The Chronicles of Stuffed Guys

Created this simple diagram to compare the usual direct project communication (when all people involved in the project talk to each directly) with the project communication based on Factory Nova.

Obviously, Factory Nova works as a centralized repository for everything project-related. All people involved in the project, instead of communicating directly with each other now communicate indirectly — that is through Factory Nova. This helps to keep all the information regarding the project in one place and easily accessible.

But there is one more thing.

Factory Nova notifies everyone involved in the project about everything that happens in the project. And it does it via email.

We decided to rely on the email, because we think that an email client is the best personal productivity software that exists today. Modern email clients are so sophisticated that you can do absolutely wonderful things with them — tagging emails as tasks (with stars or flags), create “smart” email folders which would contain only flagged emails-tasks which you have to do as soon as possible, filter and search all emails very quickly.

Factory Nova works as the central mechanism for managing all the information about the project and you can actually use it for everything, including working with your tasks if you are comfortable of using a web browser and a web interface for this. But, you can also just rely on the email notifications that are send to you to manage your own personal workflow.

This works not only for the developers/workers in the project, but for the managers too. For example, I am a manager in the project and I get an email notification from Factory Nova that a certain task was just finished by a developer. I quickly look through the final developer comments which are also available to me in the email notification and I see that something is not right. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to deal with this right now, so I just flag this email in my email client and it becomes my personal task. Later that day, I will look through all the flagged emails, solve each problem and unflag all corresponding emails.

So in our opinion email is far from dead and is ideally suited for a scenario that I’ve described. We will certainly add RSS in this scheme this year, although I am not sure if the RSS reader clients will fit this as good as the email clients. But we will see.

We are introducing skins support in the next 1.1.0 version of Factory Nova.

Our skins have one interesting feature, they can inherit some of their templates and even images from other skins. So, for example, you can create a skin which will have our “default” skin specified as a parent and the only file that would be changed in that new skin would be a file with CSS styles. All other files Factory Nova will automatically take from the parent skin.

To demonstrate this functionality we are adding a second standard skin to FN, which is called Obsidian. It only changes several icons and the header image, everything else is automatically inherited from the default skin.

The countdown continues.