Product updates, news & miscellanea from your fellow Apollo developers.
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We have recently introduced two exciting integrations: Harvest and Freshbooks. The reception from our users was overwhelming, and made us realise the importance of communicating/integrating with other online software.
Apollo doesn't send invoices; this is a conscious decision on our side: invoicing is not "Just send invoices out", just like "Project management" is not just "A bunch of task lists".
Your workspace's image is what appears in your workspace's login screen. This is a step towards the kind of personalization that makes your customers feel at ease and feel that they are using a tool tightly connected to your company. (Yes, we do plan on strengthening these features!).
One of the problems we had was that sometimes the logo included the company's name.
The projects' dashboard is the first screen you see when you click on Projects on the left hand side. It's a very important screen, which lists all the projects you have access to.
The first real improvement for the projects dashboard was the introduction of categories and paging (which were triggered by important requests from customers who were dealing with more than 200 active projects using Apollo!).
It is no secret that Apollo is internet-based software: Apollo's users can access their data either by using Apollo's great UI, or by "connecting" to Apollo's API (you can see the API as a means to access Apollo taking the UI out of the equation). The API can be invoked by your own scripts (if you are a developer), or by other online programs, in order to access your information.
While this means that potentially every SaaS out there can integrate to Apollo, we realise that it's important for us to make this as painless as possible, and decided to actively work on integrations.
We are consistently improving Apollo's reporting abilities. Time entries was a specific feature that we wanted to get out of the door as soon as possible, promising improvements to the reporting side of things. Right now, if you click on a contact for example, you are able to see all time logged against it:
We improved cases and deals, by adding the same tab for them.
When it comes to regional settings, Apollo needs to deal with several issues: timezone, date format (DD/MM/YYYY or MM/DD/YYYY), language, and so on. There is another detail, in terms of localization, that escaped in the first version of Apollo: the ability to set, in the CRM side of things, how to display people's names: "name, last name" or "last name, name". Apollo, by default, would display them as "name, last name" and would order contacts by last name.
We did some improvements on the file management side of Apollo — although only one of them is actually visible.
When you go to Project > Files, you see all the files associated to a particular project. However, when viewing "All files", you will now see the category the file belongs to:
Also, when a file is served, it will also serve the right HTTP headers so that browsers will cache them more aggressively.
For quite a while, we resisted the idea that a project should have a deadline in Apollo. The main argument was that "that's what milestones are for".
In the end, due to great demand, we thought we found the perfect compromise.
We developed the "activity" under Contacts to keep an eye of everything that happened in the CRM side of the story in Apollo.
Users find this screen very important, as it allows them to follow what happens to their contacts.
When we released Apollo, we didn't really know how many files our users would upload (having a completely oversized hard drive ended up being a really good idea!).
