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Tony Mobily's picture
By Tony Mobily
Wednesday, June 1, 2011 - 19:07
4 comments

New features: mark as unread, auto-subscribe, admin unsubscribe, comment notifications for milestones

Hi there,

Apollo is under very active development. Looking at our changelog, you can see that we are constantly adding new features, updating existing ones and fixing small problems. Reading the changelog is definitely boring -- plus, you don't get to see screenshots and pick the best of the best! So, here we go. Here are some of the new features that made it into Apollo yesterday:

Mark as unread

We all do it: we all want to virtually go back in time, and mark a message as unread so that we can answer it later. It's now possible to mark comments of messages, tasks, milestones and contact notes as unread:

Auto-subscribe to all new messages

Project messages are a really important tool to keep communicating about a project. Many users requested the ability to be notified every time somebody posts a project message, so that they can always be kept in the loop -- which is very fair! So, here it is as an option in Settings > Notifications:

Admins can unsubscribe mortal users

Users can subscribe themselves to tasks so that they receive notifications when somebody adds a comment. Some admin users want to be able to unsubscribe users in some cases: they can now do it, simply by clicking on "Unsubscribe" in the list of followers:

Comment notifications for milestones

Until now, it wasn't possible to subscribe to comments to milestones and receive notifications. This limitations is now gone: users can now receive a notification when somebody comments on a milestone.

There is more to come: other improvements made it into Apollo, especially in terms of UI. Can you spot what they are?

See you soon!

4 comments so far

Kole's picture

Kole

Fri, 06/10/2011 - 20:32

1

Great work! Will there be an android/iphone app in the future?

Tony Mobily's picture

Tony Mobily

Fri, 06/10/2011 - 20:35

2

Hi Kole,

Thanks!
We will eventually work on native Android/iPhone applications. However... not yet. For now, we are concentrating on our mobile site, which looks native and works great!
(Drop us an email with your workspace name to activate it).

Bye!

Merc.

Brian Greenwood's picture

Brian Greenwood

Sat, 07/09/2011 - 21:41

3

Been watching you from afar and becoming increasingly interested in switching. I have two SAAS solutions that I hope to replace completely with you, basecamp and freshbooks.

However, it still appears your invoicing is a long way off from being anything close to freshbooks - perhaps an integration? They do have an api..

If you do the integration, may I suggest three things:
1. Allow people to submit their entire time sheet to freshbooks, rather than immediately record the time to freshbooks' timesheet. The reason for this is once time is recorded to freshbooks, it cannot be modified through the api but has to be done manually through freshbooks.

2. Budget! (this should be done regardless of integration) Allow admins to create either a monetary budget for task/milestone or an hourly budget. I am losing money hand over fist right now because there is no easy way to track the budgeted time on a TASK/Milestone to quickly know a person has gone double over the time alocated for that one part. Monetary can be nice if you have multiple contractors who work on a single milestone and each bills a different rate. I could see this as an outline screen showing all the milestones-tasks/todos. At the top there would be a field where the over all budget can be entered and an "allocated" field just below it showing how much of the budget has been allocated and then a field showing how much budget remains. Then beside each item in the outline a field to enter budget amount. I see the milestone could have an amount entered for it, or the user can enter amounts for the todos which would adjust the total number at the top of the milestone. Once time is entered against these actual would show up beside its allocation and flag itself a color depending on its proximity to the budgeted amount.

3. Allow users to either use the site owner's freshbooks api integration, or enter their own API token. This would make it very easy to integrate contractors who are not staff in freshbooks.

Tony Mobily's picture

Tony Mobily

Sun, 07/10/2011 - 17:52

4

Hi Brian,

Thank you for your great comment.
Freshbook integration will be possible once we've released our
API. That's something we left right after iCal and
reply-by-mail, which were the most requested features pretty much from
day 1. Now that we have them down, we can think about the next 2 big
steps: APIs and Internationalisation (having Apollo in languages other
than English). So, that's the plan for when we come back from our
short, well-deserved summer break.

Budgeting is also a requested feature, but it's a feature that has
about a million possible solutions -- that kind of design takes a lot
of brain power, and right now we would rather spend time doing things
like API and multi-language support. After that, we will see.

I hope this helps!

Merc.