Pending bars are an important concept within StaffPad. StaffPad was designed to allow creative freedom with the pen, regardless of what you’re writing. If you draw something that StaffPad doesn’t recognize, or if StaffPad isn’t sure of the intention, the staff lines of that bar will be colored orange. This is known as a pending bar.
It’s worth spending a bit of time explaining the design intention and concept of pending bars, what might cause pending bars, how you can use them to your benefit, and how to deal with them when you encounter them.
Part of the main design intention for pending bars was to allow for an uninterrupted workflow. They don’t always mean that StaffPad hasn’t understood you — what they’re telling you is that StaffPad isn’t 100% sure of what some of your strokes mean. This concept of “confidence” is unique to StaffPad, but quite powerful when you think about it a bit.
While working quickly, or while drunk (hey, we’ve all been there), your writing precision and accuracy may go down. Instead of StaffPad insisting on ‘having a go’ at recognition, we felt it would more helpful if it actually left the music alone entirely until you have a chance to go back and clarify your intention. This way, at least you can go back when you’re finished scribbling your masterpiece and see your own original writing, without the app having ‘made a guess’ at what you meant and potentially misinterpreting.
Pending bars also allow you to mix standard notation and graphic, or alternate notation systems. You can write whatever you like, thanks to the freedom of the pen!
Pending bars are still saved, printed and formatted into parts – just like regular bars – but, of course, they won’t play back.