It has recently come to our attention that the MixTape sample listed here on the blog and on our Selected Work page hasn’t been operational. There’s nothing wrong with the player itself, simply that the sites we were streaming the songs from were no longer serving the mp3 files. We’ve gone back and found some other great songs to share with you, and everything should be working perfectly now. We hope you enjoy!
It’s been quiet on this blog lately, for which I send my apologies. However, it’s not without rhyme or reason. We’ve been working on a great new project called NoteCut. NoteCut is will be an online note sharing platform which allows students and teachers to easily share notes. The goal is to help students learn more effectively and serve as an learning aid, not a learning substitute.
There will definitely be more to share regarding NoteCut as it develops, however, what I’d really like to do is quickly evangelize some of the technology we’ve been using in its development.
First off we have CodeIgniter which an amazing PHP framework. If you’re familiar with the Rails approach, this is pretty similar. CodeIgniter has substantially expedited our development process thanks to its built-in functionality. Interfacing with a database really can’t get much easier, and it generates clean URLs for you (query strings, I won’t miss you). Of course it does more, but those are my two favorite niceties. However, what really rocks about CodeIgniter is the documentation. Learning basics of the system was a breeze with their getting started guide, but beyond that nearly everything is documented, and documented well. I’m a big fan of the PHP documentation, but CodeIgniter goes one step further with startlingly un-cryptic descriptions of its classes and helper methods. It’s TINY too. At the cost of sounding hyperbolic, I really haven’t found anything I don’t like about CodeIgniter yet.
That’s not all though. We wanted to incorporate a FlashPaper solution on our note pages, but we found the technology to be virtually dead. We considered rolling our own solution, but then we stumbled upon iPaper from Scribd. Aside from the cliché naming, iPaper hasn’t stopped wow-ing us in its simplicity and execution. The API is awesome - simple, sweet, and effective. Plus, the thing just works. It seems obvious, but if you think about your daily struggles with software, I bet you’ll start to realize how frustrating it can be.
We’ll be sure to keep you up-to-date on all our developments with NoteCut, as well as the rest of the news from NPL Solutions. But please, someone send me a harassing email next time it’s been over 70 days since the last blog post.
We’re proud to say that we launched two projects last week. The first was a website for a local dry cleaner, Art Cleaners. The Art Cleaners project was a lot of fun, and it’s the second site we’ve used our custom templating process on (our site was the first). I think it turned out really well, and the word back from Art Cleaners is much the same.
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.nplsolutions.com/content/mt/sample.swf" height="100" width="250" fvars="myPlaylist=http://www.nplsolutions.com/content/mt/sample.xml ; skin_url=http://www.nplsolutions.com/content/mt/skin.jpg" /]
The second project we finished was an in-house development called MixTape. You can see a sample MixTape to the right, and find out more information on our Selected Work page. MixTape is a skinable, portable, xml-driven Flash MP3 player. Many Flash products offer similar functionality in areas like playback, playlisting, or customization, but MixTape brings all three of these features together in one small, easy-to-use, and free package. MixTape is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License, so feel free to download it and try it out on your site.
We’re working on a more in-depth look at how MixTape works, and what makes it unique, so be sure to come back and check that out.
It’s been a busy week here, and that’s to say the least.
Our biggest news is the launch of our redesigned site (here). I really think that this new design shows the very best of our work and potential. For anyone who’s bookmarked this blog, those links will still work, but you might want to reference the new address in the future.
I’ve also had the great opportunity to meet a couple of really cool people in the last few days. Last week was Brad Feld, local VC and business guru, then this week Dave Jilk of Jilk Systems and Brian Kellner of Newgator - all very interesting and extremely bright individuals.
We’ve got some more news and articles coming down the pipe, so check back soon.
Our new site is closer than ever to launch. Within the next week you should see a brand new NPL Solutions making waves slip silently onto the web. This redesign has taken a painfully long time, but I think it’s been absolutely worth it.
Right now we’re working out the last of the browser compatibility bugs, and I’d like to personally invite everyone to come take a look and let us know what you think. We’re currently hiding out at http://beta.nplsolutions.com/.
