We’ve covered a lot of features in this series, and the most important part about the things we discuss here is the fact that everyone can use them. Aside from any hardware limitations, everyone who buys forScore gets the same features thanks to our policy of providing free updates for life. That’s a promise we made back in 2010 when we first introduced our sheet music reader and we’ve never looked back (even while other apps are moving to subscription models and building a laundry list of paid add-ons).
Back at version 1.0, forScore really was more of a concept than a complete solution, but with the support of our customers we were able to release over a hundred updates that took the idea from a rough vision to a complex and powerful set of tools that musicians all over the world rely on every day. Early adopters really deserve a huge amount of credit for paving the road we’ve traveled.
That enthusiasm never waned, and some people over the years consistently asked for ways they could choose to support forScore beyond their original purchase. After watching us grow and add a huge number of new features and enhancements, they wanted to do more to help. So last year we introduced voluntary upgrades, a way for people to support us by choosing to use in-app purchases to make up the difference between forScore’s lower price in previous years and its current price.
As a thank you to users who opt to support us in this way, we unlock the ability for them to change the app’s icon. It’s a fun tweak that we hope shows our gratitude and lets our customers share our pride in the app they helped to create.
If you want to learn more about voluntary upgrades, be sure to check out this news post which covers them in even greater detail.
We’re working hard to finish forScore 10.4, so today we’re taking a quick look at a useful but often misunderstood iOS feature: the Battery Usage screen. These usage statistics are found in iOS’ Settings app (in the Battery section) and they show all of the apps that have been used in the last 24 hours or 7 days.
Where people generally get confused is that the numbers shown here are percentages of the total power used, not percentages of your total battery’s capacity. If you start the day with a full battery and end with 80% remaining, then an app’s 50% reading means that it was responsible for half of the power consumed, or just 10% of your total battery’s capacity.
In other words, these percentages are highly relative. If you use an app a lot you can expect to see a higher percentage of usage. If an app’s usage seems higher than it should be for how much you use it, it may be operating in the background or could simply be managing resources poorly.
If you want to learn more about this panel, Apple’s knowledge base article offers a few additional details to help you understand how this information can be useful.
Today we’re happy to announce the release of our latest app, Badger: PDF Negotiator. Badger is a PDFKit-based property viewer and editor for the badly-behaved PDF files on your device or stored in the cloud. It integrates seamlessly with the Files app, supports in-place editing with many different apps (including the upcoming updates to forScore and forScore mini), and includes three action extensions so you can access its features from just about anywhere.
Badger is available now exclusively on the App Store at a special introductory price, so if you’ve got PDF files that need a stern talking to be sure to check it out and let us know what you think!
This week Apple announced a new iPad, the sixth generation of their most popular model and it sports some impressive specs. Most notably, it supports the Apple Pencil—the first iPad to feature this capability that doesn’t carry the “pro” label or price tag.
We think annotation is incredibly important and that the Apple Pencil provides the best experience hands-down, so we’re very happy to see this change. We want as many people as possible to use this amazing tool that really shows off some of the most intensive and creative work we’ve ever done with forScore.
Since we’re working hard right now to finish forScore 10.4, this week we thought we’d take the opportunity to share our previous Feature of the Week article on Apple Pencil in case you missed it. It’s a long one, and it touches on many of the changes we made with several updates between forScore 9.3 and 10.2, so it’s a great place to dive in.
It often feels like the potential for technology to solve problems is practically limitless. That optimism is incredibly important, but lately it’s also being tempered with an overdue reckoning over how that progress is paid for. From the fight over net neutrality to Facebook’s role in politics, people are starting to realize just how much of their activities are being manipulated and monetized on websites and within apps. So today we wanted to take a detour from strict features and discuss your privacy—a feature, in some respects, but one that’s defined by what we don’t do.
Plain and simple: we don’t collect any information from you when you use our apps. We don’t offer accounts or monitor your usage, anonymously or otherwise. Unless you contact us directly, we don’t even know who you are beyond basic anonymous sales reporting.
When we want to make sure your data is available to you on each of your devices, we rely on Apple’s fully encrypted services to do it and nothing ever comes back to us. If you use features like Cue, that information is shared locally between devices and nowhere else.
We trust our customers to tell us where we go next. It may be more difficult for us to work without broad insights into how our apps are used, but that’s a tradeoff we’re happy to make and our eight years of history prove that thoughtful development can come from relationships just as easily as it can from surveillance. In the end, we’d rather make a flawed app than exploit people to gain an edge on our competition.
If you want to read our complete privacy policy you can do so here. It’s short and easy to read so you can know exactly where things stand without hiring a lawyer.