Product updates, news & miscellanea from your fellow Apollo developers.
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We are working very hard on Apollo right now. We are very open about our roadmap, and anybody who has emailed us over the last couple of weeks knows exactly what we are doing.
We have just rolled out, for all the workspaces, two new -- and important -- features.
The first one is the possibility to upload your own company's logo in Apollo:
UPDATE: Yes transparent PNGs are now supported!
Once upon a time, going to work implied commuting from your home to your office, and -- most importantly -- implied that everybody had to have their "office space". It used to be a desk. Then it became a desk with a PC. Now, it has often evolved to a desk with a laptop. What's next?
The next step is called "freedom": it implies that you can work wherever you are, whenever you need to.
Mind you, the world will always need receptionists; and a warehouse will always need people who actually take the goods from the shelves or greet you at the checkout till.
It's no secret that here at Applicom we have recently changed: we used to work mainly on custom programs for customers. This could have been an AJAX backend, or a page-reload web site, or an automatic backup procedure. If you know the IT world, you probably know that customers' requests can get pretty wild. Customers seem to humbly and fearfully ask if it's at all possible to implement some very basic features, and... then they seem to demand, very naturally, the most impossible things.
Imagine for one second that you had to make a choice. On your left, you have an incredibly complex machine with 100 different flashing buttons and indicators and LEDs and -- why not? -- a lot of beeping noises. On your right, you have a very simple panel with five buttons, no noise, and only a couple of analog instruments.
Those two machines have something very important in common. Can you see what it is?
I wrote earlier that we started using Apollo to develop Apollo. That step was really quite huge. On one hand, it told us that Apollo was finally a _product_ -- something useful to anybody, including us.
We have just about finished developing tags, and we are loving it already. As Apollo users, tags are making our lives much easier.
Here is what tags look like:
A few users pointed out that they are getting a strange warning: if they use something “quite recent” like Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, when they log into Apollo they get a big warning telling them to upgrade to a better and faster browser.
It reads like this:
You are using Internet Explorer 8. While we do support it, you will miss out on a few graphical goodies, and A LOT of speed.
When we released Apollo in private beta, which required invite codes to join, we didn't quite expect such a response.
Many users replied to us sending us ideas, feature requests, or simply saying "thank you". Well, this is from us:
Thank you.
Your help and feedback is invaluable to us. Keep those emails coming -- we will answer all of them timely, and we will listen to everything you say (and create tickets in our development system...).
We still have invites left; so, keep asking for them!
Developing something like Apollo is very challenging -- and very rewarding. What's most rewarding, is knowing that we are using... Apollo, in order to develop Apollo. Yes, that's right!
Apollo is a pretty big project, and it requires intense collaboration amongst those who work on it. I am the project's black sheep -- I am in Australia, which is a little "out of the way" so to speak. With the rest of the team a few thousand miles from me, we use Apollo every day in order to make things happen.
