Product updates, news & miscellanea from your fellow Apollo developers.
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Last week, we introduced a new feature where you could finally move elements across projects. When we did, we received the usual (and gratifying) lot of emails to thank us for the new feature -- and obviously asking for more.
One of the common "complaints" was that we didn't allow users to move milestones across projects. We didn't think it would be that important -- and we were wrong!
So, we escalated the issue, and implemented it.
In Apollo, each workspace is an island; workspaces have their own users, permissions, contacts, and so on. It makes most sense for a company to have one workspace, and run different projects under it. We have several customers with hundred of projects -- a number that surprised us.
Each project is also somehow an island: while a workspace can have 30, 40 users, a project typically only have a subset of them with access rights.
While moving things between workspaces is technically near-impossible, moving elements is technically feasible.
Hi there,
Looking at Apollo's usage log, we are discovering interesting things and usage patterns.
Hello there,
Milestones are a central part of Apollo. Sometimes I feel that we should discourage the use of specific dates in tasks, and highlight the fact that the "real" deadlines in projects are set by their milestones.
For example, users forget that tasks might not have a date set for them, and therefore won't appear in the calendar. On the other hand, milestones always have a deadline, and always appear in the calendar of users assigned to that project.
Since milestones are very important, and projects normally have several milestones, we have now added the option where changing a milestone's date will also shift subsequent milestones in the same project.
Hello friends,
When you create a program, you expect some parts of it to be very popular and wildly used by your users. Then you release it, and... discover that some sections were just not as important as you thought they would be, while some others become absolutely critical.
My Tasks in Apollo is one of those sections: in the initial drawings, it was meant to be just a list of personal tasks. As design went on, it was obvious that it was more important than originally thought as it should obviously display personal and company tasks as well. When Apollo went live, My Tasks proved to be "the" spot where a lot of our users literally lived!
So, to make the long story short: we have recently improved My Tasks quite dramatically. You can now slice and dice tasks in a more flexible way, or filter out the noise and only concentrate on what matters.
Hello there,
I haven't written here in a while. We get a lot of consistent email feedback after posting here, and I have to say we find the communication very gratifying.
One of the features I personally talked about privately in emails a lot was the possibility to run bulk actions on contacts. Before now, if you wanted to change the visibility of 10 contacts, you had no choice but open each one of them. This was time consuming, and hardly a good way to do things.
This is why we introduced bulk actions on contacts:
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?
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.
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".
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.
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.).
