We are proud to announce that Noteflight was recently selected as the “The Best Notation Program” by a poll of music educators at the NAMM 2010 Show in Anaheim, CA. Noteflight will be featured this year in both Musical Merchandise Review and School Band and Orchestra as one of the Best Tools for Schools. Our team is very happy that educators have chosen to recognize Noteflight’s capabilities as a powerful music learning tool for students from primary levels to university and beyond.

We’ve been working hard on a new bunch of features, that you might loosely call “lines”: notation markings that can span a number of measures. Today we’ve released support for the most significant and often-requested of these notations: slurs and hairpins (or “wedges”):

The new notations can be stretched, angled and shaped in flexible ways to fit their context in the score; each of the little “handles” on the slur in the above illustration can be dragged with the mouse to change the slur’s shape. Slurs and hairpins can also extend across a system break and will be shown correctly on all the systems in which they appear.

Please see our release notes for more details!

When we rolled out the Top Scores pages as part of the social features in Noteflight 1.3 a few weeks ago, we did something that had some unintended consequences. We used the date that a score was last changed in order to decide whether a score was fresh enough to show in the “New This Week” list. The unintended result of this decision was that scores which continue to be actively changed by their authors remained in the “New…” listing long after they weren’t really new any more. This kind of defeated the point of “New This Week”, which was to provide constant novelty and provide ready access to scores that are receiving new attention.

Also, our intention was to highlight multiple pages of favorites, both recent ones, and long-term ones. However, the navigation between these pages was obscure and lots of people missed the small drop-down list that provided the choice.

As a result, we’ve made a change. We have introduced two new tabs under “Browse”: recent favorites, and all-time favorites. The recent favorites listing will be more aggressive in focusing on scores that have indeed been favorited recently, and the score’s presence in the list will depend on the timing of other users choosing it as a favorite, not on whether the score itself changes or not. We’ll probably continue to tweak our approach moving forward!