10.2: Darkroom

With forScore 10 we added a lot of functionality to Darkroom, our utility that lets you snap photos with your camera or import images from the Photos app to create a new PDF in your music library. We added the ability to automatically enhance your images, adjust their brightness, saturation, and hue, and we included the ability to crop your images—even accounting for distorted perspective when needed.

All of these new tools opened the door to some really powerful editing, but with the expanded functionality came some tougher requirements. Users who had never had any issues before started experiencing low memory crashes when working with an average number of images, so we knew we had to find a solution.

In forScore 10.2, we created an advanced caching system that keeps what it needs in memory to ensure that you can work quickly, but intelligently and transparently offloads the rest to disk so you can add far more pages to your file without worrying about losing your work. And, if something does go wrong, your session isn’t lost forever: reopen Darkroom and you’ll be asked if you’d like to continue where you left off, or if you prefer to start over from scratch.

The iPad is an incredible machine with some tight technological constraints. We can never prevent all crashes, but with forScore 10.2 your work is given the highest priority—we significantly reduced the likelihood of a crash while simultaneously minimizing the consequences of one.