got 30 seconds longer today. Personally, I take my running times down to the nearest 5 seconds. This app is very good at the one thing it does, and it also has an attractive calendar when held in vertical orientation (though you can turn it sideways for a very large and readable clock). There are a few attractive color schemes to choose from. It's got some alarm features, but because apps can't stay active in the background, there's not much point to using a 3rd-party alarm app, since you can't do anything else with the phone while waiting for the alarm to go off. For a very similar alternative, try Night Stand, which has many of the same features and some other ones. When I got it, it was free, but it's now also $.99 after a major upgrade. These two apps are now very similar in quality and sophistication, and I switch between them pretty regularly, so try them both!
Delivery Status Touch
$2.99
This is the iPhone companion to the dashboard widget Delivery Status, which has long been a favorite of mine. It tracks packages from the major delivery services, and when you sign up on the developer's site, it will sync your deliveries between your iPhone and the dashboard widget. This was a huge deal before copy and paste was available, but even now, I find it much easier to enter tracking numbers once and have access to the status of my packages from either my computer or phone at any time.Rock Band
$6.99
I know what you're thinking. Really? Rock Band? Yes, let me explain. When rhythm games first became popular (Parapa the Rapper for PS2 was the first one I ever played), I was very excited by this as a stage manager. I mean, isn't that what we do? We press buttons (or get other people to press buttons) in time with music. I found it a nice mental excercise. I never got into the whole Guitar Hero thing where you stand in your living room with a big plastic guitar, but when I got an iPhone I downloaded Tap Tap Revenge as soon as it came out. I also got Tap Tap Revenge 2, but like most rhythm games I've ever played, I was disappointed with how little relationship there is between what you're tapping and what the music is doing. It's just a hand-eye coordination game with background music, it doesn't really develop useful skills.
Having heard good things, I decided to spend a bit of money on Rock Band. It's exactly what I've always wanted -- especially when you play on hard mode, you're basically playing exactly what the instrument you're "playing" is doing in the song, within the limitations of your four buttons, of course. But by understanding the song, you gain an advantage in playing the game, and that's what I think is useful. You also have four instruments -- bass, guitar, drums and voice (voice is basically just tapping a button and holding to follow the melody). So each song has a high replay value, and mastering one instrument helps you to be ready for the next. One thing I will say is that because the app is new, there are not that many songs, but there are some free to download, and a number of hidden tracks you can unlock.
Still, this just makes it an interesting toy. The reason I added it to the list of stage management apps is not because I thought, "hey this might be helpful someday," I've thought that for years. It's because when I was learning to call Inventing Avi on very short notice, which involved running lights and sound and enough bump cues that random patrons would compliment me in the lobby, I found that I picked it up instantly. I got the chance to call a speed-through having never even seen the calling script, and basically called the show 99% correctly. The reason, I surmised, was that the lights and sound cues were color-coded, and my brain was trained from years of rhythm games (and my recent use of Tap-Tap) to be told "this finger is red, this finger is blue" and to apply those quickly to a musical, rhythmic or visual stimulus. Especially during a speed-through of an already fast sequence that I had never practiced, what I was doing did not have anything to do with the way one learns to call a show. I was applying video game reflexes and instead of a screen I had a script with circles in it, and instead of a joystick I had a light board, a Macbook Pro spacebar, and a sound console. After that experience I had no hesitation spending a few dollars to exercise my brain with Rock Band. And it's a fun game, too!
If you'd like to try it, there's now a free version with just one song, but you can try out all 3 difficulty levels on all the instruments.
Cycorder
(Jailbreak only) Free
NOTE: Now that the iPhone 3GS supports video, Cycorder is not necessary for new iPhone users, but if you have older models it's still a decent alternative.
This is a video-recording app which takes very good quality video for a phone camera. It did not originally support audio in its first release, but it does now. It's free, and supported by advertising which is pretty subtle and non-intrusive, and very much appreciated as an alternative to the other video app which costs money (which I think is rather silly for an app that is technically not supported on the phone and could be disabled by Apple at any point in the future). The app doesn't have a built-in way to get videos off the iPhone, so it requires a little more computer knowledge to do that.
For more details on using Cycorder (because the process of getting your videos off is a little cumbersome), see my blog post.
Flashlight
(Jailbreak only) Free
There are a number of flashlight apps. The one I use requires the phone to be jailbroken, because it automatically adjusts the screen brightness to the highest level, and apparently Apple doesn't want apps to mess with that. If you don't want to jailbreak, there are many flashlights on the App Store, many free. Personally I think if you have to resort to this app you have failed as a stage manager, but not as epic of a failure as if you don't have a flashlight and don't have this app. I must confess to using it a few times to get around a darkened theatre! For a more fun if slightly less bright alternative, I suggest iGlowstick (free).PDANet
(Jailbreak only) $29.99
PDANet has a long history of allowing tethering on Palm devices and others, and is now available for jailbroken iPhones. If you create an ad-hoc wireless network with your computer and join said network with your iPhone, PDANet will allow you to use the phone's internet connection on your computer. Since AT&T has decided they don't want our money (yet?) for this service, after a 14-day free trial, you can instead pay PDANet's one-time registration (I think it's about $30) for the ability to tether anytime and anywhere. This comes with all the usual warnings about tethering -- it's not allowed under your contract, don't use enough data that AT&T will wonder where it's going, etc. If you're jailbreaking your phone you probably know all about what AT&T doesn't want you to do already. It's pretty expensive for an app that violates your data contract and could cease working with a future update, but in my mind there is no price that can be put on this feature.On the subject of tethering, I hear plenty of people say it's not an important feature, but I think anyone in the theatre industry is probably accustomed to work-places and housing that don't have internet access. Stage managers will understand the usefulness of being able to pull their computer out anywhere to send off some important document. I once was in a restaurant between shows, and some subject came up which reminded me I had forgotten to send a very time-sensitive document. I ran out to the parking lot and sent it while sitting in the trunk of my car! That's about the worst case of must-have-internet-everywhere I've ever experienced, but the moral is that the document got sent out in time, and it didn't disrupt my dinner any longer than if I had gotten up to go to the restroom.
There was talk that AT&T may finally offer a tethering plan with the iPhone 3.0 software, but so far nothing new has come of it. If you think you can wait, a legit alternative (that you'd have to pay for monthly, presumably) may be coming... someday. Or you could just move to another country.
Mac Apps
Pages
Part of iWork, $79
Pages is the word processing component of Apple's iWork suite, which is a relatively recent competitor to MS Office. It is available only for Mac OS X, and unfortunately is not included for free with new Macs. I really wish it would be, since in my opinion, its greatest drawback is that nobody else uses it. I have never in my life been offered a Pages file from somebody else (which isn't saying much since I use it for pretty much everything, and yet have never offered somebody else a Pages file either, assuming they couldn't use it). It can open and save to Word format, so it's interchangable with Office users, but some of the more advanced formatting may not come out correctly, so there are still times I reluctantly use Word when I know I will have to share the file in .doc format.I began using Pages when a director (and fellow Mac geek) I worked with started sending me some beautiful schedules. I complimented him on the format and he said he was using Pages 2.0, which I had not bothered to upgrade to, since Pages 1.0 had approximately zero features, besides the ability to type text. That convinced me to give it another try, and as Apple has continued to slowly develop their iWork suite into a serious replacement for Office, I have transitioned more and more to using iWork apps by default.
The advantage to using Pages (and for that matter, the other apps of the suite, Numbers and Keynote), is primarily how incredibly easy it is to make your documents look great. The ability to lay out, align and alter your documents with tables, images, charts, etc. is so intuitive and produces paperwork that is eye-catching and easy to read with very little effort. Most of all, you can make prettier documents than are possible with MS Word, and without the mystery that comes from trying to format a Word document, and wondering why no matter what you do, it won't make it look like what you want it to look like.
The one thing you need to be careful of is making sure you can convert your document to a format other people can use. At this point I don't recommend using it for documents you know you're always going to be sharing back and forth in Office format. Pages is at its best when you want beautiful paperwork that only you need to edit. Then you can distribute it as a PDF and not have to worry about how it displays on other people's computers. In fact, due to the subtle differences in margins and things between Office for Mac and Windows, I prefer to distribute most documents with any kind of fancy layout (tables, etc.) as PDFs anyway, so I know they will show up on everyone's machine properly aligned.
My absolute favorite thing about Pages is my new performance reports that I designed for the Acting Company tour. There's actually a Numbers spreadsheet embedded in the word processing document, and this wonderful spreadsheet receives the performance times and adds up the running time and length of intermission for me. For any show that doesn't require a complete FileMaker database, I think this is the best possible solution for easy entry and editing, combined with the math skills of a database or spreadsheet solution.
Keynote
Part of iWork, $79
Keynote is another part of the iWork suite. It's Apple's answer to Powerpoint, and in my opinion is the one of the three iWork apps that is most likely to be already better than its Office counterpart.I was first introduced to Keynote (and iWork for that matter) when it was in version 1.0. I was given a copy because a tour I was PSMing was using it for onstage projections, and I would have to run it off my laptop and be the person on the road responsible for maintaining it, as the show continued to be developed (yes, we toured with a show that was never frozen -- don't do it -- ever). The show I was touring with had rather insane projection requirements for one of its size. Basically the whole plot revolved around this man on stage showing the audience a slideshow of his favorite paintings, and clicking through them and discussing each one. Needless to say, if anything happened to the projection software during a performance, the entire play would cease to make sense. In between these scenes, the projections at times consisted of full-motion video. All of them were cued with timed fades and transitions, that allowed them to progress somewhat theatrically with the lights and sound.
So here I am, on the road, running 1.0 software on a brand-new Powerbook which is a Rev A model (first of its kind, so nobody really knows if it's free from major design flaws), and absolutely nothing can go wrong with the projections. I am happy to say, in over 50 performances, nothing ever did go wrong with the projections while running a show. Keynote 1.0 had a terrible bug when saving a presentation, where it would hang indefinitely and need to be force quit, losing all your changes. We did have to hold curtain for 20 minutes before our invited dress rehearsal in New York, after a half hour's worth of edits were lost just before the show started. That sucked. But that bug is long gone, and the app proved itself to be very easy to use, and creates smooth projections with options that allowed them to be seamlessly blended with the action onstage. That tour gave me lots of experience maintaining and updating Keynote files for theatrical use, and since then I have had something of a career as a projection designer for shows that I have also stage managed, although I have never been credited or paid as such (which I've noticed I do enough, and do well enough, that I should probably do something about that).
For any non-Broadway show that wants to use projections, I highly recommend Keynote over anything else, certainly over using VHS or DVD playback, which offers almost no flexibility in timing, or skipping things if something goes wrong. It also allows you to instantly resize images and video, so you will rarely if ever have to adjust the projector itself. I saved a show $1,500 once by switching to Keynote instead of their old DVD method which required two projectors to hit different spots on stage. By shaping the projected image to fit the surfaces, we did it all with one projector and cancelled the rental on the other one. I was very popular with the producer for that one!
I'm not sure if it's still the case with recent models, but in the Powerbook / iBook days, an iBook was only capable of running projections in mirrored mode -- you would see on your screen exactly what the projector was getting. The better method is to customize a presenter's display where you can see the current slide, the next slide, and any notes you want (I did one show where one sequence happened so fast that I had to write the cues in the notes because there wasn't time to look back at the script). I have a feeling that Macbooks have good enough video capabilities that you won't need a Pro to use this feature. But a more powerful computer will always run full-motion video better. When I bought my Macbook Pro, I had 4 gigs of RAM shipped overnight to the theatre because I was about to use it to run a production of Singin' in the Rain, which has lots of onstage movies. And yes, I did use a 4-day-old computer to run a show which was completely dependent on projections. I like to live dangerously. But switching to the new computer in the middle of tech allowed us to use higher-resolution clips (upwards of 1GB .mov files) than my old Powerbook was capable of showing without studders, (and you can bet during performances the Powerbook was 2 feet away from me with a slightly lower-quality show file on it!). That show was also the first time I had used Keynote to project full-motion video with audio, and it ran just fine.
See the blog for more information about using Keynote for projections.
OmniFocus
$79.95 (educational and family pricing available)
OmniFocus is a very complex task management app which allows you to track projects and individual tasks by grouping them as projects and contexts (a context being, for example, things you have to do while at your computer, or while out shopping, or in the office). I mentioned a bit about OmniFocus above in regards to the iPhone app. That was my first introduction to the app, and I liked it enough that I finaly decided to see just how good the desktop app was, and if it would change my life enough to justify the very high cost. Thankfully there is a 14-day trial, so you have nothing to lose if you want to see for yourself. Of course by about Day 3 of the trial I had myself so organized that the thought of uninstalling the app was impossible, and with my birthday a few days away, I decided to commit to it. It is quite a bit more powerful than the iPhone app (although they are gradually adding more and more of the desktop features to the iPhone client), the desktop has support for nested folders and projects (which will show up on the iPhone, but they have to be created on the desktop), custom layouts, different views, and a few other features.Due to all the features, it's a bit overwhelming. The OmniFocus website has some links to get you started with tutorial videos and the like. I also recommend following @omnifocus on Twitter. They frequently post links to sites that offer tutorials and techniques other people use to organize their lives.
If OmniFocus is not for you, two newer contenders are The Hit List, and Things. They are a little less intimidating, and also less expensive (they are both $49.99). The Hit List does not appear to have an iPhone client yet, but I would be surprised if they're not working on one, since the ability to take your tasks with you everywhere is such a selling point for the other two.
I also have a separate page for OmniFocus tips and tricks.