Project Catalyst Questions

Yesterday Apple released macOS 10.15 Catalina and, along with it, the work they’ve done to make it easier for iOS and iPadOS developers to bring their apps over to the Mac (called “Project Catalyst”). We used it to create Mac versions of five of our apps, including Nocturne and all four Music Box apps, which are available now on the Mac App Store.

Making these apps was exciting and rewarding and although it took a lot of work to get them out the door while also prepping forScore 11.1 and getting all of our other apps ready for iOS/iPadOS 13, we couldn’t be happier with the end results. Catalyst is yet another tool developers have at their disposal to make great apps that take advantage of Apple’s great hardware and operating systems.

Of course, a lot of people will naturally be curious about whether forScore could come to the Mac and what that would look like. For now, the answer is that we don’t know. We’ve made a lot of progress on a possible Mac version of forScore as a proof of concept, but it’s just not good enough—we’ve gone as far as we can go with the current state of these tools and we’ll need to wait a little longer for Apple to build out a few additional frameworks before we’d be comfortable considering shipping anything.

Project Catalyst may have a simple marketing name, but it entails a ton of work across many of Apple’s different teams and it’s a longer term effort than a single update can encompass. We’ll be keeping a close eye on things as they progress and we’ll ship a Mac version of forScore if and when the end result is a product we can be proud of and that musicians can take full advantage of. Until then, thanks as always for your enthusiasm and support.