Five years and counting, forScore has grown a lot since it was first released. Many updates have introduced major new features, and if you weren’t a forScore user at the time or didn’t have a chance to read the release notes, you may have missed some of them.
With that in mind, we’re introducing a new series of posts that aim to highlight some of forScore’s more hidden or niche capabilities. They may be completely new to you, or they may be features you noticed but never checked out. Of course, we’re always happy to take requests—if there’s a feature you use that no one else seems to know about, let us know!
Today, we’re going to take a look at an easy one: Quick Peek. When you’re using forScore’s global search panel or viewing a list of files in the scores, bookmarks, or setlists menus, tap and hold an item with two fingers to preview it. You can tap to open it, tap away if it’s not the right thing, or tap the plus button in the bottom corner to open it in a new tab.
Of course, if you’ve never used tabs before, well, that’s a topic for another week!
April 1, 2015
| In Depth, News
Five years ago this month we released forScore 1.0, and with a hundred updates since then it’s easy to forget where it all started. That’s why we’ve put together a special retrospective to celebrate our journey so far and to look back at those incremental changes as part of a larger story. Whether you’ve been a loyal forScore user from the start or you just recently discovered it, you’ll be surprised to see how much things have changed.
We say it often, but it’s always true: we couldn’t do it without you. The support and feedback of our customers has always been our greatest asset, and we can’t thank you enough. Here’s to five years so far, and to the next five!
Our new Groups service is coming soon, and thanks to Apple’s recent acquisition of TestFlight, we’ll really be able to put it through its paces. Unlike previous betas, which were limited to just 100 devices (including our own development devices), Apple now allows up to 1000 people—not just devices—to test our apps and give us helpful feedback on stability, design, and workflow. That’s where you come in!
If you’ve helped us beta test forScore in the past, you’ll be automatically moved to the new system and will receive an email when the next test version is ready. If you haven’t helped us previously, you can sign up here. Since we’re testing our new Groups feature, it helps if you and your colleagues decide to sign up together.
Beta testers are a huge part of app development, and without this invaluable feedback our updates would be much less frequent and meaningful. We think that this new system will really help us take forScore to the next level and we hope that you’ll consider joining our team. It’s not always glamorous, but it’s what goes into making forScore the best app it can be.
Today we’re very excited to give you a sneak peek at something we’ve been working on for over six months now, coming this spring to forScore and forScore mini. It’s called Groups, and it’s a brand new service that lets you automatically share read-only copies of your music and setlists with colleagues. It’s the easiest way to keep everyone on the same page, no matter where you are.
What it does
Many musicians work in groups, and sending PDFs back and forth or rearranging everyone’s setlists at the last minute can be a huge hassle. Now, as a group manager, you’ll be able to assign specific scores and setlists to your group. As you work, changes will be uploaded automatically and efficiently in the background. Your colleagues can join your group and, once you’ve approved them, will receive updated scores, metadata, annotations, and setlists even if they’re miles away.
How it works
Groups is built on top of CloudKit, so there’s no additional account to create or separate system to use. As long as you’ve set up a free iCloud account, you’ll already be logged in and ready to use Groups. Since we’re securely sharing information between iCloud users, your group’s files won’t count against your personal storage limits, they’ll count against ours.
CloudKit is a new technology and there are a lot of important details that we just don’t have yet, such as how much Apple will charge developers for exceeding their complimentary quotas. Because of this, Groups will be a paid service and we’re taking a conservative approach to rolling it out. Although anyone can become a member of a group, a monthly subscription will be required to create and manage your own groups. Once you do, you’ll be able to share up to 250MB of content with up to 10 group members, and we expect these limits to increase over time.
What’s next
We think Groups will be a fantastic new tool and we can’t wait to show it to you. We’ll be beta testing it and a few other tidbits in forScore 8.2 and forScore mini 1.1 over the next few months, so if you’re interested in participating please let us know.
Today our app TuneWave was featured in The New York Times! It’s on page B9 of many print editions and a version of the article is also available online. We’re very happy to see our tuner app in the spotlight and we’re grateful to the Times for considering us.