Today we have just launched a new release of Noteflight with a few minor fixes and one big new feature: a link to a brand-spanking-new feedback forum site. We’re hoping this site will give users a great way to interact with us and with each other as new features are proposed, voted on, and commented on.

If there’s something you want in Noteflight, or something you want fixed, go to http://feedback.noteflight.com and check it out!

(The site is hosted by UserVoice, who have a nice idea: a turnkey user-feedback forum application that can be customized for any business, including ours. We’re currently using a trial edition of UserVoice that requires a separate registration/login — it’s a little inconvenient for our users, but it’s a good first step while we evaluate this approach to feedback.)

I’m going on a field trip tomorrow, about which I’m really, really excited. My destination is the nearby city of Lowell, Massachusetts, where Professor Alex Ruthmann of U. Mass Lowell’s Music Education Department is using Noteflight for collaborative composition activities in the classroom. Alex and his students are working with with beginning piano students from Lowell High School; please read Alex’s blog post to find out the full story on what he is thinking and doing.

I think I’ll leave it here for now, and post more in a day or two: I expect I’ll have much more to talk about after my visit to Lowell and it will be great to talk about that actual experience. What I can say in advance is that this way of using Noteflight is of great interest to our whole team. We’re hoping that many music teachers and educators will experiment with the wide-open possibilities for active learning with Noteflight, and share their knowledge with others and with us. We’re looking to find out from the many great teachers out there how we can best develop Noteflight’s potential as a great educational tool.

One of our users recently noted that the keys used by Noteflight for changing note durations, [ and ], are difficult to access on some non-US keyboard layouts. We screwed up by not looking carefully at international keyboard layouts when we assigned the keystrokes. Yesterday we posted a new version of the application that allows parentheses to be used also: ( and ). We hope this will make things easier, as well over 50% of our users are outside the United States. Please keep on letting us know about things like this!