Product updates, news & miscellanea from your fellow Apollo developers.
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A few users seem to have projects with many tasks. While we don't limit the number of tasks and task lists, the interface can get a little challenged when dealing with a lot of them.
That's why we recently added the option to collapse task lists:
Last week, we introduced a new feature where you could finally move elements across projects. When we did, we received the usual (and gratifying) lot of emails to thank us for the new feature -- and obviously asking for more.
One of the common "complaints" was that we didn't allow users to move milestones across projects. We didn't think it would be that important -- and we were wrong!
So, we escalated the issue, and implemented it.
In Apollo, each workspace is an island; workspaces have their own users, permissions, contacts, and so on. It makes most sense for a company to have one workspace, and run different projects under it. We have several customers with hundred of projects -- a number that surprised us.
Each project is also somehow an island: while a workspace can have 30, 40 users, a project typically only have a subset of them with access rights.
While moving things between workspaces is technically near-impossible, moving elements is technically feasible.
Hi there,
Looking at Apollo's usage log, we are discovering interesting things and usage patterns.
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:
When we released the translators' application for Apollo a few days ago, we didn't quite realise how quickly Apollo would become a multi-lingual service. We emailed a few people who had offered their help at the very beginning, thinking that it would be a good way to get a few strings translated and to test out our application. We were convinced it would take a few months to translate the 1800 odd strings in Apollo. We were wrong: within the first few days, Dutch was completed (thanks Thijs Kaspers!). We assumed it was an isolated case: we were wrong. Very wrong! In the next few days, four more languages progressed a lot. More and more people joined up and started translating, quickly. Right now French, German, Swedish and Polish are nearly complete.
What was the reason of this great success?
I think there are three sides to this story: an application needs to be written well; the translation application needs to encourage invite people to translate more and more; and users need to love the application and be committed to it. I believe we had all three ingredients, and we simply created the "perfect storm".
Two new features have recently made it into Apollo.
The first one is gravatar support. Gravatars are global avatars that can be created by anybody on www.gravatar.com. Using gravatars is very simple: you create one, and associate it with your email address. Then, within Apollo, you can go to Settings > Account and then tick the box "Use Gravatar" in the Picture section:
We have also made it possible for you to merge two contacts.
Interaction between programs is crucial — especially in the Internet era, where lonely desktop programs are the dinosaurs, and online services can all communicate. An area where communication is especially important is calendars: people want to be able to check their appointments on their phones, and add them on their PCs for example. iCal is a great standard to synchronise different calendars in different locations. This is why Apollo now fully supports iCal.
This is one of those blog entries that should have an empty body, because the title should say it all. To me, it's like people spending (or wasting) million of dollars in clinical studies aimed at proving the absolute obvious: smoking kills; exercise is good for you; a good posture helps with back pain; and so on. The truth about software development is simple -- you can ask any working programmer, if you don't believe a random blog entry in a product's web site.
(At this point, a disclaimer: I am one of the people behind Apollo.
