November 20, 2015
| Feature of the Week
The control bar along the top of forScore’s main view is the central hub for most of the app’s features. Six buttons—three on either side—give you quick access to scores, bookmarks, setlists, search, audio utilities, and just about everything else in the catch-all Tools menu.
If you’re using the new iPad Pro, however, you’ve got more room to work with and if you’ve installed our 9.2 update, we help you use that space more effectively by adding a fourth item to either side of the control bar. These items look and work a lot like the other control bar items, but they have a small arrow below them. That’s because they’re customizable: by default, the left side lets you access the Services panel and the right side lets you annotate, but if you tap and hold either of them you’ll be able to choose a different function or disable the button entirely. Most of the items in the tools menu are available here, so you can pick the one you use most often.
In many cases, there are several different ways you can access forScore’s features. Gestures, shortcuts, the search panel, the tools menu, the info zone in the center of the control bar, and now these two customizable items give you the flexibility you need to work quickly and efficiently. Find the way that works best for you, and ignore the rest.
Either we missed this last week at the Apple store or they just weren’t up yet, but forScore is being featured on one of the banners at the retail stores that use them. The image is part of Apple’s holiday gifts marketing series, and more can be found on their website. Check it out below, and special thanks to twitter user @RealAppleNerd for letting us know!
November 13, 2015
| Feature of the Week
In our fifth and final post exploring the various ways forScore can connect to MIDI devices and provide some unique capabilities, we’ll be looking at one last feature that exposes a fundamental detail of MIDI: the ability to produce sound.
MIDI messages describe musical events like when you’ve pressed a note and how hard, but these messages don’t transmit any actual sounds. That’s why many MIDI devices are called “controllers” and only describe how you’ve played, not what it sounds like. A synthesizer is the piece of equipment or software that actually produces notes based on those instructions.
Since forScore already includes a software instrument, the piano keyboard, it can fulfill that role and play notes as you use your MIDI device. Of course, your device may already produce sounds or you may have a different synthesizer you’d prefer to use. In that case, just open the MIDI section of forScore’s settings panel and uncheck the “Synthesizer” option. You can also disable the ability to send commands or receive shortcuts here if needed.
That wraps up our exploration of forScore’s MIDI integration. As we said way back in part one, MIDI is much more than a single feature, it’s a full language that can be used to enable a whole lot of interesting capabilities. If we missed one, let us know so we can keep building useful features! Thanks for reading, and we’ll be back next week with a completely unrelated Feature of the Week.
Today we’re happy to announce the immediate availability of forScore 9.2 and forScore mini 2.2. These updates contain a bunch of improvements, fixes, and changes, but for iPad Pro users the biggest news is the addition of an optional, customizable fourth menu item on either side of the control bar. This provides a great way for power users to access the features they use most frequently like Links, Services, Dashboard, and Groups.
Speaking of Groups, the member limit has been raised with this update from ten to thirty. We’re still taking a conservative approach to the service, but we’re excited to continue rolling it out so more and more groups can leave the pain of manual file and setlist coordination behind.
As always, these updates are completely free for existing users, so be sure to check out forScore 9.2 and forScore mini 2.2 today!
The iPad Pro is here, and we’ve finally had a chance to run forScore on some real hardware. Simply put, forScore on iPad Pro is incredible. It runs beautifully and looks great, and it’s easily the best forScore experience by a mile.
There have been many attempts to try and demonstrate just how big the iPad Pro is by stacking it up against other iPads, phones, and even iPod Nanos, but there’s really no substitute for picking one up and holding it. Fortunately, demo units are available at many (if not all) Apple retail stores.
Better yet, and this part is really exciting for us, the iPad Pros at these Apple stores are featuring a forScore demo. This is a special version of forScore we made specifically for this purpose, and it’s a slightly tweaked variant of forScore 9.1.3. A few features are disabled (like Restrictions), but it’s otherwise the complete experience. Developers can’t offer trial versions of their apps, so this is a great opportunity for anyone considering forScore to go and try it out for themselves.
Although they’re not shipping yet, we were able to try out an Apple Pencil with forScore on one of these demo units as well. Without any optimizations whatsoever, Apple Pencil is already a game-changer for annotation in forScore. It’s much more accurate, and the system-level palm rejection seems flawless. Seriously, just go try it out if you can. It’s fantastic.
