What's new in Apollo: several small improvements

Although development efforts have been focusing on upgrading Apollo's foundation libraries, we still worked towards improving our users' experience. So, if you used Apollo in the last few weeks, you probably noticed some small improvements that made it into it.

Here is a quick list:

Configurable project name in email subjects

With the reply-by-mail feature, we discovered that Gmail would ignore anything in brackets when deciding where to file your email. This meant that two tasks with the same name, but belonging to two different projects, ended up in the same conversation. Users were getting quite confused — and so were we! We fixed it with a simple setting, which allows you to place the project name at the end of the email subject:

Show file extensions in the files section

The way it was before made it hard to figure out what kind of file you were looking at, since Apollo hid the file extension. So, we changed the way the file names are rendered, to include their extension.

Attachments in email

When a message or a comment has attachments, they are not included in the reply-by-mail email that subscribed users get. This is by choice: having the attachments would increase dramatically the email traffic; also, considering that in Apollo you can attach files up to several hundred megabytes, you can see the problem. However, the automated email messages now make it easy to see if there are attachment; also, clicking on them will open up the comment or message with the attachment.

Importing of a single project in Basecamp

Before now, you could only import entire Basecamp workspaces (with all users and projects). It's now possible to import a single Basecamp project (Basecamp allows single-project exports).

This feature comes with some (unavoidable) limitations: pretty much anything will be owned/assigned to the Apollo workspace's owner. This is because along with the project information, Basecamp doesn't export the full list of users. While this option is not appropriate for "real" imports, it's a handy option to have in cases where existing Basecamp users want to send you a specific Basecamp project (rather than their entire workspace) and you want to be able to see the information in Apollo.

Time format in task view

The single task view now has a much more friendly time format, telling you when the task was created:

Dropbox Bcc to email

When you open up a contact, and click on their email address, the email link will automatically have Apollo's dropbox address. This means that if you email the contact by clicking on their email address, the email you send will automatically be assigned to that contact.

You can expect more features getting rolled out onto Apollo — stay tuned!