Today we’re incredibly proud to announce the release of our latest big updates, forScore 10.3 and forScore mini 3.3 on the App Store. These versions are fully compatible with iOS 11 and bring support for some of its most anticipated features like Drag and Drop.
We’ve said it before, but Drag and Drop is huge. If you haven’t seen it yet, be sure to check out the video. That’s the biggest new thing, but there’s a lot more than that so head over to our feature page on everything that’s new in 10.3 if you haven’t had a chance to do so already.
These updates are completely free for all existing users, as always, so visit the App Store today to get your hands on them. We’d like to take a moment to thank our beta testers for lending us their time and providing valuable feedback, and to thank all of our customers for your continued support and passion. We couldn’t do it without you.
Available now for iPad
Available now for iPhone and iPod Touch
Last week Apple released iTunes 12.7 which removes the iOS App Store entirely and has caused some concern and confusion, especially as this change relates to the File Sharing panel—something many forScore users rely on. This panel has not been removed with iTunes 12.7, and in fact is even easier to access.
Previously, accessing this panel involved connecting your device, clicking on its icon in the navigation bar near the top of the screen, then choosing “Apps” from the sidebar. This is where people generally got confused, because this “Apps” section handled installing or uninstalling apps, rearranging your home screen, and included the File Sharing panel hidden all the way at the bottom of that complex page.
With iTunes 12.7, the ability to install, remove, update and rearrange apps has been removed—this can all be handled more easily on your device. Now, instead of the “Apps” section in the sidebar, there’s a “File Sharing” section that is dedicated to the file sharing panel. This panel works exactly the same way as it always has, so everything should be familiar to our users. No need to scroll down to the bottom of the page and fight with iTunes’ many nested scrolling views, just click and proceed as you always have.
With the release of iOS 11 just around the corner, many of you may be wondering whether or not it’s safe to install. As we said last year with iOS 10, the short answer is this: if you have a recent, complete manual backup of your library and you don’t depend on forScore professionally, then go ahead and update whenever you’re ready.
The longer answer is that major updates always bring tons of big changes, from new features to behind-the-scenes refactoring that can cause all sorts of unforeseen issues (in addition to the known issues listed below). In fact, the final version Apple releases to customers will be different from any version we’ve been able to test since the first beta back in June. So whether or not you should update really comes down to this question—is there anything in iOS 11 that you need or want to try today, and could you live without forScore and your iPad for a few days? If not, wait a week and let us and others kick the tires before you jump in.
Known Issues:
Currently, there is only one bug we’re aware of that may have a meaningful impact on customers: when forScore reads a PDF page’s embedded annotations, the process of identifying links to other pages takes far longer on iOS 11 than with previous versions of iOS. This means that files with lots of links in them, especially longer files, may take noticeably longer to load or crash before finishing. If you use files with links and/or pages numbering in the hundreds, you should wait to update or disable hyperlinks in the “PDF Annotations” section of forScore’s settings panel. Unless Apple fixes this problem with a future update, working around this bug will require us to make a significant number of changes to our code and we want to be sure that they’re fully tested before we release them, so they’ll be included in a future forScore update and not the forthcoming 10.3 release.
September 15, 2017
Feature of the Week
With forScore, your menus are populated using metadata that you assign to each score. This allows scores and bookmarks to appear in multiple lists, as applicable, rather than being confined to one concrete location (as with files and folders).
If you make a spelling error or want to change a category later, however, you’ll need to change that metadata value for each of the scores or bookmarks that use them. Batch editing makes this process easier, but there’s another way to quickly rename a category: from the main menu, tap “Edit” and select the composer, genre, tag, or label you want to change and tap “rename.” Once you’ve edited the category’s name appropriately, just save it and that value will be replaced for every affected item in your library.
Instead of relying on you to manually manage files and folders, forScore uses metadata like composers, genres, and tags to dynamically generate lists that organize your music and make your collection easily browsable. That means that in order to take full advantage of this system you’ll need to do a little bit of work up front, and features like batch editing make this process much simpler and faster.
The Metadata panel includes another set of tools that help you reuse existing values when typing in the Composers, Genres, Tags, or Labels fields. When you begin editing one of these fields, the virtual keyboard will appear with an input bar along the top that features a list button (the icon with three horizontal lines) and a “Fetch” button (learn more about this feature here). If you’re using a physical keyboard or certain page turning devices, the virtual keyboard may not show, but the input bar will still appear along the bottom of the screen.
Before you begin typing, or if you’ve added a comma to the end of the existing values to indicate that you’d like to add a new value, tapping the list button presents a popup that allows you to see all of the values that currently exist across all of the scores in your library. To use any of these values for the current score, just tap them—forScore automatically adds a comma at the end so you can tap multiple values and add them with just a few quick steps.
If you start typing, forScore checks all of the existing values for that field to see if any of them begin with the text you’ve supplied. If so, forScore filters that list to only show those results, and replaces the “Fetch” button with the highest ranking result, allowing you to use it with just one tap.
So the next time you’re adding metadata to a score in your library, don’t forget to look down at this bar as you type to see if you’ve already used that value before. If so, reusing it is quick and easy, and ensures that spelling mistakes don’t create multiple, similar items in forScore’s lists.
