Today is an interesting day. Exactly 1 year ago, 29 Sep 2005, we released a completely new version of Stuffed Tracker as well as a our redesigned site.
Well, what do you know! Today we finally released the first public version of our project management software — Factory Nova. This wasn’t done on purpose, even today we were still working on the product’s mini-site, documentation and testing.
That’s actually a really good example of coincidences that we experience from time to time.
We’ve also set a new record today — the first purchase of Factory Nova came in just 50 minutes after the release was announced!
It’s a little bit old mini, but still works great.
We can finally test our software under Safari on Mac. If you are working with our software from a Mac, you can now expect to see the interface glitches that you might have experienced to go away.
PS. Thanks to Shal for providing us with the hardware.
The next beta of Factory Nova will feature a new interface element which was invented in our R&D department (read: by me and Ivan).
Due to our design restrictions we wanted to display an input field for a description of the uploaded file as a one line text box. Usually this size is more then enough for a short file description. But, as we’ve discovered our beta testers were not using the description like we did (no surprise here) and they wanted to be able to enter several lines of text in the description. In other words they wanted a textarea field.
So after some experiments we’ve invented a new interface element — an auto-resizable-with-a-slider textarea. The main idea is that at first textarea looks like a usual one line text field (and takes the same amount of space on the screen, which was very important to us), but then as you type it can become bigger and turn into a real textarea — and with a nice slider effect too.
Here is how it works: Video (2.8 Mb)
Doing support for a product is usually a pleasant job. You help great people to understand your great product better.
But, unfortunately, this is not always the case. Sometimes you get an aggressive person on the other side of the email communication pipeline that doesn’t trust you from the start. Whatever you will say to such person, he will turn against you. Oh, and he will also try to say the last word.
We are lucky that we haven’t met such people in 10 months during which the new re-launched version of Stuffed Tracker is on the market. But everything happens some day. And such person just ruined my whole day today.
That’s actually the hard part of the support job. You can’t get angry on the client, whatever he says to you or however aggressive he is. Your job is to kindly show why the person is wrong. That’s what I did today, although I feel very bad right now (you know when somebody says something very unfair to you and you can’t open the person’s eyes — he just doesn’t listen to you).
I am sure, good support service should always be polite and kind. That’s the key. This can often even save the situation. But not this time. Oh well.
I recently had an email conversation with our client who is using Stuffed Tracker to track effectiveness of his advertising. The client’s company is selling web software just as we do. He complained that he can’t make his adwords campaigns generate him sales.
And we have exactly the same problem! Traffic from Adwords seems to be of less quality for us compared to other advertising sources.
What’s the reason for this? Maybe software developers are not good at writing short text creatives and buying the right words? Or, maybe the majority of the people clicking on adwords are not looking to purchase the software?
Who could have thought? This longest journey does finally come to an end.
10 minutes ago I’ve posted a beta version of Factory Nova on a closed forum for our beta testers.
We currently accept everyone interested in taking part in the beta cycle of the product. Factory Nova should be in beta for around 2 months according to our plans. Around the beginning of August 2006 the final 1.0 version should be released.
Here is what you need to do to become a beta tester:
1. Register on our forums if you haven’t already done so.
2. Send me (user “Sergey”) a private message with a request to become a part of the Factory Beta Team.
3. After a short period you will be added to a proper members group on our forums and will get access to a closed Factory Nova Beta forum where you will be able to download the product, post your thoughts, ideas and of course bug reports.
Please note that we are in a GMT +4 timezone and I will have to give you the access to the beta forum manually. This means that after you will send a private message to me, you might need to wait for some hours before you will get the access.
As you can see we do count down, it was two weeks and now it is only one week! Yay!
As a bonus for waiting here is a screenhost of the tags screen in Factory Nova. You can assign multiple tags to a task and use this in different ways. In the Stuffed Tracker project we use tags to specify for which version a task has to be finished. When we then look at the list of all tags we can clearly see the progress for each version.
You can start the countdown now. We are finishing the translation of the Factory Nova interface and doing a bunch of small but needed things, like creating a web-based installation wizard. But generally the beta is ready.
Traditionally, we have very long holidays in May in this country. So this delays things a bit, but not for long. As I’ve wrote in the title of this post — two weeks and a beta should be announced.
Thanks for bearing with us all this time.
