The Matygo Blog

{ First community courses! }

Hey everyone,

I’ve been meaning to write a longer blog post to explain our new direction - but as often happens with ‘longer blog posts’ it’s taking… a long time ;).

So we’ve decided to start offering courses in the community on technical topics on our platform. To do the live class portion we’re integrating Google+ Hangouts which allows for live video, screensharing, and document collaboration. It’s a pretty cool experience. 

We have announced two courses, starting next week. The first is “Learn to build a sexy website”, which explains the fundamentals of web development and uses Wordpress as an example project which you customize and learn from. The second is “Beginner Rails”, targeted at beginners who want to learn the basics of Rails and be able to put together a simple web app. 

They are both listed on our home page: http://www.matygo.com

The Wordpress course is already full and there is only 1 spot left in the Rails course. 

Look for more to come!

{ Release Notes for Thu, Oct 20th 2011. }

Hey all,

We’ve been a bit silent the past few weeks but we’ve got a fair bit of stuff to share with you today that we hope you’ll enjoy. In addition to the iPad release we’ve addressed a number of performance issues, and are hard at work improving things every day.

Bug Fixes

• Resolved a simple capitalization error on profiles
• Resolved an issue where you were not asked to confirm navigation when using the breadcrumb view
• Resolved an issue where users would be notified of their own activities (ie: posting to discussion)

Features

• Added new table sorting for grades which is significantly faster as well as allows for sorting on multiple columns
• Added dynamic titles for various application states (making the back button more sane)
• Added syntax highlighting for code blocks
• Updated look and utility of notification e-mails (they now send in html and link back to the application)
• Added a view to allow instructors / assistants to manage student ids (needed for bulk uploading of grades)
• Added the ability for instructors to bulk input grades
• Added a code block of sorts (technically it’s a code span - and thus doesn’t allow empty lines, this is being worked on but is a reasonable stop gap)

// Note currently empty line will break the code formatting
 public static void main(String[] args){
    Foo foo = new Foo();
    foo.bar();
}

• Improved the location of the formatting buttons
• Improved the insert from the formatting buttons to be at the caret location and to have pre-highlighted the inserted helping text
• Added google +1s to discussion posts (eventually everything)

Thanks as always for baring with us as we shake all this stuff out, your feedback has been essential in improving the stability and utility of Matygo.

.joe (and the whole team)

{ iOS client update }

Hi everyone,

My name is Farhan and I am part of the Matygo team that is working on maintaining and improving the iOS app.

Today I am happy to announce that version 1.3 is available in the App Store. The iOS app is now a universal app and works on all iOS devices.

The goal of the iPad version was to match the look and feel of the standard Matygo web app. A lot of the UI elements will feel very familiar.

Features

• iPad support
• Profile viewing
• More Markdown support
• General UI fixes throughout

As usual there is still a lot more planned in the pipeline so stay tuned. If there are any questions or concerns I would be glad to address them.

-Farhan (farhan@matygo.com)

{ iPhone client update! }

Hey Everyone,

I am happy to announce a service release for the Matygo iPhone client.

Features

• Markdown is now supported throughout the app in the form of rich text (which includes hyperlinking / youtube / vimeo support)
• All levels of the application are now refreshable by pulling the list view down (ala twitter / facebook)
• General ui fixes throughout.

Thanks as always for using Matygo, next on the iOS docket is iPad support, so stay tuned!

.joe (and the matygo team, especially farhan@matygo.com)

{ Matygo releases Android Client! }

Hey everyone,

Today’s release includes a minor patch (of a major security issue - pointed out by Kevin Woo).

On a more exciting front, we are proud to announce the first release of the Matygo android client.

It can be found here: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.matygo.matygodroid

Please feel free to give us any and all feedback, this is our first foray into the android world, we will be grateful for your input and help to make the client fantastic.

.joe (and the matygo team)