Product updates, news & miscellanea from your fellow Apollo developers.
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This entry is longer than expected. Feel free to read it if you want some insider's information about Apollo, the people behind it, and what goes on behind the scenes.
The short story:
To know the long story, read on!
Yesterday, we sent our first newsletter. It was a pretty important moment too! Thousands of people were going to receive it, and we really did our best to get it 100% right.
If I wanted to say that "100%" confidently, I would also need to make several announcement. So, here we go.
The first one is that we invented the time machine! Yes, that's right: when we wrote that we released Apollo initially in July 2011, we obviously meant it -- it wasn't a typo.
Hi Friends,
This entry is to announce two exciting features in Apollo:
As a member of staff at Applicom, I got to use these features well in advance and I just couldn't believe how much they helped me in my day-to-day work. I can see why a lot of users requested them!
So, here are the details.
In the last few years, a number of web-based project management solutions appeared. A great number of them. I should know: Apollo is one of them. We started building Apollo when the market wasn't as crowded (although it was starting), and waited a long time before releasing it to the public; the main reason is that we didn't want to put out there something that we wouldn't use. And we were picky. Very picky.
Apollo is still missing some of the features we considered (and consider) crucial.
As many of our customers know, we are getting ready to release our "paid plans". While this is exciting, as we will finally earn money with Apollo, there is always the other side of the coin: organising a good, reliable, convenient merchant account. This involves, amongst other things, to fill out a staggering number of forms.
At the beginning, it was project management: it was basically a science, with its own specialised vocabulary and wide range of software options to actually apply that science. This science included contracts, budgeting, very refined task, sub task, sub-sub task breakdown, dependencies, complex graphs, time estimates, etc. A few people, the "project managers", were masters at finding their way in this little jungle of terms, rules, and methods.
Imagine that you sell product X. X here could be anything: to me, right now, X is Apollo, a piece of project management software that allows you to manage and organise your working and personal life. But that's just an example -- you could be selling cakes. After a while, and a lot of hard work, you become popular: people buy your cakes (and my software), and things are cruising along nicely. As you become more and more renowned, your customers start coming up with more specific requests.
