Awaiting Mac Updates

Back in August we announced forScore 12 and its upcoming debut on macOS. Nothing about our plans has changed, but forScore is built exclusively for macOS 11 Big Sur which Apple has not yet released, nor have they publicly announced when they expect to. This morning, however, they sent out invites for a Mac-focused media event scheduled for November 10th and we should learn much more then.

For now, we just want to reassure everyone that a few weeks of quiet on this front aren’t a sign that anything is wrong or has changed, just that we’re waiting along with everyone else. We think this is one of the most exciting things to ever happen to forScore and we can’t wait to show it off!

AirPods Pro Gestures

One of the most interesting things Apple announced this year at WWDC was the ability for developers to access data from AirPods Pro’s motion sensors. It requires a firmware update for the AirPods that wasn’t released until September 14th—just two days before we released forScore 12—so we weren’t able to do anything with it right out of the gate. Now that we’ve spent a little bit of time with it we’re ready to introduce something we think is pretty neat.

With forScore 12.0.4, released today, you can now flip pages by turning your head to the left or right while wearing one or both AirPods. Unlike forScore Pro’s Face Gestures, these don’t use your camera and work just as well in the dark. Thanks to Apple’s unique Transparency mode, you can use these head gestures without impeding your hearing. It’s available to everyone for free and does not require a forScore Pro subscription.

Motion data is securely transmitted by Apple’s system frameworks from your AirPods to your device, and access to this data is only provided to forScore if you choose to allow it. That data is never stored or shared in any way, it is processed live solely to provide support for these new gestures. It’s totally private and opt-in.

It has been a huge year for us and we’re still going strong. If you’ve loved all of the improvements we’ve introduced so far, please consider taking a moment to rate forScore on the App Store. Updates like these are always totally free, so we depend on word of mouth and positive ratings and reviews to help us grow and continue to do more each year. Thank you as always for your passion, enthusiasm, and support.

forScore 12

Available now for iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch

Update: iOS Crashes

When Apple released iOS and iPadOS 13.4 back in April they introduced a serious bug that has been causing major issues ever since. If you recently saw forScore launch to a white screen and remain unresponsive for an extended period of time, that was likely this bug. We’ve worked hard to get Apple to acknowledge and resolve this issue, but it persists.

In June, Apple told us they’d fixed it with iOS and iPadOS 14 and that no further feedback from us would be acted upon. We knew those major updates were still months away, so we created a workaround but made it opt-in due to significant limitations it imposes on audio playback. Meanwhile, as we finished forScore 12, we disabled this workaround for iOS 14 users since we fully expected that Apple’s fix would be the end of it. Sadly, that doesn’t seem to have been the case and we’ve had to put the workaround back in with forScore 12.0.2.

We don’t know if this is the same bug or if it’s a separate issue that exhibits the same symptoms, but we again cannot stand by and let these crashes go on—we’ve spent years building the trust of musicians everywhere and we will not let that trust continue to erode while we wait for Apple to deal with this bug at their own pace.

Since we don’t have any idea when this will actually be resolved, we’ve taken additional measures with forScore 12.0.2: if you haven’t enabled our workaround and you experience this crash, it’ll kick in automatically the next time you launch forScore. It doesn’t change your settings so the app may crash again if you relaunch it (not to be confused with closing and reopening it), but this at least ensures that you can access your music no matter what.

This isn’t how we want to be spending our energy, and it’s not the kind of experience you expect from us. You shouldn’t have to know about any of this, but we’re running out of alternatives. Our customers are our highest priority and our relationship with Apple is non-negotiable, so we have to find a balanced way forward. We will continue to communicate with you, work hard for you, and push on with everything we’ve got. Thank you as always for your patience, support, and understanding.

Face Gestures

Last week Apple unveiled two new iPad models—the 8th generation iPad (released last Friday) and 4th generation iPad Air (coming next month). Based on Apple’s technical specifications for these devices and a few user reports, we believe that the 8th generation supports forScore Pro’s Face Gestures but the new iPad Air will not.

Face Gestures are built using Apple’s Vision framework which, until last week, only provided face tracking features on devices with the TrueDepth camera system—we assumed that its unique hardware provided the data necessary for implementing this feature. Clearly that has since changed with the release of iOS and iPadOS 14.

We don’t know anything about how this works under the hood, how accurate face tracking is without the advanced TrueDepth components, or why the forthcoming iPad Air won’t support it (especially given that it costs almost twice as much), but we’re very happy to see one of forScore’s most innovative features come to Apple’s most affordable iPad.

Conservation

forScore is made in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States, a region currently blanketed in smoke from an overwhelming number of wildfires burning across the continent. Over the past ten days, we’ve been choked with a thick fog-like haze that has brought unprecedentedly unhealthy conditions to areas typically known for their lush, evergreen foliage. It’s summertime and we haven’t seen the sun in over a week.

Protecting our environment is a daunting task and any gains made by using forScore and saving paper are easily overtaken by the energy and chemicals required to manufacture and use consumer electronics like an iPad. But this context is helpful to understanding why we take something seemingly unimportant so seriously: the download size of our app.

These days apps can clock in at around 150MB and nobody gives it a second thought. Add to that the forced release cycles of companies that “regularly update our app to provide the best possible experience” and have you re-download that same data over and over again even when there’s nothing new, and you can see how it piles up.

We just released forScore 12 which is roughly 35% smaller than the previous version, just over 15MB on average (app size varies by device). That’s something we’re incredibly proud of. Our app is complex and full of rich features, but we write most of that code ourselves. When we ship third-party frameworks, it’s to provide features like direct support for certain page turning devices—something that clearly benefits users. We absolutely never include any sort of analytics libraries; on the rare occasion we need information from a user to address a specific issue, we give them the ability and choice to share that with us or not.

Every update we release is downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. Moving that data around takes energy—energy that comes from a variety of sources. It’s a tiny part of the world’s carbon footprint, but it matters. Keeping our app as small as possible forces us to always consider whether the choices we make are worth the cost or not. It also makes for faster updates and more available space on your device.

The past eight months have challenged us all and, as the view from here can attest, things aren’t going to just get better on their own. Times like these fortify our beliefs and values, and this is just a tiny part of what we believe in as a company. The rest we’ll continue to foster and build through discipline and passion. May we all see clearer skies soon.