Touch Notation 4+

I had this app for a few years. I thought it was pretty handy for jotting down short musical ideas. However it is a very fussy programme and frequently requires multiple attempts to get the notes or other annotation down. Sometimes I had to just give up trying to change time signatures, adding tests or accidentals. Which can be extremely irritating. So irritating in fact that I sadly had to delete the app altogether, life being too short.

I would not normally try to contact developers through the review forum, but this app is without any customer service - when you send off the feedback form on the Kawai site, a message pops up to say that you will not receive a reply (having limited you to 140 characters - boy, do I get the impression that contact with the outside world is unwelcome!). So here's my enquiry. After repeated attempts, I have found that it is impossible to write a natural accidental on a note. The stroke is in in two parts. The first part opens a lyric window. The second half writes an eighth rest. You never get the natural.

Many of the gestures are hit and mss. The stroke for a whole note, basically an open circle, delivers a half note or a quarter note more times than the correct one. So I was resigned to trying again and again for the natural - but not to being completely unsuccessful. I would guess that lyric writing is a later modification, and that no-one at Kawai has spotted the conflict.

Touch Notation is, without a doubt, the best handwriting music notation app I've tried! I understand that the app may not have been designed to replace expensive software like Finale or Sibelius, but it actually could do it, if some bugs and minor limitations were addressed. So far, I've found only a few limitations that, if they were solved, would make me ditch my Finale software all together:

1) no lyrics tool - I compose a lot for choir, so like the chord tool and accompaniment tool, I'd be willing to pay extra for the ability to input lyrics! It seems strange to me that this function is missing, given that the app already comes with various vocal templates (including SATB). What's the point in having these templates if you can't put lyrics underneath each voice part?

2) If I've already created a document and I want to change the time signature to 5-4, it doesn't recognise the top number 5! This is very strange given that I can create a new document in 5-4 time and the fact that I can create every other irregular time signature (like 11-16, 7-4, 13-8 etc.,)! This is probably just a bug.

3) Cross staff beaming - I need this, especially when writing music for piano!

Besides these, and probably some other small faults that I've yet to find, it's a fantastic tool!