What's new in your Apollo this summer: comment form at top, translation extras, HTML in project description, clear formatting

Hi there,

Apollo's development is very much user-driven. This implies that quite a few users will find here features they requested a little while ago. Here are some of the features that recently made it into Apollo?

Comment box at the top when comments are shown in reverse order

We were asked to show task comments in reverse chronological order: it was important to show fresher comments closer to the top of the page (and to the task description itself). We then realised that when showing comments this way, it made a lot more sense having the comment form at the top.

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Apollo and language support: a success story of good software and outstanding community

When we released the translators' application for Apollo a few days ago, we didn't quite realise how quickly Apollo would become a multi-lingual service. We emailed a few people who had offered their help at the very beginning, thinking that it would be a good way to get a few strings translated and to test out our application. We were convinced it would take a few months to translate the 1800 odd strings in Apollo. We were wrong: within the first few days, Dutch was completed (thanks Thijs Kaspers!). We assumed it was an isolated case: we were wrong. Very wrong! In the next few days, four more languages progressed a lot. More and more people joined up and started translating, quickly. Right now French, German, Swedish and Polish are nearly complete.

What was the reason of this great success?

I think there are three sides to this story: an application needs to be written well; the translation application needs to encourage invite people to translate more and more; and users need to love the application and be committed to it. I believe we had all three ingredients, and we simply created the "perfect storm".

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Export of a user-specified range of contacts in CSV format

Hello everybody,

As you probably know, we are now working on features that are meant to enhance Apollo's openness. In terms of contacts, the first step in this direction was Apollo's email integration. This allowed you to add notes to contacts by simply sending an email to a dropbox address, or replying to a task comment by hitting "reply" in your email program.

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Apollo gets a visual editor for project messages and comments

Hello friends,

Writing project messages and comments sometimes requires more than just text. You might want to emphasise things, or maybe use some strong formatting. We were very keen on allowing this, and had several options: we could have allowed some HTML tags, or maybe could have formatted the text using Textile or Markdown (if you don't know what they are, don't worry too much!).

In the end, we opted for the solution that was easiest to use for our users: a nice visual editor where you can do basic formatting:

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Apollo has forum-like project messages!

Apollo is all about team communication. The principle is simple: free flowing communication is more important than having somebody with a whip who knows how late everything is. Each project in Apollo has a very important "Messages" section, where communication about the project itself should ideally happen. Implementing reply-by-mail in Apollo has already made a difference to thousands of teams. Well, we went one step further: we turned our project "messages" section into something that can work more like a "forum".

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New features: gravatar support and merge contacts

Two new features have recently made it into Apollo.

The first one is gravatar support. Gravatars are global avatars that can be created by anybody on www.gravatar.com. Using gravatars is very simple: you create one, and associate it with your email address. Then, within Apollo, you can go to Settings > Account and then tick the box "Use Gravatar" in the Picture section:

We have also made it possible for you to merge two contacts.

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Apollo supports iCal feeds!

Interaction between programs is crucial — especially in the Internet era, where lonely desktop programs are the dinosaurs, and online services can all communicate. An area where communication is especially important is calendars: people want to be able to check their appointments on their phones, and add them on their PCs for example. iCal is a great standard to synchronise different calendars in different locations. This is why Apollo now fully supports iCal.

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Apollo: reply by mail and dropbox are here!

Apollo makes your life easier, by giving everybody a simple view of the “big picture” for any project. For this to work, it's important that everything about the project is kept inside Apollo. Apollo's brand new email integration makes this much, much easier. Let's have a look:

You can reply to comments to tasks by email. When somebody comments on a task, the receiving users can now simply hit “reply” knowing that their reply will become a comment to that task. Yes, it's that easy! Our users often told us how their customers weren't keen on logging into Apollo to add comments to tasks. They would go as far as replying to that comment with a private email. This is understandable, as the most natural action to respond to a comment that came by email is to simply hit “reply”. Well, “reply button it is”, you could say! Blackberry addicts will also find this very useful.

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Featureful, user friendly software isn't impossible. It's just hard.

This is one of those blog entries that should have an empty body, because the title should say it all. To me, it's like people spending (or wasting) million of dollars in clinical studies aimed at proving the absolute obvious: smoking kills; exercise is good for you; a good posture helps with back pain; and so on. The truth about software development is simple -- you can ask any working programmer, if you don't believe a random blog entry in a product's web site.

(At this point, a disclaimer: I am one of the people behind Apollo.

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Why SaaS rocks -- or, thank you SaaS users

Why SaaS rocks -- or, thank you, SaaS users

There has been a visible decline in conventional software development, lately: the world seems to be moving towards SaaS, or Software As A Service. I don't even need to back this with statistics or reports: all you have to do, is see what most people do when they use a computer. Experts have explained this shift in a variety of ways (for example, it makes more economical sense now that there's the Internet, they are multi-platform, no installation required, etc.).

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