Features of the Year

We love simple, clear designs, and we strive to make forScore as approachable as possible so that everyone can get started using it as quickly and naturally as possible. For some, that leaves the mistaken impression that forScore is a shallow app, and that couldn’t be further from the truth. That’s why we created this series, the Feature of the Week, and we’ve covered a lot of ground over the past three years.

This holiday week, we wanted to take a moment to recap all of the many features we’ve written and give our readers a chance to catch up on any they may have missed. So without further ado, here’s every feature we’ve discussed so far:

Thanks for reading, and happy holidays!

App Gifting

The holiday season is here and one of our favorite features of the iTunes and App Stores is the ability to purchase content—like albums, movies, books, and apps—for other people. You can pay for the item, add a message, and even schedule the gift email to arrive on a specific date. When it arrives the recipient will get a download code that they can redeem with their own iTunes account.

It’s a great way to send last-minute gifts, or to share an app you’ve enjoyed with someone who perhaps can’t afford or wouldn’t choose to buy it on their own. For more information on app gifting, check out this page on Apple’s website. Happy holidays!

10.3: MIDI Playback

MIDI, the eponymous digital musical language, is a bit of a chameleon. It’s a way of describing musical activity, but in practice that can take several different forms: it can be used to send keystrokes from a keyboard to software that responds almost immediately by producing sound, or it can be used to communicate tempo changes and setup information—like telling that software to use a different sound bank.

It can also be used to save and recreate songs at a later date, much like an audio track such as an MP3 file. Instead of including actual sound information, however, MIDI songs are a record of musical events—this note was pressed with this velocity, this pedal was released, and so on. When software is asked to “play” that information back, it reproduces those actions faithfully but can use any of the sound banks at its disposal to produce results that may sound like they were played on an entirely different instrument. Certain kinds of software can even try to represent that information visually, as sheet music.

With forScore 10.3.4, we added the ability to import, link, and play back MIDI files just like you’ve already been able to do with other audio tracks. You can play them back, add automatic track turns, loop sections, and adjust their playback speed. The first time you try to play a MIDI file you’ll be prompted to download a small sound bank from our servers, then you’ll be ready to go.

Whether you’re using a MIDI device to control forScore’s features and page turns, using score-specific commands, sending messages with buttons, reusing common commands with presets, or using forScore to produce piano sounds as you play, there’s something for everyone in this diverse language. And now, we can add one more: MIDI file playback.

10.3: PDF Annotations

For several years now forScore has had the ability to display embedded PDF annotations. These additional pieces of information are stored within PDF files, but they’re generally added later—after the file has already been created. Some are pixel-perfect, like images, and others are more symbolic: it’s up to each app to decide how to reproduce them faithfully on your screen.

Our presentation of these annotations has always accommodated page adjustments like margin reduction and cropping, but with forScore ten’s ability to skew pages these annotations were left out due to the complexity of rotating and repositioning them accurately. With forScore 10.3 we made the necessary layout changes to allow these kinds of annotations to be appropriately placed even atop skewed pages, so now you can adjust your pages without sacrificing anything.

For users running iOS 9 or 10, that’s pretty much the end of the story. With iOS 11 and the introduction of PDFKit, however, our support for these annotations was largely made redundant—now we simply let iOS do all of that work for us, providing you with broader support for annotation types and renditions that are more in line with the rest of Apple’s ecosystem.

We never know what Apple is planning and it’s always a risk to develop new features or to build out support for something only to have them come along with something better, but that’s the cost of progress. In the end, our customers get better results and we have less code to maintain. That’s obsolescence we can live with.

10.3: Item Pickers

Whether you’re adding scores to batch edit them in the Metadata panel, choosing a specific song or setlist to track with Dashboard goals or reports, or appending their pages with the Rearrange tool, the item picker is the tool you use. This picker is a list view that’s similar to the Scores menu but more specific and narrowly focused. There are no arrow buttons and no edit mode or any of its related functions, but things that help you find what you’re looking for quickly—the search bar and filters—are ready should you need them.

It’s a small thing, but in 10.3 we made the item picker a little better by showing additional information such as rating, difficulty, key, and duration for any score that has such metadata. It’s not game-changing, but now when you’re looking for a specific version of a piece you won’t have to rely on its title alone to make sure it’s the right one.