One

April 2010

By the time forScore 1.0 was released, just six days after the iPad's debut, a lot had already happened. It was crafted blindly for a device few people had actually used, in a category Apple hadn't yet fully defined, destined to be met by an audience of skeptics.

Websites like MacRumors and Gizmodo took notice, giving us the opportunity to give forScore the debut it deserved. Five years and a hundred versions later, it's clear that forScore had the right idea at the right time. Peel away those years of development, however, and it's hard to imagine just how basic it was in the beginning.

It displayed PDF pages on screen and used a unique layout in landscape orientation to maximize screen real estate (rather than the standard split-screen view that other apps used). It featured a single menu for navigating between the almost 300 bundled scores and any of your own PDFs that you may have added via iTunes. It also featured a metronome with a standard audio mode and an innovative visual mode that remains largely unchanged to this day. A 'notes' feature allowed you to type page-specific notes and recall them later, and that was it.

With versions 1.1 through 1.6, we worked furiously to add the most important and basic features to forScore, features like annotation, zooming, setlists, links, and more. Its evolution from proof of concept to viable tool was swift, with most of these new features coming within just four months of release.