After the original Apple Pencil was announced, we were just as excited as our customers to learn more about it, how it worked, and what it could mean for apps like forScore. It wasn’t something we figured out overnight, since everybody’s needs are unique and can’t be addressed with one quick update or setting, but over the past three years our approach has evolved to help our users take full advantage of this stylus’ strengths.
iOS’ palm rejection is quite good, but it’s not perfect and after Apple Pencil was released we got a lot of requests for something more concrete, an option to completely ignore finger input when drawing. We knew that there would be times when the Apple Pencil wasn’t available, like if it was out of reach or its battery had drained, so we had to get creative. Apple doesn’t let developers know when an Apple Pencil is nearby or whether or not it’s fully charged, so the only time we know for certain that you’ve got one is when it’s touching the screen.
To solve this, we tied our “prevent finger drawing” option to another setting, “automatically enter annotation mode,” which lets you annotate by drawing on the page without having to activate annotation mode first. Since that mode only kicks in when you use Apple Pencil, we relied on it to make an assumption about whether or not to allow finger input.
Sometimes, though, a smart answer isn’t the right one. That setup was confusing for a lot of people and unnecessarily complicated. With forScore 10.5, we took a simpler approach: if enabled in forScore’s settings panel, the “prevent finger drawing” option now works all of the time, no matter how you enter annotation mode. As long as your Pencil has touched the screen within the last fifteen minutes, forScore will ignore finger input for drawing purposes.
A new icon in the center of the annotation toolbar shows you when this setting is active. If your Pencil stops working or wanders off, tap this icon to temporarily disable the option and allow finger drawing. The next time you touch the screen with your Apple Pencil, it’ll re-activate itself automatically. Instead of trying to work out whether or not to block finger drawing on its own, forScore gives you a clear view of what it’s doing and the freedom to override it if necessary.
If you delete a score, bookmark, or setlist by mistake, forScore 10.5 includes a recovery feature that may be able to help. In forScore’s Backup panel, tap the “Recently Deleted” item at the top of the list to see any items you deleted within the past seven days. Tap on an item to put it back, or swipe from right to left and confirm to delete it permanently and free up storage space on your device. Use edit mode to select multiple items and tap one of the buttons at the bottom of the list to delete or recover them all at once. To select everything in the list, enter edit mode and—without selecting any items—tap the appropriate button at the top of the list; forScore selects all items for you and asks you to confirm the action before proceeding.
This feature provides a great safety net, but it’s important to note that forScore can only help you recover things that you delete through the app. If you use the Files app or iTunes’ File Sharing panel to delete a PDF, forScore won’t be able to help you get it back.
December 5, 2018
In Depth, News
It’s been about a month now since Apple unveiled their latest generation of iPad Pros, so today we wanted to detail some of the impact that these devices’ unique characteristics has had on forScore and what effect it will have as we look to the future.
Aspect Ratio
The most important change Apple made to this round of iPads is that they changed the aspect ratio of their screens. The 11″ iPad Pro is taller and skinnier in portrait orientation, or squatter and wider in landscape. The 12.9″ iPad Pro’s screen has the same dimensions as previous generations, but the addition of the home indicator area along the bottom of the screen has its own implications: apps can display roughly the same amount of information on screen, but a strip along the bottom of the screen is non-interactive—touches that you make in this zone are reserved for system gestures like returning to the home screen.
These changes are important because, until now, forScore has always run on devices with roughly the same proportional screen size. Unless you’re using Split View, the app’s usable screen area is usually equivalent to an 8.5×11″ piece of paper. PDF pages are rendered within that area, with gaps added to the left and right if needed (for skinnier pages like A4) or below the bottom of the page (as with landscape-oriented pages). Regardless of how much visible area your page occupies on screen, forScore has always allowed you to annotate anywhere on the screen so your markings don’t suddenly stop working when you move past invisible page boundaries.
Now, forScore runs on two unique devices: one that has more space at the bottom and another that has the same amount of visible space but less interactive space.
Challenges
When your device is held in portrait orientation, forScore displays full pages and allows you to flip through them with a single tap or swipe. In landscape orientation, forScore increases the size of the page to fit the longer edge of your screen and navigation adapts to allow for scrolling up and down as needed before turning pages. iOS 9’s multitasking modes make things a little more complicated, so forScore considers “portrait” to be any app size that allows it to display a full page without cutting off the bottom, while “landscape” is the opposite.
The first problem we encountered in updating forScore for these new devices was that the screen size of the 12.9″ iPad Pro, minus the area required for the new home indicator, meant that forScore assumed traits normally intended for landscape orientation even when the device was held in portrait orientation. Tapping to turn the page scrolled up or down by a tiny amount, and two-up mode inappropriately replaced half-page turns. On this device forScore can display a full page but the app’s interactive space is slightly smaller than what’s expected. So we added an exemption in forScore 10.5, and another in 10.5.2 for users with iOS’ Display Zoom feature enabled.
On the 11″ iPad Pro, a side effect of the screen’s aspect ratio change is that, when in landscape orientation, scrolling from the top of the page to the bottom leaves very little overlap and may not display each system of music fully. In forScore 10.5.2, we added a setting that’s specific to this device so you can choose whether forScore scrolls by half or by a third of a page.
Another change new iPad Pro owners quickly noticed was that iOS displays its home indicator at all times, potentially obscuring a very small portion of the bottom of your page if you’re using a 12.9″ iPad Pro. While iOS doesn’t allow developers to access or modify this indicator in any way, it does allow apps to declare that they prefer the indicator bar be hidden if possible. As of version 10.5.2, forScore does exactly that. When the home indicator appears or disappears is entirely up to iOS, but generally if you’re not touching the screen the home indicator will now get out of your way so you get an unobstructed view of your music.
The Future
Soon after these new devices were released, we started getting questions from purchasers of the 11″ model who were confused by the fact that, in portrait orientation, forScore doesn’t use the full height of the screen to display pages. This has to do with aspect ratio: making a page taller stretches it and makes the music look wrong, and zooming in on a page cuts off the left and right sides of your music. Even if you’re using pages with skinnier aspect ratios (like A4 pages), the fact that forScore has always allowed you to annotate within a canvas equal to the original iPad screen’s dimensions means that zooming in could still obscure your notes, links, text annotations, and more.
A few customers who asked about this have followed up by asking if cropping could be handled differently: that forScore display pages just as it does on older devices, but that cropping be adapted to allow pages to get bigger on the screen. This presents its own challenges, however, such as when sharing these files with colleagues who might be using older devices, or when using iOS’ Split View. It gets incredibly complicated and tough to do in a thoughtful, natural, and reliable way.
As we look to the future, however, we absolutely understand that this is a downside for people hoping to get the most out of their new device’s large screens. All we can say now is that we’re exploring a variety of possible ways we can better work to the strengths of each new device. Just like we did with the Apple Pencil, we move from getting the basics working right before we press onward to determining how best to take full advantage of major shifts in Apple’s hardware. It takes a little bit of time to get right, and we appreciate your patience.
Introduced in forScore 10.1, filters let you narrow down the items in a list by combining powerful rules to specify when things should be included or omitted. It’s a handy tool that gives you a lot of granular control over what you see and it can be used to cross-reference categories quickly and easily. And now, with forScore 10.5, filters have gotten even more powerful.
Filters were originally available in forScore’s main menu, the global search panel, the setlist creator, and in item pickers used throughout the app. We added them to the Setlist menu in forScore 10.5 so you now can see exactly what you’re looking for within the contents of a specific setlist.
Everywhere filters are available, you can now also define rules based on setlist membership: choose to see things in—or not in—a specific setlist, or select multiple setlists and see the items in any, all, or none of them. Together, these two upgrades can really help you work smarter and faster.
When you want to add certain types of markings to a page, Stamps are often the right choice, but for dynamic markings such as slurs they just aren’t flexible enough. For those situations we created the Shapes tool which lets you draw certain common markings that need to be different sizes and aspect ratios.
There are two new shapes to choose from in forScore 10.5, an arrow and an oval (the two most commonly requested ones). Just like other shapes, you can use the resizing slider to change their thickness or tint them to the perfect color.
Out of the original set of shapes, the rectangle has always been a bit of an outlier: created to allow people to blank out sections of a page they don’t need, the rectangle is filled instead of outlined. Now, with our latest updates, you can choose either style for the rectangle and the new oval shape. Tap the circled arrow button next to either shape to see the tint color picker, and use the new tab bar along the bottom to show these new shape settings. There’s also a setting for the staff shape that allows you to specify the number of horizontal lines drawn.