Collaboration

Work on the same show at the same time, with cues syncing live

Several people can work on the same show at the same time. Move a cue and your teammates see it in about a second.

Two systems doing two jobs:

CuePoints syncs the cues: cues, tracks, timings, labels and colours, live.
Your shared folder carries the files: the project file and all the audio and video sit in the Dropbox or Drive folder your team already uses. Your media never goes to our servers.

Open the project and choose Sync > Members and Sharing…, then Share this project.

That is the only moment a project becomes shared. It never happens on its own.

Then put the show folder, the project file and its media, in the folder your team shares, exactly as you would anyway.

A status badge appears in the toolbar telling you the project is shared and syncing.

Giving Your Team The Show

There's nothing to hand out beyond the show itself. Put it in the shared folder; anyone who opens it can ask you for access.

Nothing to re-issue or keep track of.
Having the file gets nobody in. You approve every request by hand.
Changed your mind? Remove the member, or Stop sharing to pause the whole project.

You can only approve people who already have a CuePoints account, and nobody can find out whether an email address has one. A mistyped address can't put your show in a stranger's inbox.

Joining A Show

Accept the Dropbox or Drive invite and open the project file from the team folder. That file is the show, and it stays the show, it's what you'll see in your recent projects, your title bar and Show in Finder from now on.
Click Request Access when CuePoints offers, or use Sync > Request sync access… at any time.
Your badge shows Waiting for approval. The owner gets the request straight away, approves it, and you connect automatically. No restart, nothing else to do.

What The Badge Is Telling You

Badge	What it means
Synced	Connected and up to date. The tooltip shows when something last arrived from the team.
Syncing, 3 to send	Your recent edits are on their way.
Sync frozen	You've paused incoming changes. Your own edits still send.
Sync paused	You chose to disconnect. Edits queue in your file and send when you reconnect.
Sync offline	No connection. Your changes are safe and send themselves when you're back.
Waiting for approval	Your join request is with the owner.
Sharing stopped	The owner paused sharing for everyone. Keep working; your changes send if sharing resumes.
Sync offline, 5 queued	You're signed out or unreachable and edits are piling up. They're safe in your file; sign in to send them.

Click the badge for the quick controls: Freeze Sync, Pause Sync, Sync Notices and Members and Sharing.

Freeze Sync

Freezes incoming changes so the show stops moving under you while you concentrate. Your own edits keep going out. Unfreeze and you catch up.

Working Without A Connection

Nothing stops. Your changes queue safely inside your own file and send themselves the moment you're back, even days later.

A line across the top of the show tells you how current you are: "Currently offline, showing the team's work as of 20 minutes ago." So you always know whether you're looking at this morning's show or last Tuesday's.

Saving

Press Cmd+S and carry on. You never choose a file, and you can never save over a teammate.

Underneath there is one rule: only the owner writes the file in the shared folder. Everyone else's work reaches the team through the cloud instead, in about a second. So the file in Dropbox gets refreshed by nothing more exotic than the owner opening the show and saving it:

Tuesday evening, the programmer re-times Act 2. The team sees it immediately, through the cloud.
Wednesday morning the owner opens the show, it catches up in seconds, and they press Cmd+S.
Dropbox carries that fresher file out to everyone's laptop, ready for the next person who opens it away from a connection.

Save As and Save As Bundle are switched off on a shared project, so the master can't be replaced by accident. To take a standalone, non-syncing archive, use Save A Copy As….

Members And Permissions

Sync > Members and Sharing… is where the team lives:

Members: who's on the show, and what they can do.
Permissions, including per-cue-type access. You can give the lighting programmer the Lighting cues and nothing else.
Activity: who changed what, and when.

Cue types someone has no access to are hidden from them completely: not greyed out, not visible-but-locked. Their number-key shortcuts renumber from 1 over the types they can see.

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