The manual

1. 1

   Install it

   Open the disk image and drag CueMonkey to Applications. It is signed and notarised by Apple, so it opens like any other app: no right clicking, no trip into Security settings.

2. 2

   Sign in

   Press the face in the top right corner and choose Google or Apple. Your own browser opens and comes back. CueMonkey never sees a password, and an account is free.

3. 3

   Add something

   Press Add cue and choose a sound, a video or a picture. It lands at the end of the running order, named after its file.

4. 4

   Press the space bar

   That fires the next cue. Press it again for the one after. That is the whole of running a show.

Signing in is what lets you build shows and save them. Opening a show somebody sent you and running it never needs an account, and never will: a licence in this app cannot stop a cue from firing.

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1. 1The show's name. A dot beside it means there are changes you have not saved.
2. 2The tools: files, history, the view, screens, sound, settings, and your account.
3. 3Acts. A show can be one, or one per act, or one per scene.
4. 4What is on stage right now, and what is armed to go next.
5. 5The running order. Cues fire from here, left to right, top to bottom.
6. 6Backdrops: the pictures that sit there between cues.
7. 7The transport. Three controls, and the keys that fire them.

Nothing in this window moves during a show. Notices float over the running order rather than pushing it down, and the player opens on top of the grid rather than between it and the transport. The cue you are reaching for is where it was a second ago.

Add one with the Add cue button, or by pressing the first empty slot in the grid. You can choose several files at once and they arrive in the order you picked them, each named after its file. Drag a tile to move it; the running order is the order they fire in.

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1. 1What it is. A picture or a frame of the video for anything with a picture, a speaker for sound.
2. 2Its name. Click it to select the cue; double click to rename it.

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1. 1LIVE: this is sounding or on a screen right now.
2. 2How far through it is, and how long it runs.

A green outline means a cue is armed: it is the one the space bar will fire. Selecting a cue arms it, so you can jump anywhere in the running order by clicking a tile and pressing GO.

Everything you can do to one cue is on its own menu, which opens with the right mouse button, or with two fingers on a trackpad. The key beside each line does the same thing without the menu.

S

The settings for the armed cue

T

Trim the armed cue

P

Open the player on the armed cue

⌘D

Duplicate it

⌘C, ⌘V

Copy its settings onto another cue

⌘⌫

Delete it. Deliberately awkward: no single key deletes a cue

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1. 1Clear takes the show off: sound out, the cue's picture down. Backdrops stay up and the next cue stays armed.
2. 2Blackout takes every screen to black at once. Nothing stops playing underneath, and pressing it again brings the picture back.
3. 3GO fires the next cue and moves the playhead on. It is the only painted control on the console, because it is the one a hand has to find without looking.

The space bar is GO, B is Blackout, Delete is Clear. Nothing else fires a cue, so a stray key press cannot start one.

To jump somewhere else in the running order, type its number. The console collects the digits as you go, so 4 then 2 means cue 42 rather than cue 4 and then cue 2, and what you have typed so far is printed above the grid as you type it.

Then press GO. The first GO after a number takes the number: it arms that cue and plays nothing. The green outline moves to it, you can see you typed what you meant to, and the second GO fires it. That is one press more than a lighting desk asks for, and it is there on purpose: jumping is a rare, deliberate thing to do in the middle of a show, and a mistyped digit that fires immediately is a cue nobody wanted over a scene. Escape forgets a number you have started.

The arrow keys do the same job at close range: they move the armed cue back and on one at a time, without playing anything.

Firing the first cue puts the console into show mode. From that moment it stops telling you things: no update notices, no first run help, nothing over the running order that is not about the show. Your Mac's alert volume goes to nothing too, so no notification or message tone can happen over a scene. The old level is written to disk before it is changed, so even a machine pulled out of the wall gets it back.

Add an act with the plus. Cues you add land in the act you are looking at, and switching act changes the running order and the backdrop strip together. Drag the tabs to put the acts in the order the evening runs in.

GO never fires across an act boundary. When the last cue of an act has played, the line above the running order says so and names what comes next; the GO after that brings up the next act with its first cue armed, and plays nothing. It takes one more press to start it. After the last cue of the last act, the same line says End of the show.

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1. 1A backdrop. Press it to put it up, press it again to take it down. The number is the screen it is on.
2. 2The key that switches it, so you never have to find it with a mouse.

Backdrops are separate from the running order on purpose: GO never touches them, so a set slate or a house curtain stays where you put it while cues come and go over it. With more than one screen you can have a different backdrop on each.

A cue can say what the screen falls back to when it finishes, in its own settings: leave the backdrop alone, turn it off, or switch to a different one.

1. 1

   Hold

   Stops what is playing where it is. Press it again and it runs on from there.

2. 2

   Start again

   Back to the top of this cue, still playing.

3. 3

   The bar

   Where you are in the cue. Drag it to go somewhere else.

4. 4

   The time

   How far in, and how long the whole cue runs.

5. 5

   The cross

   Puts the player away. Whatever is playing carries on.

Press P, or open it from a cue's own menu. It floats over the grid rather than pushing it down, so opening it moves nothing: the tile you were reaching for is still where it was.

This is a rehearsal tool. Nothing here is on the transport, because holding a cue halfway is not something anybody does during a performance, and a control that is never used in a show should not be sitting beside GO.

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1. 1The picture, if this cue has one, playing from wherever the start is set.
2. 2Where the cue starts and stops in its file. Type a time, or drag the handles below.
3. 3How long the picture and its sound take to come up, and to go as the next cue arrives.
4. 4The sound of the whole file, with the piece you keep drawn brighter. Drag either end, or nudge it with the arrow keys.
5. 5Play what you have chosen, and start again from the beginning.

Nothing here touches your file. A trim is two numbers on the cue, so you can move it a hundred times during a tech and it costs nothing to save.

Press S on the armed cue, or open it from the cue's own menu. What is in here depends on what kind of cue it is: a video has a screen and a picture to think about, a sound does not.

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1. 1Which screen this one plays on. Left on Default it follows the show's screen.
2. 2Fullscreen is the real show output. Windowed is a small movable copy for checking things.
3. 3Hold this as a backdrop instead of running it with GO, or say what the screen falls back to when it finishes.
4. 4Its sound, its picture, and whether it repeats.
5. 5How loud it sits, and how it comes up and goes.
6. 6The piece of the file it plays, the same two numbers the trim window sets.
7. 7Leave this cue alone: the buttons that change every cue at once will skip it. For a gunshot or a sting, set it once and it stays set.

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1. 1Turn the picture, or flip it, for a projector hung upside down or bounced off a mirror.
2. 2Drag the box, or its corners. The real screen moves as you go.
3. 3The same thing as numbers, for when you know exactly what you want.
4. 4Which screen you are setting up. Each one is set up on its own.
5. 5Fullscreen is how the real show runs. A window is for checking without taking over a screen.
6. 6How long Blackout takes to take the screens down, and to bring them back.
7. 7Lines and labelled corners, to catch a picture that is turned the wrong way.
8. 8Every screen in the room at once, saved under the name of the room. Next time you are in it, one press puts them all back.

Save the whole rig under the name of the room. Next time you are in it, one press puts every projector back where it was.

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1. 1Every cue with sound, measured. The level it sits at, and what CueMonkey would change it by.
2. 2Which output the show plays out of.
3. 3The level everything is evened out to. Dialogue is louder than music on purpose.
4. 4What a cue with no fade of its own uses.
5. 5How a fade travels: even sounds like a hand on a fader, straight is a straight line.
6. 6Measure everything again, or apply the levels to every cue at once.

Cues arrive from a dozen places at a dozen loudnesses, and this is what stops a rehearsal being spent riding a fader. Nothing in your files is changed: it sets each cue's own volume, and a cue marked Leave alone is skipped.

Half an hour before an audience comes in, the questions are always the same. Is every file still where it was? Is the projector plugged in? Which output is the sound going to? Is there room on the disk? The clipboard in the toolbar asks all of them at once and answers in a few seconds.

1. 1

   The show's files

   Every cue opened and read, not just looked for. A file that has been moved, renamed or emptied is found here rather than at the moment it should have played.

2. 2

   Screens

   Which screens this Mac can see, and whether the ones your cues are set to play on are among them.

3. 3

   Sound

   Which output the show is going to. A rehearsal that ran through the laptop speakers and a show that should be going to the desk look identical until somebody asks.

4. 4

   Room to save

   How much disk is left. A save that fails halfway through a show is the worst way to find out.

5. 5

   This machine's own sounds

   Whether CueMonkey can take the Mac's alert volume down for you when the show starts, and put it back afterwards.

6. 6

   Saved to a file

   Whether what is on screen has been written to the show file yet.

Nothing here changes anything. It looks, it reports, and it leaves the decisions to you. Press Check again after fixing something and it asks all of it again.

Press Save. What you get is a single file ending in .cmshow, and it is the show, not a description of one: every sound, every video, every image, every fade and every screen setting is inside it. Put it on a memory stick, open it on any other Mac with CueMonkey, and it plays. Nobody has to find anything.

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1. 1A second file to hand over. You stay working in this one.
2. 2A second file, and you carry on working in that one. This is how you start next year's run from this show.
3. 3Writes the file out fresh, dropping whatever earlier saves left behind.

Separately from anything you press, CueMonkey keeps its own copies of the show while you work, and puts one back on its own after a crash, a restart or a flat battery. Earlier versions, in the toolbar, is where the older ones live.

Each one says when it was taken and what was in it. Going back replaces everything on screen with that copy, so it asks first, and playback stops before it happens. This is the answer to "we wiped act two an hour ago", which is a bigger thing than undo is for: undo cannot reach back across it, and it is not meant to.

An account covers three Macs. If you need a fourth, take one off the list at cuemonkey.app/account: removing a Mac frees the slot straight away, and that Mac carries on playing the shows it already has.

Signing in wants the internet once. After that CueMonkey runs with no signal at all for weeks, which is the normal state of a booth.

The keyboard is in two halves, and the line between them is deliberate. Bare keys run the show: one hand, in the dark, without looking. Anything that changes the show itself wants the command key, so a stray press can never edit a running order during a performance.

None of them fire while you are typing in a field, and none of them fire while a window is open. The window has the keyboard until you close it.

Space

GO. Fires the next cue and moves the playhead on

B

Blackout. Every screen to black, and back again

Delete

Clear. Takes the show off and leaves the next cue armed

0 to 9

Type a cue number. The next GO arms that cue rather than firing anything, and the GO after it plays it

←↑

Arm the cue before this one

→↓

Arm the cue after this one

ZXCVNM

The first six backdrops, in the order they sit in the strip

S

Settings for the armed cue

T

Trim the armed cue

P

Open or close the player

Esc

Forget a number you have started typing, and close whatever is open

And the editing half, none of which touches what is on stage:

⌘Z

Undo. Everything in this app can be undone

⇧⌘Z

Redo

⌘D

Duplicate the armed cue

⌘C

Copy the armed cue's settings

⌘V

Paste those settings onto another cue

⌘⌫

Delete the armed cue, after asking. Deliberately awkward: no single key deletes anything