Sometimes, while working with forScore, you’ll need to choose one or more scores or bookmarks from your library—not to view them, but for various other reasons. We use something we call ‘item pickers’ to allow you to do just that, and with forScore 10.4 these pickers got a few new abilities.
First, let’s identify all of the different situations where you might encounter one of these pickers: in the Metadata panel when choosing additional items to batch edit, in Rearrange when inserting one or more items, when creating a new template, setting up item-specific goals or reports in Dashboard, or when creating or editing a Button that uses the “navigation” action type. The first two allow you to select one or more items and tap “Done” when you’re ready, while the rest are closed automatically as soon as you choose a single item.
Most of these pickers now offer the same full range of sort options that the main menu does, allowing you to view your scores and bookmarks by title, newest, rating, difficulty, time, or key, if applicable. (Dashboard’s pickers are a little different, since they offer you the ability to pick a score, bookmark, or setlist. Since the sort bar is busy letting you choose between “items” and “setlists,” these new sorting options aren’t available in this case.)
The pickers used within the Metadata, Rearrange, and Templates panels now also offer Quick Peek previews of their items so you can make sure you’ve got the right piece before you select it. Swipe over any item from left to right—the opposite direction from the standard delete gesture—or tap and hold two fingers on it to see a preview. Tap away to return to the list, or tap the thumbnail image to select the item.
These upgrades make it easier for you to browse through your library and make sure you’re picking the right item so you don’t have to guess or rely on trial and error.
It’s been a few weeks now since our latest big updates, and we’ve continued to improve things with minor revisions that fix bugs and provide small usability improvements. Generally these minor updates don’t include notable new features, but today we’re making an exception with forScore 10.4.3 and forScore mini 3.4.3 so we can bring you a few tweaks and upgrades that didn’t make it into the big release milestone.
First, the Rearrange tool’s Insert function has gotten a boost, allowing you to select multiple documents at once and giving you access to the Templates feature so you can insert pages of staff paper with just a few quick steps.
Next, we’ve added support for the Turn Touch remote. This handheld, four-button Bluetooth Smart remote is made mostly of wood and held together using strong magnets. It’s inviting to hold and works beautifully: simply connect to it using forScore’s Devices panel, then visit forScore’s settings panel to assign up to eight actions (each of the remote’s four buttons can perform one action with a click and another action with a click and hold).
Last but not least, we updated the Metadata panel’s audio file picker to provide standard Quick Look previews so you can hear your tracks and make sure you’re selecting the correct one. We’ve also replaced the basic playback controls in the Recordings browser with Quick Look previews to provide a more consistent experience.
Our work is never done—there will always be big ideas, iOS updates, and hardware revisions to account for, and while bug fixes are always our first priority we love to be able to provide new capabilities and make forScore’s functions just a little more useful. They also usually come directly from our customers as suggestions, so if you’re one of the musicians who asked us about these tweaks, thank you! We hope you enjoy them.
For most of iOS’ history, sharing files between apps has always worked one way—it sent a copy of the file to the receiving app, duplicating the data and making sure each app could only modify its own version. This straightforward way of copying content between apps is easy to understand, but it also makes editing files more difficult and uses up more of your device’s storage.
With forScore 10.4 and iOS 11 we now support in-place editing of files. That means that you can use other apps on your device to modify the files stored within forScore without duplicating them first, as long as two conditions are met: First, the other app must support in-place editing (if it doesn’t, it gets a copy of the file just like before). Second, only files stored within forScore’s Documents directory can be edited—if you share an annotated PDF, for example, forScore sends a temporary copy that isn’t saved anywhere, so any edits made won’t be reflected within forScore.
The easiest way to edit a file with another app is to share it from forScore and choose the app you want to view or modify it with. As we discussed last week, forScore now integrates with iOS 11’s Files app—this means you can also open the Files app and choose to share one of forScore’s files with another app. If you’re working with an app that uses iOS’ document browser to open files, like our Badger app does, you can even access and update forScore’s documents without leaving the app you’re working in.
Lets look at some examples:
- A PDF file’s table of contents has an entry that is misspelled and you’d like to correct it. Sharing the score from forScore as a PDF allows you to open the file in Badger, our PDF editing app, and make your edits. Because Badger also supports in-place editing, when you return to forScore your changes are immediately reflected in the Bookmarks menu’s TOC tab.
- The page number of several entries in a CSV index file are incorrect and must be updated before you can create bookmarks within that file. Sharing the file from forScore and opening it with a text editing app on your iPad allows you to make those changes and save them, so that when you return to forScore they’re ready to go.
- While browsing forScore’s documents in the Files app, you notice that the lyrics of a piece haven’t been updated properly. Tapping and holding the file and choosing “share” allows you to open the PDF file in another editing app on your device, correct the text, and save the changes. When you open forScore, the file has been updated.
If it seems like there are a lot of rules and different scenarios for working with your files, you’re right! By opening up the ability to access files between apps, Apple has introduced a decent amount of complexity that just didn’t exist before.
Fortunately, there’s a great example of a device that plenty of people use every day and behaves similarly: computers. If you’ve learned how to work with files and folders, apps and websites, then you’re already familiar with many of these concepts and after a little bit of an adjustment period you’ll be whizzing back and forth making edits without breaking a sweat.
When the iPad was first introduced it raised a lot of questions about where exactly this new device fell on the spectrum of iPhone to Mac. It had powerful multi-touch gestures on a screen big enough to make desktop-class apps possible, but it avoided some fundamental computing concepts such as the ability to view multiple apps simultaneously and, most controversially, the file system.
The iPad has a file system, of course, but iOS and its software was designed to hide that reality away from users in order to simplify the experience. Unlike on a computer, where one file can be opened and edited with multiple applications, iOS only allowed copying files between apps so that each one had its own version spread across your device. That approach remained controversial, but eventually Apple recognized the need to provide some sort of file management.
Files App
It began when Apple released the “iCloud Drive” app alongside iOS 9. That app only showed files stored in iCloud, but it was an important first step. With iOS 11, things got much more interesting: Apple replaced the iCloud Drive app with a new “Files” app that showed files stored in iCloud, certain files stored on your device, and even allowed third-party apps (like Dropbox) to offer their cloud storage services and display documents within the Files app. This provides users with a single, familiar interface for managing, sharing, and editing their files no matter where they’re stored.
Not all apps can display their documents in the Files app, however. To do so, they must support both iTunes file sharing and in-place editing. We’ve supported the former since forScore was first introduced, and with version 10.4 we added support for the latter. (In-place editing is a bigger topic, so we’ll be taking a deeper look at that next time.) That means that forScore’s Documents directory can now be accessed through the “On My iPad” location in the Files app’s sidebar. It makes working with documents easier, allowing you to do things like copy them between forScore and iCloud Drive, Dropbox, or any other third-party app that integrates with the Files app.
Services
Since version 8.1, forScore’s Services panel has allowed you to access iCloud Drive through a system-provided interface. Apple doesn’t provide an API to allow us to communicate with iCloud Drive directly, so this works differently from other services like Dropbox. First, you must choose whether you want to download or upload a file. Once you’ve done that, Apple takes it from there and displays an interface that looks a lot like the iCloud Drive app.
Although iOS 11 makes some big changes, the way you access it through forScore’s Services panel is virtually unchanged. You still choose to download or upload files, but on iOS 11 the interface that comes up looks almost identical to the Files app and gives you access to its powerful new features. It supports downloading or uploading multiple files at once, and it gives you access to any third-party apps on your device that expose their contents to the Files app.
There’s something to be said for Apple’s original approach. The length of this article is proof enough that file systems are complicated, but it’s what you can do with the system that makes it worth having. If you can’t accomplish the same things with a simpler system, or if you can’t do them quickly, then perhaps that complexity is justified.
Last week we explored forScore 10.4’s Musicnotes integration and the concept of “content providers” in addition to the existing “cloud services” that can be accessed through forScore’s Services panel. While Musicnotes is the biggest story here by far, our latest update also includes some nice enhancements for those cloud services as well.
First, we added the ability to specify a starting directory when using Dropbox or Box: open either of these services and navigate to a directory where you store your forScore files, tap the new gear icon in the toolbar, and check the “Start Here” item. Now, any time you return to that service you’ll start in that directory. There’s a grace period, however, so you can close the services panel to check something else and return within a short amount of time without losing your spot.
Next, Dropbox users can now view a thumbnail preview of their files so they can make sure they’ve got the right item before they download it. Just tap the info button to the right of any supported file type including PDFs, CSV files, and many image formats.
We also made some changes to the way forScore integrates with Apple’s own service (called Files on iOS 11, iCloud Drive on iOS 10 and earlier), but there’s more to the story there and we’ll be back next week with a detailed look at that one.