Product updates, news & miscellanea from your fellow Apollo developers.
Some of our users probably noticed that over the last few weeks Apollo's changelog changed a lot less than usual. If you thought that we were slacking off development, think again: we worked really hard to upgrade Apollo so that it used the latest version of Dojo. Here the what happened.
When we designed Apollo, we decided that we could create some really good notification emails without using HTML. There are, no doubts, several advantages when you use text-only emails: spam filters never seem to bother you; there is never a formatting problem (and believe me, different email clients can render things very differently); finally, they are easier to generate.
The only problem, is that they look "plain". Very "plain".
Hi Friends!
Using Apollo makes you feel excited about your projects.
Sometimes, when you create tasks for your project, you are not entirely sure which task list they will belong to. Or maybe none of your existing task lists is the right one. Sometimes, all you want to do is jump on a project and quickly type 4 or 5 quick points, maybe while you are on the phone with your customer.
This is why we implemented a very quick way of adding tasks to Apollo:
Hi there,
The holiday has definitely been good for us: this week, we have released tons of new features which were requested by users over the last few months. I will break up the list in two blog entries.
We now allow users to search notes for contacts. This strengthen further the CRM side of Apollo, which now allows you to look up old conversations with your contacts by typing a few relevant words:
Hi there,
In my previous blog entry I started listing the new features that made it into Apollo since we came back from our summer break. I also asked you to spot the ones I hadn't listed. I am sure a lot of people simply cheated by looking at Apollo's changelog. For the ones who didn't cheat... here we go!
First of all, we added a couple of important workspace settings.
It's now possible to set a default language for your workspace:
Hi everybody,
we are back from our short (and well deserved!) summer break, and here we are rolling out new features already.
Yesterday, we released our new "Milestone completion bar". If you go to the Milestone page of one of your projects, you will see the usual list of milestones, and for each one, a progress bar:
Hi there,
Software development happens in small steps. Before our deserved summer break (which is just about to end!), we released several small improvements in Apollo. We covered a some of them last week. Here is the rest:
We gave this some thought, and decided that the main means of "subscribing" to a task should be by dropping a comment. This is what happens naturally in several blogs.
Hello everybody,
As you probably know, we are now working on features that are meant to enhance Apollo's openness. In terms of contacts, the first step in this direction was Apollo's email integration. This allowed you to add notes to contacts by simply sending an email to a dropbox address, or replying to a task comment by hitting "reply" in your email program.
Hello friends,
Writing project messages and comments sometimes requires more than just text. You might want to emphasise things, or maybe use some strong formatting. We were very keen on allowing this, and had several options: we could have allowed some HTML tags, or maybe could have formatted the text using Textile or Markdown (if you don't know what they are, don't worry too much!).
In the end, we opted for the solution that was easiest to use for our users: a nice visual editor where you can do basic formatting:
Apollo is all about team communication. The principle is simple: free flowing communication is more important than having somebody with a whip who knows how late everything is. Each project in Apollo has a very important "Messages" section, where communication about the project itself should ideally happen. Implementing reply-by-mail in Apollo has already made a difference to thousands of teams. Well, we went one step further: we turned our project "messages" section into something that can work more like a "forum".
