Last week Justin sat down with Charlie Chapman to discuss forScore’s origin and the experience of building and maintaining an app that has become an incredible success story and is used by so many musicians all over the world. Listen to this episode at launchedfm.com or search for it using your preferred podcast player.
As recent events have shown, running a business as an independent app developer is a risk when your product depends on third parties—whether that’s a service or an app store gatekeeper like Apple. Nothing is certain, so it’s important to celebrate your successes and share the joy of having created something good.
In that spirit, today we’re happy to announce that we’re opening a gear shop to sell forScore-branded merchandise for a limited time. Most of these products are print-on-demand, so the profit margins are slim and the quality may vary, but we’re primarily doing this to commemorate forScore, not to make money.
Thank you to everyone who has supported forScore over the past thirteen years and counting, it’s an incredible privilege to be able to work on it every day. We hope you enjoy these mementos and that they might brighten your day just a little bit.
March 30, 2023
| In Depth
Dear Apple, Justin here. Over the past thirteen years, thanks to the work you’ve done and the incredible hardware you’ve created, I’ve been able to take a simple idea (sheet music on an iPad) and turn it into one of the most successful and complex apps on the App Store. I’m proud of what I’ve been able to accomplish from the very beginning with the revolutionary iPad 1, but it’s time to let down your guard and get rid of the watchdog on iPadOS.
The watchdog policy is sensible: if a device is working hard for too long it usually indicates a problem and can lead to unresponsiveness, battery drain, and a generally unpleasant experience. This policy terminates any app caught violating these limits, which vary depending on the device. Since forScore is an app that works with user-supplied content, tasks performed on any sufficiently complex or long PDF file can lead to shutdown.
This policy is prudent on iPhones and was appropriate for iPads for a long time, but not today. For over a decade, I’ve had to tell forScore users that the reason they can’t rearrange a PDF file or create an archive of their library is because of the watchdog timer; that you, Apple, decided that terminating my app and losing work is better than letting it complete a user-initiated task (even though users can quit any app manually if needed).
The same processors power both iPads and MacBooks whose battery life is measured in days, not hours. Stage Manager was basically designed to be used on iPads while connected to—and powered by—an Apple Studio Display. So why can’t users take advantage of that power, even in situations where these concerns are moot? Why is app termination the right choice on an iPad but never on a Mac?
iPads are incredible, but their biggest downside is an artificial policy limitation imposed by you onto hardware that doesn’t deserve it. You took iPadOS and split it off from iOS for situations just like this: it’s time to leash your watchdog and let users get back work.
For today’s episode of the iPad Pros podcast, Justin spoke with Tim Chaten about forScore’s history, his approach to development, and how the evolution of the iPad lineup and its accessories has created incredible new opportunities for innovation. You can find the episode at iPadPros.net or by searching for it using your favorite podcast player.
To celebrate the release of forScore 14 and its brand new icon, we’ve created a few clothing items over at Cotton Bureau so you can wear some of forScore’s iconic logos for the first time ever and show off your support. We’ve never done anything like this before but we had fun putting these together and we’ve got more merchandise planned, so be sure to check back soon for more!