forScore Updates

It’s been just over a month since we released our latest major update, forScore 11, and we’re very grateful for the tremendous reception it has gotten so far. It was one of the biggest updates we’ve ever done and it’s great to see that work deliver a better experience to musicians everywhere.

Since then we’ve been working as fast as we can to fix bugs and improve features based on user feedback. Today we’re releasing another batch of changes with forScore 11.0.4, and there’s one thing in particular that we wanted to discuss in more detail than usual: variable width drawing.

We spent a great deal of time creating and testing forScore 11’s new variable width curve drawing algorithms that take full advantage of the sensors in Apple Pencil and Logitech Crayon to create more dynamic results. They produced better looking markings and, based on every metric available to us, were relatively comparable in speed to the older techniques we had been using.

Once 11.0 was released, however, we started to hear from customers who were experiencing long delays when tapping “Done” to save their annotations, occasionally resulting in crashes and lost markings. Although we never saw anything like this in testing, we immediately disabled the feature on certain older models that seemed most susceptible and we added a troubleshooting option so any user could revert to the original method if needed.

This workaround helped those people who knew about it, but the majority of affected users don’t check this website or reach out to us directly and instead just live with the issue. That’s not okay with us, so forScore 11.0.4 defaults to using the older drawing methods and allows users to opt back in to the newer version if they like (open forScore’s settings panel and enable “variable width 2.0” in the Apple Pencil section).

Our goal has always been to make the best sheet music reader we can, and no matter the underlying issue it’s obvious that this wasn’t servicing that goal. We’re continuing to investigate why this feature works so beautifully for most people and yet causes major problems for others, and once we know more we’ll decide how to proceed while doing everything in our power to maintain and rebuild the confidence and trust you’ve placed in our app. To everyone affected, we sincerely apologize.