We’re more connected every day, it seems, with our devices knowing more about us, helping us more, and vying for our attention with banners and sounds. For a musician performing with forScore, they can be a big problem, so today we’re taking a break from forScore features to look at a few iOS settings that can help you block out distractions while you’re on stage.
First, muting your device is always a good idea. On an iPhone, that’s as simple as flipping the silent switch. On an iPad, that same switch might control orientation lock instead of silent/vibrate mode, and if you’ve got an iPad Air 2 there’s no switch at all! If your switch doesn’t control silent/vibrate mode, swipe up from the bottom of the screen and tap the silent button (the bell with the line through it).
That panel along the bottom of the screen, Control Center, also gives you quick access to a pair of other tools which every musician should be aware of: Airplane Mode and Do Not Disturb. There are subtle differences between these two, so figuring out which one to use can be tricky.
Airplane Mode, like it sounds, is used to turn off all of the radios in your device so as not to interfere with an aircraft’s instruments. With no radios, however, you’ll have no internet access so be sure you have everything downloaded ahead of time. There is another subtle caveat here though. Most people think that Airplane Mode stops all notifications, but that’s not the case: any notifications scheduled locally by an app will still come through, including calendar alerts. Only incoming information will be blocked, like text messages or phone calls.
Do Not Disturb, on the other hand, is meant to help minimize distractions when appropriate, like overnight when you’re asleep. It stops your device from making sounds, vibrating, and turning on the screen when you get a notification. That last part isn’t as helpful if you’re using your device, but it brings up an important detail of Do Not Disturb. In the settings app, in the Do Not Disturb section, you’ll see a Silence setting at the bottom of the list. By default, notifications and sounds will only be blocked if you aren’t already using your device. That may make sense for many situations, but for musicians the “Always” option is essential.
Of course, your best option is to use all three: mute your device, turn on Do Not Disturb, and turn on Airplane Mode as well. You’ve got little to lose by being overly cautious, and nothing should be more important than your music when you’re on stage.
When you’re on stage, predictability is key. You need your pages to turn at exactly the right moment, and virtually everything else needs to just stay out of the way. That’s why we introduced performance mode with forScore 3.5.
Once activated, performance mode restricts most of forScore’s features and makes page turning much simpler: tap or swipe gestures activate the moment your finger touches the screen, so it doesn’t matter how long you press, how many fingers you use, or which direction you swipe. Simply touch the left-hand fifth of the screen to turn to the previous page, or touch anywhere else to turn to the next page. Links still work, of course, so you can still handle repeats easily.
Performance mode can be found in the tools menu, or in the second page of the main navigation bar’s title view. If you use it frequently, you can even move it over to the first page for instant access. Once activated, you can exit performance mode by tapping the blue circular “x” button in the top right-hand corner of the page.
Bonus tip: If you’re headed into a performance, be sure to activate your device’s airplane mode as well since app developers can’t prevent distracting notifications and alerts from popping up along the top of the screen.
We’re happy to announce the immediate availability of our latest update, forScore 8.4. This update includes the much-anticipated Groups service that was unexpectedly delayed earlier this year. If you haven’t had a chance to read about Groups, be sure to check out our original sneak peek as well as some important details to know before deciding if this service will work for you. This update also fixes several bugs, so be sure to check it out today on the App Store!
[Updated March 2018: the Groups service has since been discontinued, learn more here.]
June 19, 2015
| In Depth, News
There has been a common notion in the media for the past year or so that the iPad just isn’t doing very well. If you look at Apple’s quarterly earnings reports and iPad sales, it’s obvious: people are buying less of them than they once did. That’s a hard fact, but it shouldn’t be sensationalized as the premature death of the post-PC era—especially just as things are really starting to heat up.
Long upgrade cycles, the introduction of the iPhone 6 and 6 plus, and a resurgence in PC sales after a long period of processor stagnation have all played their part in slowing the iPad down. But arguably the biggest problem with the iPad today is that every major exclusive software innovation it features was introduced way back in 2010. Every iOS update since then has made the iPad more like the iPhone, and it’s a tough sell when almost everything that makes iOS on the iPad unique is five years old. Fortunately that’s about to change in a big way.
This year’s WWDC, Apple’s annual developer conference, just wrapped up last week. Apple unveiled iOS 9 and, although it’s lighter on big features than previous releases, a lot of the new stuff seems to be focused squarely—if not exclusively—on the iPad. New trackpad-like features don’t appear to be iPad specific, but Apple clearly had bigger screens in mind when designing them. The headlining features, though, are all iPad-specific: picture-in-picture, slide over, and split screen multitasking. In fact, that last one is exclusive not just to the iPad, but to the newest iPad Air 2.
Last year’s introduction of the iPad Air 2 should have been a bigger deal. With an incredibly powerful 3-core CPU, 2GB of RAM, and touch ID, it was even thinner and lighter than the previous year’s model. Yet it ended up being little more than a footnote in the media. After all, what good was all that power without some new software features to help users take advantage of it? Developers soon discovered that some of the changes made in iOS 8 seemed to indicate that a split screen mode was in the works, but that it simply wasn’t ready for prime time. This year it is.
Just as long as there have been rumors of a split-screen mode for the iPad, there have also been rumors of a larger iPad, generally dubbed the ‘iPad Pro.’ Of course, there’s no reason to believe that just because one of these rumors panned out, the other will as well. We’ve been working hard to get ready for iOS 9’s release this fall and although the beta is not stable enough for everyday use, the Split Screen and Slide Over features make a lot of sense on the existing iPads that support it. That could be the end of it, but where there’s smoke, there’s fire.
Many people seem to immediately dismiss the idea of a larger iPad because it doesn’t make sense for them, but the whole reason product lines exist is to satisfy the needs of unique groups within the larger market. The iPod Classic could never have suited the needs of everyone who bought an iPod mini, nano, or shuffle, and the iPad isn’t perfect for a lot of people. Which people? Yes, you already know where this is going: musicians. Many forScore customers want a device with a bigger screen, and although it has seemed like the rumor that would never come true, the pieces all seem to be falling into place. We won’t know for sure until this fall, but iOS 9 seems like a big part of this puzzle and we can’t wait to see what comes next.
While an iPad is better than paper in many ways, its biggest disadvantage is that the device’s screen is smaller than a standard page of paper. Fortunately, a lot of things about paper become obsolete when going digital, like large white margins around the edges to ensure that your music is readable even near the binding where the pages curve inward.
Cropping is hardly a forScore-specific feature, and most people already know about it, so with today’s feature of the week we wanted to take a moment to explain a more subtle aspect of forScore’s implementation called auto-crop. When you choose “crop” from the tools menu, the first thing forScore does is try to find the margins on your page for you. It simplifies the image data and looks for light and dark areas to figure out what’s important and what’s not. Once that’s done, forScore zooms in and repositions your page to its best guess. If it’s correct, all you have to do is hit the “Crop” button and you’re done. Otherwise, you can still adjust the zoom and position of your page as needed.
We’ve done a lot of work to make this feature as accurate and quick as possible, but it’s still a best guess. Pages that are darker overall can produce false positives and auto-cropping may seem to never kick in at all, and processing this information is still too intensive to crop every page for you automatically. That’s why we do our best to get you 90% of the way there, and let you make any final adjustments as needed.