New Features!

Welcome to the PUBLIC CHALK New Features blog! We continue in our pre-beta stage and we are getting lots of great ideas from our testers and we’ve even come up with a few of our own. Not to mention that list of items that we knew we’d have to fix. In our next “features” release, we plan to provide the following items:

1. Tags – What are tags you ask? Well, they are short notes (1 or 2 or maybe 3 words) that describe something. An example would be if you were describing a bottle of wine – you might tag it with 3 tags including Tag 1 – Red; Tag 2 – Cabernet Sauvignon; Tag 3 – Vintage 1996. And if you did, I would hope to get an invite to help you drink it. But in PUBLIC CHALK you will be able to tag an entry in one of your crews. So, if someone in one of your crews says, “I love Asics” you might tag it as 1) Running shoes; 2) Gel. Then you will be able to search Tab 3 by tag.
2. Hover Over – Ever wonder what something on a page means? Well, now you’ll be able to hover the mouse over many of the things on the page and get a pop-up box with a quick explanation of what a particular hyperlink or button does.
3. Drop Down Options – Previously, if you posted an item, you would see a small gray “X” to the right of your post which would allow you to delete the post. That small gray “X” has been replaced with a dropdown options box. One of the options will still be delete (if you were the poster). The other options include Email which will allow you to notify everyone in the crew via e-mail of the post (whether or not you posted it) and Tag (see Tags above).
4. Edit Events – you set it up, you posted it, and now it has changed. In previous versions this has been a sad state of affairs – you couldn’t change an event once it was posted. This has been corrected with the “Edit Event” dropdown feature which will allow you to change any aspect of your event. You may also use the e-mail feature to notify everyone of your event or you can delete your event entirely.
5. Invite Enhancements - Now when you invite your friends from your contact book, you'll notice a list of the people you've decided to invite to the crew that appears at the top of the page as you check them off. Don't forget to double-check this list before clicking the invite button... wouldn't want to accidentally invite mom to the "What I did last Saturday" crew!
6. Finally, with all this talk of Tab 3 – we’ve made some improvements there too allowing you to search by tag and telling you which crew your search results came from.

Check back here for more new features coming soon.

ETJ

Pre Beta

Remember the days when “Beta” meant that the software just wasn’t quite ready for prime-time use but that you could “test” it out and provide feedback? Things were expected to break and be a little clunky. Those days are long gone. Today, “Beta” means that you can use it but it isn’t really guaranteed. Gmail was in beta for 7 years. The “New” Yahoo! mail is still in Beta and it has been out for well over a year. Both services work very well and have since the first day that they were available for “Beta” usage.

After many months of work, Public Chalk is in a state where the software isn’t quite ready for prime-time use but you can “test” it out and provide feedback. Unfortunately, that is no longer called “Beta”. So, we have invited a few friends associated with a few groups or events to test out the software in “Pre Beta”. Once we have the kinks worked out and the software is “Ready to Use”… we’ll call it “Beta” and invite a whole bunch of others.

Public Chalk, as it exists now, is a very robust service. It accomplishes the goal of providing a place for people to chat among friends in specific crews or groups of people, upload photos, enter reviews, make announcements, plan an event, and even text in messages to crews. And, beyond the user experience, there is lots of code in the background that manages all of these services and makes them secure.

Of course, there is a list of well over 100 “enhancements” and additional services that we’d like to provide for our users. Check back here for what is coming up next. Current users, please let us know of any issues you encounter or what you’d like to see next using the user feedback crew.
Thanks!

ETJ

One Week

More than a Barenaked Ladies song… it is the amount of time we just spent (this past week) fixing issues with PUBLIC CHALK and finishing up some of the initial functionality that we thought was “absolutely” necessary before we rolled any part of this out to even a small group of friends.

Here is a list of just a few things that we accomplished this past week:

• We tested and made some fixes to the invite functionality.



• We changed the register process to make it as streamlined as possible for new members.



• We drank 3 very nice bottles of wine. Note that this was done over an entire week by three of us, not all at once… although, at times, I think we could’ve all used our own bottle.



• We changed the look and feel of the application. Our initial color pallet was not working anymore – too much orange and pink and teal (no, I’m not joking, those really were the colors… and, no, our designer was not retarded).



• We incorporated the new name and logo.



• We worked on overall performance to make sure moving around the site is quick.



• We taught the dog how to jump into the pool. Before this week he would always walk down the steps. Now he throws himself in with abandon from any side of the pool.

• We updated copy throughout the site – including the copy on the initial crew – so that, hopefully, it makes sense to everyone who reads it as they learn about the site. In case you are curious, copy means the text on different parts of the site. I was just calling it, “The text on different parts of the site”, but I was told that I had to be more official and call it copy.

• We took a really cool “welcome” picture you will see in the “Getting Started with PUBLIC CHALK” crew. I know, it looks like it would be a 3 minute project – but it took us a good 15 minutes to get a picture we liked.

• And, we made a list… of a whole bunch of additional functions that we want to implement soon after rolling PUBLIC CHALK out. We realize that we’re going to have to fix some bugs – but we also want to make some really cool new features available soon after the initial release.
  

So, here we go… our first real “rollout”. We hope to hear some good things back from our initial users as well as reports on any issues and we’d love some suggestions on what you like best and what functionality you’d like to see in future releases.

ETJ