March 9, 2021
Uncategorized
With iCloud Syncing, forScore can automatically keep your sheet music library up to date across all of your devices.
Setup
To set up syncing, start with your device that contains the most complete and up-to-date music library. Choose Sync from the Tools menu and tap “Sync with iCloud” to enable it. Next, you’ll have to choose how to handle conflicts with any data already on the server, if applicable: in general, you should choose “Prefer Device Versions” on your primary device, and choose “Prefer iCloud Versions” from other devices that may not yet contain complete copies of your library.
Once you’ve completed syncing from your primary device, repeat these steps on your other devices. Note that your choice to prefer device or iCloud versions of your data is only necessary when enabling syncing—from then on, forScore has enough information to resolve conflicts automatically.
Syncing Content
Syncing happens automatically as you make changes to your library and as efficiently as possible depending on your connection type, server availability, and other factors. Changes are typically synced in less than a minute but may be delayed in some cases; to request that forScore begin syncing immediately, open the Sync panel and drag the view downward until the refresh control starts spinning. Return to this view at any time to see when the last successful sync was completed.
Currently, forScore syncs your music library and content (your sheet music, bookmarks, setlists, metadata, annotations, recordings, and more). Settings are not synced, however, since many people choose to use slightly different configurations on different devices to get the most out of each form factor. Due to privacy considerations, Dashboard data is not currently synced across devices.
Status & Error Messages
As with any network-dependent service, iCloud Syncing sometimes encounters issues that temporarily prevent it from completing its work. This is a normal part of the process and usually resolves itself after a short while. In other cases, syncing may not be able to proceed until you take additional action (in this case you’ll see a red exclamation mark next to the Sync entry in the tools menu).
iCloud Accounts & Storage
forScore uses your personal iCloud account to store its data and keep your content up to date across all devices. For multiple devices to share the same forScore library, they must be logged into the same iCloud account. This feature does not facilitate sharing content between different accounts (even those that use Family Sharing).
Apple’s iCloud service provides different storage plans, and you will not be able to use forScore’s syncing functionality if your account does not have sufficient storage. iCloud accounts, storage plans, and payments are all handled exclusively by Apple.
Backups
forScore stores its synced documents in iCloud, but in a separate location from Apple’s whole-device backups. If you use iCloud Backup to back up your device(s) and you also plan to use forScore’s syncing feature, you may not have sufficient storage space to accommodate both. If needed, forScore can indicate to the system that its documents should no longer be included in future whole-device backups. This increases the risk of data loss, but ensures that only the synced copies of your forScore files exist in iCloud. In this case, it’s imperative that you manually back up your data to a safe, non-synced location in case your data is corrupted or lost. Once a change is synced across your devices, this is the only way to ensure that you can revert to a previous state.
Privacy
All of your data is stored by Apple using your iCloud account and as such is governed by their policies and terms of service. We do not maintain user accounts of any kind, and we do not analyze or share your content with any other party at any time.
Today we’re proud to give you a first look at forScore 12.1, one of our most important updates ever with just one major new feature: iCloud Syncing.
Built upon years of hard work and with the utmost priority for ensuring that your music is always instantly available, forScore’s syncing engine coordinates with all of your devices to keep your music up to date automatically. It stores a complete copy of your library on each device, so there’s no need to wait for something to download when you want to play it.
We’ve been testing iCloud Syncing with our beta program, and now we’re getting ready to start rolling it out to everyone. To ensure that it’s fully optimized for all of our users, iCloud Syncing will be offered first as an Early Access feature for forScore Pro subscribers, and will be coming to all users later this year.
This feature has been high on many musicians’ wish lists since iCloud was unveiled years ago, and we worked hard to deliver the most reliable, sophisticated solution we could. It took far longer than expected, and we sincerely appreciate your support—it got us here today and ensures we can continue onward for years to come. Thank you!
forScore 12.1 Sneak Peek
Just a few short weeks ago we released forScore for Mac, and we’ve been pushing out minor updates across all platforms to fix bugs, iterate, and refine things even further now that Apple’s major OS updates have settled down.
As we head into the holidays, we’re continuing to push forward with development of iCloud Syncing. We’ve been testing it through forScore Labs since June and slowly increasing the number of slots available through TestFlight. Today, we released a new build and we’ve doubled our tester limit to allow even more people to participate. If you tried to sign up previously and weren’t able to, we invite you to check it out now. Click the button below to learn more about forScore Labs and to join the program if you’re interested.
We know a lot of people are anxiously awaiting more news regarding syncing, especially those who have downloaded the Mac version. Unfortunately Apple doesn’t currently offer TestFlight service for the Mac, so for now syncing with forScore Labs is available solely for iOS and iPadOS. Thanks for your patience, enthusiasm, and support; we hope to have more to share very soon.
Update: This testing phase is now concluded, but if we need help testing experimental features in the future we’ll let you know with a
news post like this one. Thanks very much to our testers, we sincerely appreciate your time and participation!
November 13, 2020
In Depth
This week forScore made its Mac debut, so it seems like the perfect time to explore how the Mac version came to be, what it took to get here, and what its current state represents.
Origins
Back in 2018, Apple announced the beginning of a major initiative (called “Project Catalyst”) to help iOS and iPadOS developers bring their apps to the Mac. In fact, towards the end of the WWDC 2018 keynote when this initiative was unveiled, Craig Federighi said “there are millions of iOS apps out there, and we think some of them would be absolutely great on the Mac, and Mac users would love to have them there.” He said this against a backdrop of app icons, and we were thrilled to see forScore up on stage amongst many other apps—but that certainly wasn’t news to us.
A Mac version of forScore was always possible and something we’d considered a lot, but until that point it would’ve required maintaining two completely separate apps with very little shared code—something our company of two people just couldn’t do without significant compromise. Once it became clear that Apple was creating an impressive new way of getting there, we were all in.
Preparations & Struggle
First, we had to go through some tough transitions. We merged forScore and forScore mini, combining them into a single universal app instead of selling and maintaining them separately. We partnered with digital sheet music providers and ended our limited publisher program. We began working on significantly overhauled page rendering and layout systems. We introduced an optional, auto-renewing subscription to give us more flexibility with our business model depending on how Apple’s own priorities continued to shift.
We reduced our dependency on third-party code by doing things like rewriting support for Dropbox and Box APIs without needing to include their entire SDKs just to enable basic file operations. Other decisions were out of our hands: Google and Microsoft shut down the APIs we had been relying on to provide built-in support for their cloud storage services, forcing us to migrate to Apple’s Files app and infrastructure instead.
With most of those significant transitions complete, all we had to do was wait until June 2019 when Apple gave us the first beta versions of their developer tools and operating systems. As soon as we had those, we worked harder than we ever have before to create Mac versions of forScore, our Music Box apps, and Nocturne. As things progressed, it became increasingly clear that forScore wasn’t going to make the cut. There were too many things missing or broken, and at that point Mac apps had to be sold separately—they couldn’t be offered as a Universal Purchase (something which later caused another painful migration for our other Mac apps). We built what we could, then shelved it.
Round Two
This year Apple did a lot of work to make these tools better, but they also dramatically overhauled macOS’ user interface to make iOS and iPadOS apps feel much more at home on the big screen. They didn’t make macOS look like exactly like iOS, but they unified their design language to make the two platforms seem more closely related.
That alone pushed things forward quite a lot, but there were still some significant issues we needed to address. Most importantly, popovers—the presentation style forScore uses heavily to display menus like the main score menu—are more cumbersome to use on the Mac. They animate in instead of appearing instantly, and in general they’re just slower to work with. So we moved to a split view on the Mac to provide a faster and more flexible experience. For the first time, this structure allows a user to view and work with their music without closing the menu. It also enables us to do things like display the Layers, Shapes, or Stamps panels next to the page in annotation mode.
When iPadOS 13.4 introduced cursor support, the changes we made to take advantage of those new interactions automatically carried over to the Mac just as they already had with contextual menus and drag and drop. Things really started to come together, and we did a lot of work to reach feature parity while also finding opportunities to improve the Mac experience on its own.
Pitfalls
There were some things we couldn’t overcome. Apple’s Media Player framework, the source of major ongoing issues with forScore on iOS and iPadOS, is unworkable on macOS for our purposes. Our list of unresolved bugs is long and Apple is, in most cases, completely unreachable regarding any of them. We spend a lot of time writing bug reports, collecting analytics data, and creating sample apps that unmistakably reproduce issues and yet Apple virtually never acknowledges or fixes them. We worked around what we could, but the Media Player issues left us completely stuck (see this FAQ article for more information). In spite of this, we pushed through and finally made forScore for Mac a reality.
Design & Direction
It’s hard to design for a brand new operating system without having lived with it for a while, so in the end forScore on the Mac looks and behaves a lot like it does on an iPad—and that’s the point. What appears to be “basically the same” took far more work behind the scenes than you might imagine; we spent months getting it to this point and it clearly has a lot of room to grow, but we’re very proud of it and how much it enables musicians to do from day one. It’s a ten year old app, after all, and that means our first Mac version is very mature even if a few features are limited or some interface quirks sneak through.
The big question that remains, though is: what is a Mac app? Until recently it was defined in large part by its ergonomics and input devices, but now that the iPad supports both keyboards and pointing devices that’s a distinction that has lost some of its weight. The Mac has a very long history with well-established conventions, but Mac apps (forScore now included) aren’t just consumers of these conventions—they also help establish or reinforce them. By participating in Project Catalyst we’re joining the conversation. Even though many of forScore’s interface elements are managed by Apple’s user interface framework and our ability to manipulate them is limited, our decisions have an impact and it’s our responsibility to be thoughtful about them.
The design choices we’ve made clearly aren’t the same ones we’d make if forScore was designed from the start to be a Mac app, but we never intended to make the very best Mac app we could—instead, we aimed to make the best forScore we could, and keeping things familiar between platforms is how we start. Now that it’s available, that journey is sure to continue for years to come (just in time for Apple to reinvent it all again).
Today we’re absolutely thrilled to announce the highly anticipated release of forScore for Mac. It’s available exclusively for macOS 11 Big Sur and is offered as a Universal Purchase, meaning that it’s completely free for anyone who has ever bought forScore. Big Sur is also a free update, available starting today.
With the introduction of Apple Silicon-based Macs, it’s easier than ever for developers to get their iOS and iPadOS apps onto the Mac with no modifications—but that’s not what we’ve done with forScore. Instead of letting Apple shoehorn our apps exclusively onto their newest Macs (with significant limitations), we built a unique experience that highlights the best parts of the platform, highly optimized for Apple’s next generation of Macs, while ensuring full compatibility with the millions of Intel-based Macs that are already out there today.
It feels right at home with Big Sur’s dramatically overhauled interface—but it’s designed to be used, not just marketed as a proof of concept. It’s fully-featured and built to be a practical, everyday tool for musicians using almost any Mac. That’s also why we don’t charge separately for it—we want forScore on the Mac to be accessible, especially during this tough year.
It has been a long journey to get to this point, but we know this is just the start of what we’ll be able to do on some of the most incredible, powerful devices out there. Thank you all for your support and enthusiasm, they made today possible and we’re tremendously grateful. Be sure to check out forScore for Mac today, and visit this knowledge base article for complete details or to find answers to some common questions.
Available now for iPad, Mac, iPhone, and iPod Touch
