Note: This post will be posted on both techinmusiced and ukestuff.
One of the best aspects of this “non-job” has been the people I have had the opportunity to meet. I can’t think of a single person in the area of music education technology that I have not immediately liked. Simply put, the music education technologists that I know are also some of the finest, most intelligent, collegial people I have met. I learn from them, as I am sure they learn from me–and I enjoy hearing about their lives and getting to know more about them.
This winter, I had the chance to present sessions at the Maryland Music Education Association, mostly thanks to Robby Burns, who has served as the MMEA’s technology chair. Robby is an incredible teacher and technology user, and has a blog, podcast, and even a book on digital organization (Buy it! Paper. Kindle. See his awesome promo video at the bottom of this post). If we have “specialties,” I would say that Robby is a specialist in secondary band and technology automation. He looks for ways for technology to simplify his life and to make automatic processes that solve problems, keep things organized (for himself, his program, and his students), and to ultimately create more free time for himself and his family. When you see Robby’s presentations, hear his podcasts, or read his book or blog, you need to know that like all the music technology experts I have met, he lives what he is teaching. The knowledge comes from real life experience, and is personally tested.
One of the highlights of my trip to Maryland was spending 30 minutes with Robby (until we were kicked out of the exhibit hall as it closed) simply talking about apps that either of us did not know. One of those apps was Any Font.
Robby discussed how he loved Any Font, as he was able to use any font on his iOS devices for anything–documents, presentations, whatever. While I should have been writing down every app he suggested (I only typed out a few–and thus, I am not the expert on digital organization), that conversation is locked in my brain.
I blogged about the new version of Chordette the other day, an app that provides a way to use a font to make ukulele chords–something of great use if you teach ukulele. However, if you use the fonts embedded with Chordette–they are not going to show up correctly on an iPad (ever get the Keynote message that a font is not available? Even if the font is no longer used in the presentation? Any Font is one solution, and there is another that I will add at the end of this post). I have also been working with the developer of Chordette to make a font set that uses the colors of the Aquila KIDS strings–and would love to use those fonts in my presentations. Fonts are always better for a smaller document size than an image–which is why a PDF of music created by a software program (e.g. Finale, Sibelius, Notion, Dorico, MuseScore) is always smaller than scanned music (embedding a picture in the PDF).
I haven’t had need of fonts other than the standard fonts embedded in iOS, but Any Font allows me to put the Chordette CGCA ukulele fonts into iOS. You send a True Type Font (TTF–most are in this format) to Any Font (you can even “Open In” from iCloud Drive or Dropbox, but easiest is Air Drop from a newer Mac to an iOS device), and then select the fonts you want to install on your device. Any Font sends those fonts as a profile to your device, enabling those fonts for the iOS device to use. If you delete the profile, the fonts go away. You can always add a font and take it away later. Any Font also offers 1,000 additional fonts for $2 as an In-App Purchase–a pretty good deal. Of course, you can find a great number of fonts on the web for free, including musicological fonts that might be helpful in documents and presentations.
So…if you have ever wanted to use other fonts on your iOS device, or have had issues with Keynote telling you a font wasn’t available, Any Font is a great way to solve both of those issues.
It does make you wonder why Apple hasn’t made it possible to simply add fonts to iOS as you can on a Mac–perhaps this will be resolved in the future. Until then, I recommend Any Font to you, and want to offer thanks to Robby Burns for bringing this app to my attention.
Final note: Are you getting the “font not available” warning in Keynote, even after making sure all fonts were in the system? If you don’t want to install the not-used but still considered “missing” font, do this: Export the Keynote as PowerPoint, import that exported file into Keynote. Save the file. Problem solved.
Technology in Music Education 