Thirteen

September 2021

After a year and a half of global shutdown, it was time for a comeback tour. We took what we learned, saw what worked, and did our best to turn the page and move forward.

The Mac version of forScore showed us what was possible, and the obvious next step for us was adding support for multiple windows. It may sound like a simple task, but a lot of assumptions we could safely make with one window fell apart with many: every pane and every action needed to be self-aware so that changes made in one window were reflected in the others. Tasks that couldn't safely be done simultaneously needed to coordinate with each other to prevent data loss.

Instead of tackling everything at once in a monumental rewrite, we decided to create a whole new forScore experience for secondary windows. It gave us an opportunity to experiment and create something totally modern, using the latest interface elements and conventions, that we could build out over the next several years. Even though we had no plans to replace forScore's main window, our vision was to design a complete, theoretically standalone second interface.

To make our work easier, we fully embraced Apple's built-in icon library SF Symbols and refreshed the app's design from top to bottom using these icons and reducing the app's size in the process. We also added the ability to change forScore's theme color for the first time ever, making it easy to personalize the app's interface.

We'd spent years slowly rewriting forScore using Swift instead of the old Objective-C programming language, and with 13.1 it was time to make one big push and finish that work. We took a year, skipping our typical Spring update, and replaced almost all of forScore's code while also adding big new features and improvements.