Flat V8 is now live | Hacker News Reader

Flat V8 is now live

blog.flat.io

84 pointsciconia44 comments

What is Flat V8?

This isn't a problem isolated with your website, but it seems to be almost impossible to get a clear description of a product from any website other than Wikipedia these days.

Currently I'm assuming it's either a non carbonated vegetable juice, or some kind of horizontally scaled node implementation.

OK, from the non blog site:

> Use the easiest tool to create sheet music collaboratively

V8 is just version 8, nothing to do with JavaScript engines :)

You're right, the blog need to be updated :) you're not the first one to highlight the "V8" misunderstanding. Will definitely call the 9 "V9.0" :)

You misunderstand. For V9 it won't matter, there's only confusion because "V8" already evokes other meaning. I don't think "V9" has the same issues.

Just using lower-cased v8 would've eliminated much confusion.

It's been a trend for a while, now. Instead of using something that is intuitive like "gcc" for GNU Compiler Collection, everyone just picks a random word that is only slightly a propos and then calls their product by that obscure name.

I'm going to launch a Web app using monads-as-a-service built with docker and emscripten and deployed via packmule.io that will translate all these stupid names to actually-useful definitions.

I'll call it Language.

I'm guessing you wouldn't name a computer company "Apple", a search engine "Google", or a shopping site "Amazon"?

gcc isn't particularly intuitive anyways; you have to learn what the acronym is, then you have to learn what another acronym is, and then after you learn what a recursive acronym is, you realize you have to research further to understand what it means...

You're mistaking the ease of comprehension with the ease of recall. Do you think I'll remember what Flat is in 8 months? Nope.

You can bet the first time I learned about GCC I remembered what it stood for, though. Same goes for things like ALSA. That is a descriptive name that's easy to pronounce.

Meanwhile I'm trying to remember the difference between Square, Stripe, and Box. One of them is a payment processor and which one is it again?

The difference with Apple and Google is that they have massive advertising budgets to overcome that obstacle.

Well Flat is a musical reference in this case so it's not far out. This is also a blog post rather than a press release as such.

I actually thought one of the car manufacturers had released a evolutionary version of the V8 car engines...

I though it was some variation of Google's V8 JavaScript engine.

How to read half the posts that make it to the frontpage on HN:

1. Click on the link on HN.

2. Click on the logo/header of the page to go to their main site. If that fails, remove "blog." from the url.

3. Read what the thing actually is about.

4. Go back to the original link and read it (or alternatively just ignore it and comment about the thing itself on HN).

Even that doesn't work in this case ...

Thanks for the feedback, we changed the link of the logo + signup links to the homepage ;-)

Thanks for the comment, we added an intro to this blog post:

> For those who don't know Flat (https://flat.io), welcome and here is a quick recap for you. We launched our startup on January 2015. We developed a collaborative platform for composing and editing music scores. Our product is designed for musicians from all around the world, but also for music teachers who can use it with their classes. We aim at changing the way you can learn, teach and make music today. Our answer is Flat and this is the story of the release of the 8th version of our platform.

Moreover we have plans to rework our blog ;-)

> Flat is a collaborative platform for composing and editing music scores.

This is why I almost always check the comments on HN before reading the article. A shocking number of times I can figure out what the article is about faster reading the HN comments than I can from reading the article. Do schools not teach the old thesis, body, conclusion method anymore?

Actually, I thought their website did a great job describing what the product was, especially compared to all the magical node/js* sites out there.

The product isn't my world, but your logo should link to your product homepage (www.flat.io) and the word "blog" to the blog front page - it was basically impossible for me to find out what Flat actually was without modifying the URL manually :)

This release looks awesome. I remember when Flat first launched and I was really hoping to be able to use it as a replacement for Sibelius (which is the only reason I have to keep a Windows VirtualBox on my Ubuntu machine). In the early days it wasn't quite there yet and was missing some important features that I needed for arranging scores. I will definitely be giving it another try, the product has come a long way since then. Kudos to the team!

Thanks! Indeed we put a lot of energy into the V8 release. So excited about it and can't wait to work on the upcoming bunch of improvements :)

Have you tried MuseScore and what were your thoughts on it?

Can I make a small recommendation? Your product looks awesome, seriously. But the V8 through me for a huge loop. I was thinking it was some fork of the the Chrome V8 engine that used... I'm not sure what, but something flat. V8.0 might be a better name, even if it doesn't fit with the previous releases.

Seriously though, cool product, I'm impressed.

I don't think their target audience will have that problem.

Completely fair point.

Some minor things; A link to the product in your blog header wouldn't hurt, and your back-to-school offer link for the pricing page bounces me to a login. Not sure if that's exactly the flow you intended for showing a promotion.

OH I also didn't realise if I looked at the education page i'd then see different edu. pricing.

Indeed, our signup link in the header + fixed to the our auth page, we will change it to our homepage :) Thanks for the feedback for the back to school, we will check that.

This is awesome. I've been looking for a Guitar Pro alternative for years, and this is preeeetty dang close. Copy-pasting measures could be simpler, and manipulating note length via keyboard would make it precisely what I need - maybe i just need to figure out how to do that.

Great work, Flat!

Why don't you guys look into creating a marketplace for the scores created by your users? Or make it way more prominent if it exists. I want scores, but I don't want to make them myself.

Hi, That's a suggestion that comes more and mores. This a way we may go in the future however that a strong move that requires ressources and a bigger team :) Moreover there is still so much to do on the editor is self.

Feedback: After clicking the link, editing the url to find the real site, clicking everything, I still don't know what this is besides something that has to do with music and collaboration.

Suggestion: let a friend (or a professional tester) try out your site and listen carefully to their comments, before you go boosting, and frustrate a lot of people that probably will not bother again.

A serious tester would probably have told you that you are missing info on the site.

Congrats on the new release! As somebody who has built his own web-based music renderer (soundslice.com), I know how big of a project it is. :-)

What web technologies were used to build Flat? I'd be particularly interested to know how the music editor was built. It looks gorgeous!

We use SVG and Angular.js for the editor and the engraving. WebMidi & WebAudio APIs for the playback. WebSocket for the realtime collaboration. You can find our stack on our AngelList page.

I have a friend who's a fairly famous pianist. He played Carnegie Hall a couple of years ago, even. He's always dabbling on his Steinway at home, but he's not to good with technology. Will Flat V8 be useful for someone like that? Just thinking of whether I should mention this to him.

We try to make the use of Flat the easiest possible. I think it can give it a try anyway. Really depends if he is used to music notation softwares :)

He's never used any type of music notation software - he's very traditional. Still, would be interesting if something like this could spark his interest and he'd change his working methodology over the next years.

At the end we aim to break the frontier between real world instruments and the software itself, using real-time transcription through microphone. It will still take a few months to get there but you got the vision ;)

Nice. I remember about a year ago stumbling across a minimoog emulation somebody had done. Interesting how far we've come since the 80s that somebody can just stick a decent synth into a web browser :-)

Excited that this exists. I'd love to spend some time playing with it.

However, I was disappointed that the one of the first things I tried to do (play the "Super Mario Bros. Coin Noise" sheet) worked in Chrome but not Firefox. Maybe it was just a blip (another sheet worked fine), but I wanted to call it out anyways!

Thanks for the report! I couldn't reproduce it though, I guess a network error happened while downloading the soundfont.

The first and only feedback I can give you is that I can't find a link on your homepage that actually shows me what your product looks like, or even how it works. Consider adding an intro video or having a demo that doesn't require me to log in and give you my personal information.

As others have said, V8 in the title is confusing.. v8.0 would be better. Also, the website at a glance was very confusing to me. I feel the top should have a section about what "Flat" is and what it solves. I should know your mission statement right away.

It looks like a very nice piece of composing software but I fear most of your visitors will close your website before figuring that out.

you refer to the blog as well?

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