Nine

August 2015

For many people, 2015 was game-changer thanks to the introduction of the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil. People who couldn't get by with a 9.7" screen finally had a bigger option, and those who relied on annotation had an incredible new tool to help them mark up their scores more naturally and expressively.

With iOS 9, Apple introduced a whole new way of multitasking on iPad with Split View and Slide Over. These modes—along with the introduction of larger screens—meant that iPad apps could be presented in a wide range of shapes and sizes for the first time ever. We spent hundreds of hours making sure that every single view or panel in forScore not only looked good when presented on these devices, but that they adapted effectively when the app transitioned between these multitasking modes.

forScore's annotation experience has always been one of its best features, and the introduction of Apple Pencil was a major inflection point for us. The stylus offered up to four times as much information as any accessory before it, so we had to effectively quadruple the performance of our annotation engine to keep up. It remains some of the most intense and successful work we've done, and those optimizations cleared the way for us to really dive in deep with Apple Pencil's unique functions and to explore all of the possibilities that had suddenly opened up to us.

That process continues today, but it began in forScore 9.3 with Live Annotation, giving users the ability to draw on a page at any time without activating annotation mode first. It was a simple change, but even small and obvious improvements to the things you do every day can really add up over the years.

forScore 9 also introduced Dashboard, allowing musicians to track and quantify what they play, Buttons to combine the look and feel of links with a wide range of customizable functionality, combined audio utilities, and our first new metadata category since forScore 2: Labels.