10.4: Automation

From globalization and industry to speakers that can turn on your lights, automation is a big word with a lot of different applications and meanings. In short, it describes how people take one or more unchanging tasks and create a system that does it for us, either repeatedly or on command.

For instance, often times you’ll want to get to a specific page of a specific score in your forScore library. First, you’ll need to open the file—either by browsing for it through forScore’s menus, or by searching for it—and then tap forward or use the page selector at the bottom of the screen to navigate to the correct page. With forScore 10.4, you can now create shortcuts that do both tasks for you at once, and they use a familiar mechanism: URLs.

Any time you share a link with a friend, open a bookmark in your web browser, or click on a tracking number in an email, you’re using a URL. While URLs most often reference content on the internet, they also have other uses. Instead of the usual “http” or “https” prefix, a link might start with “mailto” and open a new email draft addressed to the person indicated in the URL. These prefixes are called Schemes and help your device understand how to handle different types of URLs.

With our latest big updates, forScore now declares its own custom scheme (“forscore”) and can handle these specially-formatted links, allowing you to navigate to specific content or a location in the Services panel with one easy tap. This support is provided across the entire system, so any app that displays tappable links, including Apple’s own Safari, Notes, and Mail apps, can send the URL on to forScore so it can respond no matter where it comes from.

You can ask for a specific score, bookmark, page, or setlist, and you can combine these parameters to achieve different results. For instance, tapping forscore://open?setlist=Summer finds the setlist called “Summer” if it exists in your forScore library, and opens to the first item in the list (using the setlist’s current sort order). If you know the Summer setlist includes a piece called “June”, you can open the setlist to that specific piece using forscore://open?setlist=Summer&score=June and forScore will do just that.

Those are just a few examples, but there’s a lot more you can do with forScore 10.4 and automation. For a full list of parameters and formatting requirements, be sure to check out this page.