The fourth version of Flat last August was about a brand new visual identity. We released in November our V5 dedicated to education.
So far, we have been working really hard to finish all the eagerly awaited music notations. However Flat is a whole experience that goes much further than a music scores editor. We started to notice that, when we discretely introduced popular, comments and stars a few months ago.
Many of you started to email us asking for completely new features like search capabilities, a way to follow composers that you love etc... It completely set up a new challenge for us that we're proud to achieve today!
All of that in a brand new offline web application!
A constantly improved music score engraving
Everything start from our editor. Cyril and Romain are doing an incredible work to improve as fast as they can our engraving capabilities. Obviously, the more the editor become, the more awesome compositions are. In the past few months, we've seen such incredible work published in the community and therefore many early users came back and started to compose within our editor that finally fits their needs.
Indeed, the last big one that we needed to release was multi-voices per staff. Now that we're done with that, we will be able to focus on annotations such as:
- pizzicato
- textual annotations
- 8va/ba
- pedal markings
- ritardando
But we also want to take our overall engraving to the next stage. As Julien perfectly points in his article about our new toolbar, even if our editor keeps becoming more and more advanced, we care about keeping everything as simple and intuitive as we can.
There are still so many things to do and we're really excited to face these new challenges.
The need of social interactions
Flat has reached more than 230k compositors signed up on the platform with more than 70k active monthly (meaning that they actually drop notes) and around 140k actives in the past quarter. You're all using Flat intensively and you started to send thousands of emails and feedback asking for more social interactions. For us, it was a full new challenge that we were really excited to solve. That's why we completely reworked our design one more time, to enhance your overall experience.
So here's what you can do so far
- follow composers
- star compositions
- comment public creations
Social interactions are great and bring so much interactivity between you all. We're completely amazed by the speed at which the number of comments and likes is growing day by day.
Bring realtime out of the editor
As I mentioned in the introduction, we first discretely introduced comments and stars to see how it goes and adapt our work. What really surprised us was how Flat seems static despite all the emerging social interaction and the growing number of daily composers. That's why we rolled our sleeves and got to work. To break the sad reality rule that musicians share and collaborate on forums or any old platform, we introduced push and instant realtime notifications.
The effect has been "instantaneous"! The number of interactions literally exploded, which drives us to the popular page. It gathers all weekly and monthly trending compositions.
All of that offline
I kept the biggest news for the end. As the CEO of Flat and a member of this incredible team I am very proud to announce that we achieved the first web based music editor that can work without an internet connection.
We've started to work on it by the beginning of February when many users and schools with low quality networks told us that Flat had many synchronizations issues between collaborators.
With this awesome feature we want to:
- Solve all network issues that you may have encountered
- Give the opportunity to our users that can't always be connected on the internet to keep composing and express their creativity wherever and whenever they want!
what's next ?
With the Flat V6 being live, we achieved a major breakthrough in the Flat story. Julien and Mathias are now heading to the mobile world (tablet first) and we hope to release our first version by June! As usual we will keep you posted about our progress :)
Time to celebrate
I can't tell how proud we're regarding the work done this past three months. Most importantly we can't tell how grateful we're for all the feedback and support you sent us, we wouldn't be able to make such a great product without you!
Thanks for being part of this incredible journey!
See you on Flat!!
Musically yours,
Pierre & The Flat Team
PS: Feel free to share the incredible news to all your Friends <3