Fast Iterations - 1.1 and 1.2 up
Being so early and young (and a web app) we have the advantage of being able to iterate really fast on user feedback. We’re currently practicing a form of poor-man’s continuous integration by manually pushing up to the server new code at least twice a week. Many of those are just bug fixes, but a few times a couple notable feature requests slide in and we call that a version.
I’m going to try to the keep the blog up to date with the ‘version’ releases, here’s what we’ve done so far. They always include bug fixes, so I’m just going to mentioned the ‘major features’.
v 1.1 (pushed Friday, Jan 14)
- Icons. No more google’d icons for us! We now features a consistent, complete set, custom designed by the fantastic Meg Robichaud
Old New
- Feed & Linking
Feed used to show the first 300 characters or so of activity description with a link that said ‘show’ that only took you to the course - not the actual activity the feed described.
We now have ability to link to almost any data object in the app directly, and the feed is much more structure - there’s more and better information, and links to the thing you want.
- Smarter Course/Task Management
One of our ‘killer features’ in the in-app windowing system - you can have multiple courses/views open simultaneously and switch between them. It’s the kind of thing you’d normally have to use browser tabs for. We’re still trying to come up with the right usability model for it, but we improved this so that when you click on anything new, your current window minimizes and opens a new one. The response has been really positive, it’s encouraging people to actually use this features and saves state instead of navigating the current window.
v 1.2 (pushed Thursday, Jan 20)
- Fail Cases
Like so many optimistic programmers, we initially programmed for the good not the bad. So when things went wrong (for example the server threw an exception), things went really wrong (the UI froze, mostly). Now we fail much more gracefully.
- Mark unread & flagging
Probably our most requested feature: You can now mark discussion posts, announcements, unread/read and flagged/unflagged for convenient come-back-to-this later notes.
3 flagged, 28 unread
We might be a little more cowboy then we should be but these fast iterations sure are fun.
As always, lots more good stuff in the pipe. Stay tuned. :)
- Paul
