Seal’s new album of jazz standards is out today, and PBS has just released a video of his performance of “Luck Be A Lady” at Vibrato Jazz Grill in Los Angeles. His big band includes the inimitable Alan Steinberger, complete with his iPad and forScore. The video includes a few snippets of him using our app, and it’s always a pleasure to see it in use (you can even catch a page turn just after the 5-minute mark—effortless compared to an earlier moment where one of his paper-based colleagues struggles).
When we started this series over two-and-a-half years ago (has it really been that long?), we picked one of our favorite features, Quick Peek. Built into most of forScore’s menus, it’s an easy way to preview a score before opening it by tapping and holding the item until the preview appears. Tap the thumbnail image to open the score or bookmark, or tap the + button in the bottom right-hand corner to open it in a new tab.
A few things were changed in iOS 11, though, and that tap and hold gesture is now used by iOS for Drag and Drop, so we had to come up with a new way of invoking this helpful feature. Now, instead of tapping and holding the item with one finger, do the same thing with two fingers instead.
Since that’s not the most obvious gesture (these days all the good ones are taken), we added a second way to preview your items. Just as you’ve always been able to swipe from right to left over a table cell to show the “delete” action, forScore 10.3 features a similar “peek” action on the other side that you’ll see when swiping from left to right. You can use a short swipe to show this item and then tap it to see the preview, or you can just swipe all the way across the cell to invoke Quick Peek with one quick motion.
Times change, conventions evolve, but have no fear—Quick Peek hasn’t gone anywhere. We use it all the time and, judging by how many people wrote to us to ask us about this change, so do you!
Two kinds of controls, links and buttons, provide a lot of power and flexibility in how you work with your scores. The Links feature, which allows you to easily handle repeats, is one of forScore’s oldest and most beloved features. Buttons, which were added later, look similar but can do all sorts of things like start and stop an audio track, send MIDI commands, or control the metronome.
If you’ve used either of these features before, you may have found that their control size isn’t exactly to your liking. Whether you find them a little too small or bigger than you’d prefer, with forScore 10.3 you can adjust their diameter by choosing from four options in the Accessibility section of forScore’s settings panel (in the “Link/Button size” submenu).
These controls are incredibly handy and powerful, and we don’t want a lack of usability to stand in the way of everything they can help you do. If you ever found them too hard to tap, tweak this setting and give them another shot.
In addition to this morning’s big wave of updates to all of our iPhone-compatible apps, today we’re also proud to announce the immediate availability of forScore 10.3.4. That version number may make it sound like just another minor update with bug fixes and design tweaks, and while it’s got plenty of those, it also includes a great new feature: MIDI file playback.
Just like with audio tracks, forScore now allows you to import, link, and play back MIDI files. Since these kinds of files don’t actually contain any audio, just a digital representation of notes, they can support fine-grained speed adjustments without any degradation in quality. Support for these files is also included with this morning’s forScore mini 3.3.4 update.
As always, forScore 10.3.4 is available today as a free update for all of our existing customers, so be sure to check it out!
We’ve been working incredibly hard over the past few months, as we always do over the summer in preparation for a major new iOS version, but this year is a little different: Just as we were putting the final touches on our huge forScore 10.3 and forScore mini 3.3 updates, Apple announced three new iPhones—one of which is rather unlike any model that’s ever come before it.
The iPhone X may not have been a surprise to anyone who frequents Apple rumor sites, but what we didn’t expect is that while unoptimized apps run in a special compatibility mode, any app that has been updated for iOS 11 is automatically flagged as optimized for iPhone X and does not use this compatibility mode. So with just a little over a month to update every app in our lineup, we found ourselves jumping right back in.
Today we’re extremely proud to be able to share the results of that work with you. While the iPhone X (and its notch) may seem unfamiliar at first glance, the extra space at the top and bottom of the screen really does start to feel natural once you’ve been staring at it for a few weeks. We’ve updated every single one of our iPhone apps, including forScore mini, Nocturne, and our four utilities: Cue, Beat Keeper, TuneWave, and Pitch, Please! These updates are available now, free of charge for all of our existing customers, so be sure to check them out.
