After I don’t know how many months and I don’t know how many hours of work, Stanza for iOS has made an appearance in the world. I wish I could say an appearance on the app store, but it’s not quite there yet. However, it has made an appearance on my iPhone as an app for beta testing.
I must say, I am impressed by this app. Although it is still in its most infant of versions, (0.4.0, and for comparison my whatsapp is on version 24.7.79) it works and feels like a real app. It has a clean, professional look, and operates smoothly, things you always expect from an iOS app.
As soon as I had the app downloaded I had to create an account before I could proceed. This felt like what I was used to from other apps and went very smoothly. (I didn’t even have to opt out of advertising emails because they weren’t trying to get me to sign up.) As soon as I entered my email and set a password, I chose my subscription plan. From there I proceeded into exploring the app.
My first impression was, Wow. This thing is amazing. I had seen quite a few screenshots over the past year so I knew a little bit of what to expect but it was way better in real life than anything I had expected at this point in the game. Navigation was intuitive and felt very natural. When I selected a song it loaded immediately in high resolution pdf format. I scrolled through books and chose songs at random to view. I browsed through the discovery tab and saw some favorite hymns and some songs still new to me. I clicked on the “My Library” tab for a view of songs that I had favorited while browsing and searching through books and was pleased to find them all there, sorted by alphabetical order. There was also a tab in “My Library” for collections, but I couldn’t seem to get that button to work. (Lest we forget this is still in beta testing.) I dived even deeper into the app and explored the settings tab and found some interesting stuff about offline mode and automatic projector mode. (They tell me these settings will likely be removed and these features will just happen automatically).
I was listening in on a call with Kirby and Kent and asked about using Stanza with a projector at an upcoming youth rally where I am supposed to lead the singing. Kent said it would work fine to use Stanza at the youth rally but it would be best to do this and that in particular order, which reminded me of when Steve Jobs showed the iPhone to the world for the first time.
When Jobs got on that stage in San Francisco back in 2007 to address the audience in the room but ultimately the world, the device he held in his hand barely worked. Things had to be done in just the correct order or the phone would crash onstage with everyone watching. He even pulled some fancy sleight of hand during the keynote and switched phones on the go because they kept running out of memory.
Are the stakes as high as they were for Steve Jobs? Hardly. Does Stanza have as much potential for change as what he was introducing? Maybe. But seriously, in all reality, after getting my hands on this app, I feel like Stanza will revolutionize the way we interact with sheet music.
This post was written by Levi Jantzen and is not a paid promotion but an honest evaluation of an honest effort.
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