Today we’re happy to announce major updates to our Music Box apps and two minor updates to Nocturne and Piano with Friends. These free updates involve six apps spanning three platforms: it’s a huge batch of updates so let’s jump right in!
• A complete rewrite of our tuner using SwiftUI for a beautiful native experience across all platforms, TuneWave offers improved audio analysis presented with an even easier to read design. It features the ability to adjust the microphone’s input level for better results depending on your instrument and surroundings, includes a lock screen widget for easy access, and it comes bundled with a watch app for the first time ever (for no additional fee). It’s the biggest update to TuneWave ever, and we can’t wait to hear what you think.
• Pitch, Please! is now called Onyx and sports an updated design with four themes (two of which support light and dark modes) and an updated screen widget for instant access.
• Beat Keeper has been renamed as well: Modus is our new metronome and features a lightly updated design and minor improvements that’ll keep the beat going no matter what.
• Featuring a new split view layout for menus and sepia mode for the first time ever, forScore’s remote control app Cue is ready for the perfect duet.
All of these updates (and the minor updates to Nocturne and Piano with Friends) feature brand new icons, several alternates, and the previous versions in case you prefer them. These updates are free and all available now for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS, so be sure to check them out today!
Justin recently sat down with Philip Rothman and David MacDonald for the Scoring Notes podcast to talk about forScore’s origin, evolution, and the principles that guide its development. Check it out by searching for Scoring Notes within your preferred podcast player, or visit the Scoring Notes blog to read the episode description and give it a listen!
Hi, I’m Justin, and I make forScore (more on that in a moment). Thanks to ongoing controversy at Twitter, a decent number of forScore users have started migrating over to other services. I’ve sparingly maintained a forScore account on Twitter for some time, and I just started one on Mastodon. I plan to experiment a bit, but you can generally expect the same thing from either account: it mostly serves to get the word out about the biggest news and updates concerning forScore and its sibling apps and isn’t regularly monitored for responses or equipped to handle support requests. If you prefer, you can also use this site’s RSS feed to see all news posts.
So that’s the update, but let’s back up a bit—who is this fellow and what happened to the rest of the company? Due to a number of important but boring reasons, I started using the royal “we” to voice all forScore communications. It was a necessary decision back in 2010, and it’s a hard habit to break. But the truth is that I created forScore and have been its sole developer ever since. I also handle pretty much every aspect of running the business and making apps except for support, which I entrust to my partner Isaac.
Moving to a new social network gives me an opportunity to revisit how I approach talking about myself and about my work, so I’m trying to be more singular and authentic going forward. If you’re interested in learning more about me personally and don’t mind unvarnished opinions, feel free to follow me at mastodon.social/@ambulephabus (I don’t expect to be on Twitter for the foreseeable future). Just know that I won’t be ‘on the clock’ in that personal arena and will not be engaging in topics or questions that cross the line into business.
I just want to say, personally, thank you for your support over the years. Your passion has kept me going all this time and I sincerely appreciate it. I look forward to becoming a stronger part of this community very soon.
Apple’s major OS upgrade cycle wraps up next week with the release of iPadOS 16.1 and macOS 13, so we’re getting ready with a few updates of our own. forScore 13.1.5 brings important updates and minor improvements to iOS and iPadOS, and brings all of the great upgrades in 13.1 to the Mac so you can enjoy them across all of your devices.
We’ve also updated some of our smaller Mac apps to get them ready for macOS 13 Ventura: free updates to Cue, TuneWave, and Pitch, Please! are all available now so be sure to install them to keep everything running smoothly.
Just over a week ago now Apple released iOS 16 and we introduced forScore 13.1, the biggest update we’ve ever done. We’re so grateful for your patience and feedback while we work to address the bugs that slipped through. We always test our updates as much as we can but going from less than a hundred testers to over a hundred thousand users in an instant is always bound to uncover things we just didn’t see on our own.
There’s a tough balance to strike between fixing every bug as quickly as we can and releasing too many updates in a row, but sometimes we just have to push through. It has been an exhausting week (especially for an app built and maintained by a single developer) but we’re happy with the progress we’re making. Right now we’re aware of a performance issue affecting people with a very high number of files and we’ve added some diagnostics capabilities to 13.1.3 to help us identify and resolve it. So expect a 13.1.4 relatively soon, and then things should quiet down until iPadOS 16 comes out in a few weeks.
There’s one last thing we’d like to point out for those who aren’t aware: although automatic app updates are enabled by default, they’re optional. If you require a near-constant level of stability and even a few days of bugs can severely impact you in professional or educational terms you should turn this feature off and update when you’re ready. You’ve got some control over how this process works and you should use it if you need to.
Thanks once again to our incredible audience, your continuing support and enthusiasm are what drives forScore forward.
