10.4: Snapshots

One of forScore’s older features allows you to create and restore from annotation snapshots. These per-page saved states for your annotations allow you to keep different markings for different situations, but the new Layers feature we discussed last week gives you all of the same capabilities and more: you can hide any layer at any time without permanently removing those markings.

Since most people will want to use layers going forward, we replaced snapshots with layers in the annotation toolbar (you can reverse this if you prefer by visiting the “legacy features” section of forScore’s settings panel). When you’re working on a page that already has one or more snapshots, the Layers panel displays the Snapshots icon in the top left-hand corner so you can still access them and use them just as you always have.

When you’re ready to upgrade to using Layers, you can use a new conversion function we added forScore 10.4 to help people transition. It takes each of your snapshots and creates a new layer from them, with one caveat: forScore supports up to 8 layers but up to 24 snapshots. If you’ve got more than eight, you’ll need to remove some before you can switch over to using Layers instead.

New features are always exciting, but the real test of any thoughtfully developed app is how it helps existing users adapt to the new functionality. We spent a lot of time trying to find the best way to create something amazing for everyone without disregarding the work and time our users put into organizing and annotating their scores.