If you’ve contacted customer support, or read our blogs, forums, or Facebook page, you’ve probably crossed paths with Justin Phillips. Recently named the senior product manager for notation products at MakeMusic, Justin is today’s guest blog host.

Great things are underway for the Finale product line, and I want to take this opportunity to share a few of them with you.

Our first Finale app for the iPad, now officially titled Finale SongBook™, will be available from the App Store any day now. What’s more, a major free update to Finale 2012 will be available to all Finale 2012 users in June.

If you’re a long-time Finale user, you probably noticed that we typically release a shiny new version every summer. We’ve decided to break this tradition, and will not be releasing a Finale 2013 this year.

This decision is largely based on your feedback and requests. Lengthening the Finale development cycle not only allows us to develop for new platforms like the iPad, it also allows us to provide more in-depth maintenance updates, add additional features, and to give you adequate time to integrate each new version into your workflow.

So if you’ve been waiting for “this year’s model,” you don’t have to wait any longer. You can upgrade to Finale 2012 knowing you’ll have the latest and greatest throughout the rest of the 2012 calendar year. Plus, as I mentioned above, 2012b will be available in June and will include additional refinements to features introduced in Finale 2012 as well as popular feature requests, bug fixes, and entirely new features, too.

I’d also like to give you some information about our support for legacy operating systems. While Finale 2012 continues to support PowerPC (PPC) Macintosh computers, subsequent versions will only install and run on Intel Macs. In addition, Finale 2012 will be the last to include support for Mac OS X 10.5. These changes allow us to move Finale forward in feature development and take advantage of the new and better features in modern versions of Mac OS X. If you own a PPC Mac or use OS X 10.5 and are unlikely to purchase a new computer or operating system anytime soon, you may wish to consider upgrading to Finale 2012 now to get the most use out of your upgrade and hardware.

On the Windows side, while the next version of Finale will continue to support Windows XP and Vista, it will likely be the last version to do so.

I hope this information is helpful. It’s never fun to purchase new software only to find out that your computer or operating system is no longer supported, so I want to make sure you have plenty of time to prepare for hardware and software upgrades. It’s my plan to keep you in the loop on topics like these as they develop, as well as to announce new features and services. As a former customer support representative, my focus is always on your experience and I am committed to communicating with you as much as possible.

Have any questions or concerns? Please let me know by clicking on “Comments” below.