Hasta La Ideas

Although I’m still somewhat skeptical of the iPad, I can’t help but be very impressed by a small number of new and forthcoming applications being developed for the platform. In fact, the video demo for one soon-to-be-released app is weakening my resolve to wait out the first generation of the device.

forScore is a sheet-music management application that will allow the user to load his or her own PDF files, instead of relying on a proprietary format. The application also supports page specific annotations, which is particularly useful for marking up difficult passages. The developers were also quite clever to include an integrated metronome that can flash the border of the screen at a pre-set tempo.

The idea isn’t new. Electronic sheet-music displays have been around for a several years, but they’ve been even more expensive than an iPad. This seems like a good multitasking alternative, if you’ve already been considering such a device.