Now this is pretty ingenious. My colleague Gabe Cobas tells me that BALMUDA Design’s NumberKey application for iPhone and iPod Touch (available from the iTunes App Store for £1.19 here in the UK) works beautifully with Sibelius on Mac OS X 10.5.
Recent Apple laptops have done away with the embedded numeric keypad that was previously accessed by holding down the Fn key (or using Num Lock) and typing particular letters on the QWERTY keyboard, which is something of a problem for Sibelius, since it relies so heavily on the numeric keypad for choosing note values, etc. (By the way, if you’re using a Mac without an embedded keypad and don’t have an iPhone or an iPod Touch, fear not: update to Sibelius 5.2.5 and you’ll find that you can choose Notebook (laptop) features on the Menus and Shortcuts page of Preferences, which will allow you to use the number keys on the main keyboard as Keypad keys.)
But if you have an iPhone or an iPod Touch, you can now use NumberKey. Gabe says:
I installed the Numberkey app from the iTunes App Store and tested it with Sibelius. So far so good, and it has all of the functions of a normal number pad. No need to carry an external number pad around anymore!
I haven’t tried this myself yet (I have some stupid problem with my iPhone and my WiFi here at home) but this looks like a winner for owners of recent Mac laptops who want to use Sibelius on the go!