Blink Session Music: Because Virtual Music Lessons are More Than a Video Chat (Sponsor)

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forScore for the Mac: Review

forScore has long been my most essential iPad app, and one of the few apps I consider iPad-first. This is to say that it is an app that takes specific advantage of the iPad’s strengths (form factor, pencil support, paper-like display, direct touch input) and leverages them in a way that makes the iPad feel essential.

For the same reasons it is essential on iPad, it has seemed slightly less essential on the iPhone (small screen size is impractical) and Mac (similarly, the design is not easy for direct manipulation, annotation, portability, or sticking on a music stand).

Still, an app this useful screams to be used cross-platform! The more I moved my sheet music library from PDFs on my hard drive to forScore, the more I found I needed to be able to work with the same library structure on my other devices. An iPhone is small, but there are those moments when it is the only device on you and you want to reference something really quickly. In a moment that my iPad battery once failed, I did conduct a percussion ensemble rehearsal from forScore on the iPhone.

In the same way that the iPhone is sometimes useful for being always the one in your pocket, the Mac is also useful sometimes. For example, file management is way easier on a Mac. No matter how many Mac features the iPad adds (drag and drop, Files app, etc.), it is simply not as easy as the Mac. Yes, the iPad can technically do the same things as the Mac in this regard, but it’s slower and more cumbersome. Furthermore, most users know how to use the Finder on Mac but don’t know how to work with the Files app on iPad, even though it is mostly the same these days.

It is actually possible to open forScore and the Files app side by side on the iPad. From there, you can drag and drop multiple files at once from one app to another.

I’d like to note that a year of teaching (mostly) online has sent me “back to the Mac,” so to speak. The Mac’s efficiency in multitasking, as well as its ability to run streaming apps like OBS and Loopback, has positioned it as my primary work device. Streaming forScore to my iPad’s screen to my Mac using OBS and AirServer is great, but it’s fiddly, indirect, and kills my iPad battery. It has become so much more direct to have forScore running right on the Mac, in the same place my other work is already happening.

In video conferencing apps like Zoom, I can now share music on the screen with my students directly, thanks to forScore running on my Mac.

The wait is over. Actually, it has been over since the fall. With the launch of macOS 11 Big Sur, forScore has released a universal version of their app on the Mac App Store. This means that it will be a free download for those who have purchased the app on iPad.

Note: I wrote most of this review fairly soon after release. Its scope is therefore more like what I would call “First Impressions.” I have been using it all school year long by the time I am actually posting this and think it is now more accurate to call it a review even though I will not be covering every detail comprehensively in the words below.

The goal of this review is to cover what’s unique about the Mac experience. If you want to learn more about forScore’s features, check out this excellent review by David MacDonald

For more on this subject (and speaking of David MacDonald), listen to my podcast review of forScore for Mac, where he was the guest.

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Overall Experience

Having forScore on the Mac is a huge deal for me. I have been using it aggressively since the fall. It is on a shared screen during every band class and private percussion lesson I teach. Using it right on the Mac is just as easy as I expected.

All of the buttons, knobs, bells, whistles and user interface elements are exactly where you would expect them to be because it looks and feels like the iPad app. I will get into the implications of that in a moment.

Adding music to my library is now a breeze. Until this point, I have been storing all of my scores in a folder in iCloud Drive and then creating duplicate copies in the iPad version of my forScore library. This means that to share music on my Mac’s screen (without doing the AirPlay method above), I have to open the files in PDF Expert. They don’t have any of my indexes, metadata, or attached recordings. I cannot annotate them as I can in forScore, or use music stamps, and I cannot see them in the context of my organized setlist. It is in some ways like maintaining two separate libraries of the same stuff.

To make matters worse, iCloud Drive periodically decides to put some of my scores back in the cloud when I am low on space. When this happens, and I try to open a score from the Spotlight, even a score I used the day before, I will have to wait an extra-long time for my Mac to download the file before actually opening it.

I am happy to report that forScore on the Mac resolves these frustrations. Not only is it lightning-fast for me to get all of the scores that were not in my forScore database inside of it, but scores can also now sync across devices over iCloud. Using keyboard shortcuts like Command+Clicking, Command+Tabbing, and the precision of the keyboard and mouse, allowed me to easily drag and drop most of my remaining digital sheet music library straight into forScore from the Finder. I never pushed forScore too hard in this regard, but at one point, I dragged about 40 scores into forScore from the Finder at once and it handled them with a breeze. This is something the iPad would occasionally crash while trying to do.

The file import process I showed on the iPad above is far faster and more precise on macOS.

Because of this ease, finding duplicated, and deleting them was also easy. So was adding metadata. The Mac is now my preferred tool for doing this kind of logistic work in bulk.

Catalyst

forScore uses Apple’s Catalyst technology which means that Mac apps can share code with iPad apps. Apple introduced this at WWDC in 2019 and in the year that followed, relatively few apps made this transition. A notably good app using this technology is GoodNotes 5. They ditched their native Mac app in version 5 and decided to bring the iPad version over. GoodNotes is a good comparison to forScore, because its strength is, similarly, that it is a touch-first app that feels best when conceptualized as a digital “piece of paper.”

Catalyst apps can be automatically provided to the Mac by the developer with one press of a button, but they won’t be good experiences. Developers can do more work to have the app feel more like it belongs on the Mac, using things like the Touch Bar, custom Tool Bar elements, keyboard shortcuts, etc. The results have been lackluster. Still, having a Mac version of GoodNotes is better than not having one. And because it is an app I usually use on iPad, the need for the Mac version was more for reference.

GoodNotes 5 on the Mac. It looks good. But I am constantly forgetting whether to double or single tap on things because it behaves like an iPad app, but I have the conventions of a Mac hardwired into my brain when I am sitting in front of one.

This is an even weirder example of an iPad toolbar on Mac, but it brings GoodNotes to my Mac, and for that I am grateful.

At WWDC in 2020, Apple announced that more developer tools would be coming to Catalyst, so that it is easier to bring even more of the things that make Mac apps feel like Mac apps to your iPad version. They also announced that new Macs would be coming out (they shipped on November 17th) with new processors built by Apple. These new machines would be able to run native iOS apps without developers doing anything at all.

Steven Troughton Smith highlights these three methods on Twitter.

I imagine forScore went with the last of those three options for the Mac. Even though it feels like a mostly native experience, some things get weird.

With everything in macOS 11, it’s getting harder to define what Catalyst is. There are 3 forms:

• Unmodified iOS apps (Apple Silicon-only)
• Traditional Catalyst apps (more Mac like, but blurry scaling)
• Optimized for Mac/Mac Idiom Catalyst apps (pixel perfect, Mac controls)

— Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) November 12, 2020

Details and Weirdnesses

There are things about forScore on Mac that “look” like the iPad and things that “behave” like the iPad. The things that look like iPad are more forgivable.

For example, the toolbar of an iPad app looks distinct from that of the Mac. Apple is attempting to blur this distinction by redesigning their stock apps to have buttons that are made of thin-lined graphics, rather than appearing as press-able buttons.

The old macOS toolbar used to look like this.

By contrast, iOS apps that are brought to the Mac with Catalyst have a toolbar that looks like this.

The new macOS toolbar seeks to blur this distinction by bringing its own toolbar design closer to that of iPad apps.

iOS apps also have different pop-over style elements that feature a Cancel button in the upper left and a Done button in the upper right. These don’t feel Mac-like but they get the job done. You can, for example, still press Escape to dismiss them like you can on a Mac, though the difference in user interface might suggest otherwise.

Alerts and settings screens trip me up with Catalyst apps because they really make me feel like I am using an iPad.

By contrast, here is the user interface of the OmniFocus settings screen, which follows native Mac app conventions.

Here are some other details and quirks that highlight the varying degrees of success that forScore has at being Mac-like…

Window resizing

Windows can be resized on Mac. This is implemented pretty well in forScore. When the window is dragged to certain dimensions, the score will automatically decide if it is better to fit one or two pages of the score on the screen. As with an iPad, you can click the book-looking button to the left of the file’s title to force it to keep two pages on screen, regardless of window size. Tools in the toolbar also automatically disappear at smaller window sizes and reappear at larger ones.

forScore can do things on Mac it can’t do on iPad, like window resizing!

Menu bar

The Mac has the menu bar which exposes (in well-made software) all of the available actions in the app. This helps with discoverability and customization. Users can always find what they want from the menu bar and can set menu bar items as keyboard shortcuts in the System Preferences app. It is nice to see many of forScore’s options in the menu bar, but I am not certain that all of them are there. Fortunately, forScore for Mac has an area in settings that allows you to customize keyboard shortcuts for many of the app’s features.

You can set up custom keyboard shortcuts in forScore.

Page navigation

It’s really weird. Simply put, page navigation conventions that work on iPad do not always translate to the Mac. For example, touching and dragging the screen to turn pages is natural when you use your hand to turn the pages, but less so with a keyboard and mouse. Common Mac conventions like two-finger scrolling to swipe pages are implemented in forScore. But other things are weird. Two-finger scrolling feels more natural in other document-based apps like, for example, Preview. In forScore, you can pinch to zoom, but pages that are zoomed in larger than the window size take extra page-turning gestures to navigate. This if because forScore’s default behavior when you swipe is to show you whatever of the page is not on the display. This makes sense because in a performance you might want to zoom in closer to the music. When doing this, it makes sense that a one-touch gesture reveals the next part of the music (regardless of what page it is on), but in practice, this is not Mac-like. Any other app that deals with PDFs would show me the next page when I do the page turn gesture. This quirk is particularly weird if your score is just a few pixels taller than the window size you have set. Turning the page takes two swipes instead of one. The first swipe awkwardly jolts the screen down just enough to see the few missing pixels at the bottom of the screen, and the next swipe actually turns the page.

When my window is just too short, I have to turn the page twice, to turn it once. These kinds of quirks aren’t terrible, but when you encounter them, it’s easy to perceive the app as broken or untrustworthy.

Zooming in and out

The above-mentioned quirk is even weirder when you have zoomed in a lot. I do this often to focus my students on a particular excerpt of music. When scrolled in, there is (to my knowledge) no way to keep scrolling from the trackpad. You have to zoom out, turn the page, and then zoom in again. Contrast this with Preview, a native Mac app, which will just let me scroll freely through the document, no matter how far I have zoomed in.

Spotlight!

I am pleased to say that searching for score files in Spotlight (Command+Spacebar) results in all my scores showing up, even chapter titles in an index of a larger score.

Sidebar

Mac apps tend to have sidebars that reveal list views and top-levels of organization hierarchy in an app. These can often be toggled on and off though I usually leave them on so I can get to things more quickly. forScore on the Mac supports the option to keep the sidebar permanently visible, so you can always see your library alongside whatever score is selected. Cool.

I like that the Mac version of forScore supports a permanently-visible left sidebar. I wouldn’t mind this feature on my 12.9 inch iPad Pro.

Conclusion

There are of course more Mac-like things to celebrate and more iPad-like things to question, but the bottom line is this: forScore is an app loved by musicians all over, and it is completely stellar that the developers dedicated time to bringing this application over. It is unknown if it would ever have happened without Apple’s Catalyst technology, but because of it, we get to have a pretty ok Mac app, where we otherwise would not. And having a pretty ok Mac version of an indispensable iPad app is… actually great! So thank you forScore team!

There are certainly more Mac apps that I would love to see on iOS than there are iOS apps I would like to see on the Mac, but the list is getting smaller.

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Want more forScore? The second most popular post on this website for a long time was my tutorial for adding an index to large scores in forScore for iPad. Watch the video above.

Planning Band Rehearsals with MindNode, A Mind Mapping App for macOS and iOS

I am starting my third week of paternity leave tomorrow. And while I am doing my best to ignore work at all costs, I am also reminded that when I return I will have three weeks with my students to work on their band assessment music. My long term sub (who is incredible) will have been working on it with them for three weeks by the time I return. Naturally, there is still a lot I want to accomplish with it on my own time.

To that end, I decided to get organized. When I organize large projects, I like to create a mind map.

In my brain, there are a lot of ways I want to keep kids engaged with our current repertoire. I have score study and lesson planning tasks, music and videos I want to inspire them with, strategies for rehearsal, alongside stories and verbal illustrations to communicate abstract tonal and phrasing ideas. I also have some behavioral concerns that need to get locked down so that our focus is at 100 percent. Personally, I don’t know any way to dump out these interconnected ideas and see how they fit together without a map.

MindNode is a mind mapping application for iOS and macOS that lets you easily dump ideas quickly into a beautifully structured map. A MindNode document starts with a single bubble in the middle of the screen from which you can create “nodes,” or branches, off from the middle. It is possible to create a vast tree of hierarchical concepts, topics, and ideas, without even taking your hands off the keyboard, much like typing a quick bullet point list into a note.

The nodes can later be dragged around freely anywhere on the map. When you move one branch, all of the others adjust around it dynamically, ensuring that your map is balanced.

Dragging a node adjusts the map.

MindNode has a ton of features that are beyond the scope of this post. You can add notes, images, and tasks to nodes, which you can see I have done in the map above. You can apply various different themes to the way the nodes look, or even customize your own theme. You can also view your map as a linear outline. The new version, MindNode 7 has even just added a visual tagging feature to help you better organize your nodes. You can read about that here.

MindNode is full of tools to conceptualize your map and format it so that it looks great.

One of my favorite new features is the Apple Pencil support. When you screenshot a mind map you can choose to annotate it like a normal screenshot or you can select 'Full Page' and MindNode will fit the entire document into view and cut out all of the user interface elements like menus and buttons. This way, you can mark up a clean copy of the file which you can then export as a PDF to an app of your choice.

This is what annotating a normal screenshot looks like.

MindNode uses Apple's PencilKit API to strip away buttons and menus, leaving you with a clean document to annotate.

MindNode's export tools are amazing. In the next screenshot, you can see all of the options. You can export the document itself as an image, PDF, or outline, just to name a few choices. But what I love is the option to export the nodes to the task manager OmniFocus or Things as a project.

Next, you can see a screenshot of Apple Notes with an exported MindNode PDF (left) alongside todo app Things (right). MindNode has neatly formatted my map as a project in Things with headings and checkable todos that I can later give due dates and deadlines too. Awesome!

In that screenshot, notice another PDF beneath my MindNode document. It is another PDF I exported. It is a score map of Greenwillow Portrait by Mark Williams which I am performing with one of the bands.

One of my goals for the quarter is to spend more time in the score. I like to occasionally study a score starting with the big picture and later moving to finer details. To help establish this big picture, I will occationally make a map that serves as a rough guide to a piece. One of my problems with drawing maps is running out of screen space on any of the four ends of the iPad. To solve this, I used Concepts, an open canvas drawing app.

It's full of features, but I am most attracted to the style of the pen tools and its ability to keep drawing in any direction, without being limited by the four walls of the iPad's screen. The document just keeps adding room to whichever side I keep drawing on. It's worth checking out if you have a need for this kind of drawing tool.

When I started this document, I ran out of room on the side of the screen at measure 19. All I needed to do to solve that problem is zoom out and keep drawing.

Happy winter and good luck preparing for your spring assessments if you are taking a performing group to one!

🔗 Microsoft Office for iPad now supports opening files from the Files app more directly

Microsoft Office and the Files App Finally Play Nice Together:

Today Microsoft updated its Office suite for iOS, with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint all reaching version 2.12. Office updates rarely receive detailed release notes, and today was no exception, but user Teddy Svoronos discovered that the updates brought 'Open In' capabilities to the share sheet, which previously only enabled making a copy of an Office document. The 'Copy to' option has now been removed, replaced by the more convenient 'Open in.'

After seeing Teddy's tweet, I did a little playing around in the Files app and discovered that, while Excel and PowerPoint documents accessed in Files will load Quick Look previews and require tapping 'Open in' from the share sheet, the experience is even better with .docx files. Those Word-associated documents open directly in the Word app with just a single tap from the Files interface – no need to open the share sheet first.

It is really nice to see proper use of the Files app user interface being adopted into apps by third party developers. The more time passes, hopefully we will see this adoption so wide that opening documents using the native file browser will feel no different on an iPad than it does on a Mac. It always feels jarring on Mac when the “Open” option doesn’t show the Finder. On iPad, custom “open” UIs have been standard since its beginning. Hopefully the Files app introduced this past fall with iOS 11 will continue to change that. 

What I really thought was interesting about this article was something I have been wondering about the Files app since the summer. 

Update: One of the developers working on Office has confirmed my suspicions: the reason Word files open for me with a single tap while Excel and PowerPoint files do not is that I haven't opened those files enough for iOS to know that I would prefer to bypass the share sheet.

I had noticed that tapping on files in the Files app could open them within third party apps but I never understood how iOS knew which apps to use. (For example, standard text files were opening in Byword on my iPhone and 1Writed on my iPad for a time.) It seems that the user can to some extent control these apps by using the “Open In…” option from the Files app and choosing the desired app frequently. Still though, I would love the option to set default apps on iOS. I can tell my Mac which app I want to open PDFs. Why not on my iPad Pro?

🎙 New podcast episode! - Working with PDFs, featuring guest, Paul Shimmons

In this weeks episode, I am joined by Paul Shimmons (band director, music tech in education blogger, and podcaster). We have a great time talking about our various workflows for reading, editing, annotating, and organizing our PDFs. This episode was recorded shortly after the announcement of iOS 11 which will bring a lot of new productivity features to the iPad. Naturally, we had to discuss these announcements and how they might reshape our PDF workflows next fall.

You can listen to the episode here.

🎬 Adding an Index for Your Real Books in forScore

forScore 10 adds a feature that allows you to add indexes to large scores by uploading a CSV file that links the song titles to specific page numbers of the PDF. This is especially useful for real and fake books that have hundreds of songs all associated with one giant file. A competing score app called unrealBook pioneered this feature to my knowledge. I used to keep it installed on my iPad just for that one feature, but now, I can do everything I need to in forScore.

I created a video tutorial of how to accomplish this. See below:

 You can find the index files I reference in the video here. 

I don’t have a full technical understanding of how this feature works, so I tried to avoid explaining what is going on with the file. I think I am explaining it well enough that if you imitate my steps, you will be successful in most attempts. If there is anything unclear, let me know and I will try to clarify it in a future post.

One thing I did not cover in the video are the page offset settings at the bottom of the index settings screen. I have attached about 10 indexes to my forScore library and only twice did I need to use those buttons. In some cases, the CSV score may be offset by a few pages leading to the index not linking you to the correct songs. In these cases, I simply fiddled around with the plus and minus buttons until I got the result I wanted. I would be happy to redo the video with that step included if enough people are interested.