In an effort to help Haiti after their devastating earthquake, over a hundred fifty independent Mac and iPhone developers, myself included, will be donating today’s sale profits to our charity of choice. Please check out the page and help suppport the cause.

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Nota 1.2 is finally out with tons of new features. The main focus of this update was to bring the most requested feature to Nota; chords and scales. You can now browse and play almost any type of chord or scale in any key. Chords can also be inverted. A simple piano is now available in full screen landscape mode with bigger keys that are easier to play and the sound engine has been revamped for better responsiveness across different iPhone models. The Reference section can now be browsed in cover flow mode when the device is in landscape mode making it easier to browse by symbols instead of names.

Nota 1.2 Changelog:

• Chords and Scales
• Landscape mode piano
• Cover flow view of reference
• Revamped audio engine for improved responsiveness
• Minor revisions to the reference library
• Spanish localization

Nota 1.0.1 Changelog

Piano:

• The audio format was changed to improve playback performance on the iPhone 2G and 3G.
• Memory management tweaks have also helped performance in these devices.
• Playing a note repeatedly no longer cuts the audio of the previous note sound making it a lot smoother.

Quiz:

• In the previous version, Accidentals and Notes where mixed in the possible answers. This would sometimes make the answer an obvious one. Therefore Accidentals are now grouped together in the answer. This means that if the correct answer is a Sharp or a Flat, then the choices given will be Sharps or Flats, excluding regular notes. Vice-versa, if the answer is a regular note, no Accidentals will be given as possible choices.
• The High Score board now shows the percentage bar of the correct answers.
• The Save Score window now shows up if a new High Score was made.
• Corrected two G flat notes that were showing incorrectly as a G.

Reference:

• Added Alto and Tenor Clefs.
• Fixed a typographical error.
• Expanded the description of Tuplets and Triplets.
• Corrected two G flat notes that were showing incorrectly as a G.

notaapp.com
app store

Why Nota?
The idea for making Nota, my first app, came from the fact that I have two kids(7 and 10) who are both taking piano lessons. We had these music flash cards to help them in the learn to read music process but of course we somehow lost them. When the kids inherited our old iPhones(deactivated) after we upgraded to 3GS I figured a music flash cards app for them would be perfect! I looked into it and realized the choices at the time were not that great. I could design a better one I thought. I knew this was a niche market app and would not be my Tweetie but, it was a simple idea, perfect for a side project getting done at nights and weekends. Little did I know it would evolve from flash cards to include a piano and a reference library and that I would find myself unemployed and dedicated to this new iPhone development venture more seriously. The design process took only two rounds and one final revision was made during development.

Initial Design Concepts: 
In the initial round of concepts, I explored the design treatments shown bellow but I settled on using the bamboo and dark glass as the official look and feel for the app. This design had the best positive feedback from the people I showed it to. In this early prototype, the Learn section was utilizing the iPhone’s scrolling interface to navigate the selections. This was later changed to a multi level table view which allows for better navigation when dealing with large amounts of content.

Revised Concepts:
Once I settled on the bamboo concept, the next step was to apply that look and feel to all the sections of the app. Bellow are the designs for the Splash page, the Quiz page, the Staff page which never made it to the final app, the Piano page, the Learn page and a second level page for it. I also refined some of the elements in the interface like the arrows in the Piano section.

Final Design:
As development progressed, the design was tweaked and refined even more. The Quiz gained some playing feedback like number of correct or wrong answers, a start screen, a pause button, a high score etc. Looking back, I should have designed this before starting development to avoid pausing, rethinking and redesigning during development stage. The Learn section was renamed Reference and brightened up a bit since in the previous version it looked too dark and did not seem to belong with the other screens. Also, the icon for this section was changed to a book with a music symbol on the cover to make it look more like a library resource and less like music playing in iTunes.

Logo:
For the logo, I wanted to include the bamboo as well as a reference to music, weather that was piano keys or a musical symbol. I started with the piano but realized there were tons of icons like this already in the App Store. I then added the note above the but this made the design too complex so I removed the piano completely  leaving just the symbol with a bamboo border. I was really happy with the end result.

Find out more about Nota at notaapp.com

At last I am putting in some love to All Forces. Today I launch the new design and hope to post more often now that everything is in order. A few thoughts about the redesign. The new design is not a big departure from the previous one, the truth is I liked the old design. But under the hood it was just a hack of the default Kubrick template. So I set out to redesign it from scratch but maintaining it’s elegant simplicity. The goal was to have a wider design, ajaxed comments, search hints, ajax contact form, ajax share functionality and the least amount of plugins possible. This means I had to write a lot of this functionality myself to keep the code clean and fast.

The only plugins I am using now are Akismet for spam, Audio Player for some old posts I have with audio(might get rid of this one soon), HeadSpace2 for Google Analytics and auto-generated meta keywords and meta descriptions, Popularity Contest for generating the top posts on the sidebar, WP-Cache just in case I ever get Dugg, Viper’s Video Quicktags (can’t believe this is not part of wp core) and WP-PageNavi for the paged navigation on posts. The paged navigation in the comments area is made with  JQuery and 1 line of PHP code. Perhaps I’ll do a post on that next. The live search hints is done in a similar way but with the help of a Quicksilver javascript port and the work from John Nunemaker and John Resig. It loads a list of all posts via JQuery after the page is loaded and then filters them as text is entered in the search field.

The Share and Contact functionality is all JQuery and a wonderful PHP class I wrote a while back for sending html emails. The code I hope to release in the near future.

One thing to note, you can now follow just All Forces posts via twitter @allforces or you can get my more frequent, random and personal posts at @melvitax. I would love to hear your thoughts.

Added: It looks like Viper’s Video Quicktags might be  getting rolled into  WordPress 2.9. Oh, and post thumbs as well which I forgot to mention I wrote my own version of.