Recent Updates

We have been doing more work on Graceful Tools than our blog gives evidence to. Much of the work has been behind the scenes and on some new tools that we hope to release sometime next year. Yet the tools that you know and love have received many helpful and need updates in recent weeks. Below is a list of some of what you might find new.

New Features: 

 Quota's and Waitlists: Now you can limit the number of participants who may signup for an event and decide what will happen after the registration deadline has passed.  You can decide to close registration or allow people to be added to a waitlist.

Discount Codes: We have had discount codes for a short time but the functionality has been vastly improved.  Users can confirm whether they have received a discount prior to payment so it is clear they will only need to pay their remaining balance.

Invoices and Payments: The most significant part of this was a way to see the payments you have received from your event or appointment participants and an online record of when we send checks to reimburse you for these payments. I think you will find this very helpful if you collect payments for your events.

Security: In events that had an associated location there was a security warning in Firefox warning of "unencrypted content." This had to do with google maps being loaded. Still this concerned some of our users. This percieved security vulnerabilty has been closed.

Surveys now Compatible with Chrome: Survey creators were having some "issues" in Google's new chrome browser. There were a few other issues in how multiple choice answers were appearing upon editing.  This has been fixed.

Email Guests: One simple feature that many users have requested is an easy way to email all the guests to an event, appointment, meeting or respondents to a survey. Now managers can easily email guests as well as invitees.  They can use the link to return to change registration information..

Better view of registrants

Now it is easier than ever to see registrants and signups.  Canceled signups are now listed as well so people cannot cancel without you knowing about it!  We have also disabled the ability for registrants to change there name and email to prevent them from effectively disappearing by changing this identifying information.

Small performance updates

In addition to the changes listed above we have also performed a number of other small performance optimizations and bug fixes. 

Thank you for using Graceful Tools this past year.  We hope you have found it useful.  Please keep the feedback coming so we can serve you better.

New Look and New Features on Graceful Tools

We are excited about our new look for graceful tools and our new features.

1) Easier login and logout for all our graceful tools. This means that you don't need a separate login or to separately logout to access your surveys, loans, or any of the meetingstarter tools (appointments, events, and meetings).

2) We have added automatic discount codes to the our events tool and reorganized the edit pages of the events tool. We think this will be helpful for those of us who frequently run conferences and events.

3) We have create column summaries in surveys that we think are pretty helpful. It is now much easier to view a count of how many people answered the same way on a multiple choice question or the sum or average in a column.

4) In page editing of details of event and appointment registrants and post registration editible fields. This is great when you need to assign registrants to housing, cars, small groups etc... after they are registered.

6) We have increased our browser support and testing to include Safari (previously we only tested in IE6, IE7, and Firefox 2).

7) Notification in surveys. You can now choose to have survey managers and viewer notified upon completion of a survey.

8) Cleaner links... our links now end with simply the id. i.e. www.gracefultools.com/appointments/1141.

9) We are offering summer jobs and are now using our own surveys for our feedback. So give us some feedback!

Warmly,
Jon

Update to surveys and more bug fixes

Over the past week we have done a number of incremental improvements to our tools. There have been a few noteworthy additions...

1) We have posted a Frequently Asked Questions Page. We will continue to update this page with information that you might find helpful.

2) We have posted a jobs page. Yes we are hiring! We are excited to expand our team to help our tools continue to improve and to help serve people more effectively with our tools.

3) Some love given to surveys. We have recently given some more love to our survey tool (it hasn't received as much attention as our other tools but it seems many of you are still finding it useful. We have added a few additional question types including a Date field that has nifty popup calendar to help people choose dates. We now allow you the ability to choose how to display the question/response fields (either horizontal or vertical). We also make it incredibly easy to change the order of the questions. Just drag them into the order you like. More than anything some bugs that had been annoying us (and I am sure some of you) have been fixed. We have made it possible to receive email notifications when people respond to your survey as well as made it possible to customize your response message.

4) We continue to invite your feedback. We have appreciated all the feedback we have received keep it coming in. You can still use our feedback at gracefultools.com but you can also use the link at the bottom of the page which now uses one of our surveys.

we have a meeting with some professional designers tomorrow night and plan on doing some additional performance improvements in the days to come. If you have wondered why we have been a bit slower updating our blog and rolling out updates in the last few weeks check out my family blog at www.kuoparis.com.

Warmly,
Jon

Recent Updates

We have recently made quite a few updates to our tools recently. Let me list some of the recent and upcoming updates.

1) nicer looking emails. A small touch but now the emails that are automatically sent out from all our graceful tools are a bit more graceful.

2) faster login. Our login in procedure is now easier than ever. We have decided to collect less information initially in order to make it easier for people to start using our tools fast.

3) In table editing for event and appointment respondents. This is huge. You are now able to edit information that people edit right in a spreadsheet format on line. We think this makes things a lot easier to use for organizers.

4) manager edit only fields. Imagine you are editing a conference and after people have registered you want to assign them to cars/housing/small groups you name it. Now you can do this online. We hope this will make it a lot easier for people to organize a conference. You don't have to bother with excel or a google spreadsheet you do it all from within meetingstarter with all the user rights that you want.

5) Prettier URLs. visit www.meetingstarter.com/gt/jon and you will see what I mean. This has been available for months but many people didn't know it was there.

6) Many bugs fixed... If you have used our tool and found bugs... you are not alone. We have been working hard to become bug free. If you find additional bugs let us know.

7) Suggesting potential partners. Part of why we are doing what we do is that we want people to be able to get together face to face fast. At the same time we have realized that from time to time I have found that the cost of travel in both time and money makes this difficult and one or more of the meeting participants needs to call in. We have found Rondee.com is a free and easy way to add multiple people to a conference call so we are recommending them as a possible "location" that meeting participants might want to choose from. check it out.

Finally if you want to know more about the people behind Graceful Tools you might be interested in checking out our family blog. www.kuoparis.com I recently wrote some of my reflections on St. Patrick's day there which many have told me was encouraging and inspiring.

Warmly,
Jon Paris

emails to manager and easier meetings

Graceful tools has had the ability for you to give other users the ability to update information about events, appointments and surveys but we have never automatically notified them when you gave them this capability. Today we added this to make things easier for you.

We also added a few additions to the meetings to make it easier for you to see that there are multiple weeks from which you can share your availability. Keep the feedback coming in.

enjoying life,
Jon

Introducing Happy Loaner...

HappyLoaner is our newest graceful tool... The idea is simple ... help people be loan out stuff more freely by providing a way to keep track of everything they are loaning out. In addition it will email out reminders to both the loaner and borrower to let them know that when the item is expected back... It is really simple and really helpful... Some of our next steps include creating video tutorials, adding in-page payment, and making all our tools easier to use.

Surveys - Reverting to private fixed

We are so grateful for the feedback of our users. Thanks to one user we fixed a bug that was causing surveys to become private again after any the survey details were updated... How annoying is that! It is now fixed so you can send out those public surveys without the fear of people being blocked from seeing them unexpectedly!

Jon

New Meeting Listing Page check it out

Tonight we pushed a new page to list all your the meetings you are invited to or are organizing. It has a lot more information and than the previous page and is much easier on the eyes! It groups meetings by whether or not you are the organizer or just a guest and also separates out the recently past and older meetings. Give us your feedback since we plan on using a similar interface for our other tools soon.

seeking to serve,

Jon Paris - Graceful Tools

Fun with Public Photos

Today we added the ability to add a default "public photo" to your user profile with www.meetingstarter.com. You can use these photos to quickly add a photo of yourself to any appointments you are hosting (so for example people recognize you when they get to the cafe they are meeting you at).

These same photos are also displayed when you use events in RSVP mode. If you have a public photo then it is displayed next to your name and comment. Now you can reconect those faces and names before you get to the party!

To add your public photo simply simply click on your email (in the to right corner of the screen. Then click on the Browse button to the right of "Public Photo". Grab a photo from your computer and then click update... it is that easy... You can alway remove or change your photo from your profile.


enjoy...
jon

Adding gracefulness back into gracefultools.com

The weekend our development team had a bit of a showdown against some of the existing bugs in our tools and I am happy to say that the developers won. We closed up a number of security loopholes that we discovered over the weekend. More interesting changes include:

1) Locations and Activity preferences are back in Meetings! For a short time the votes people cast for locations and activities were not being displayed correctly. When you went to view other users responses. Now they are being displayed. The number is still a bit confusing (in case you were wondering what the percentage represents it is simply the percentage rating of the location or activity as percent of the total possible score of all the invited guests). One of our next projects is to update locations picker to be more similar throughout our tools. We also plan on adding the ability for meeting invitees to suggest locations and activities that can be voted on.

2) Your invitees will now see the meeting/survey/event/appointment on the respective listing page. So if you invite someone they can see it from with meetingstarter/gracefultools and don't need to respond via email.

3) The meeting page where you pick your available times has been cleaned up a bit. A bug that occurred when ranking your times (great,good,ok) has been fixed. We increased the font size of the instructions on how to use the time picker to help those who are less familiar with calendaring environments to try it out.

4) Meeting Confirmation... If you haven't tried this it is a great feature... You can confirm a meeting time or even multiple meeting times with different locations or activities. This is great for small groups to confirm the time from within meetingstarter so people know the plan as soon as possible. The ability to confirm multiple meeting times is also really exciting... Imagine you are trying to get multiple times together with a few friends.. confirm them all. Imagine you have a large group... A dorm, a church, a campus club and you are trying to arrange multiple smaller groups to meet together. Gather each person's preferences and then organize the best times and locations for a number of small groups to meet...

We have more features coming soon... We hope www.meetingstarter.com will continue to help you spend less time trying to connect with people so you have more time to actually connect.

Warmly,

Jon Paris

Surveys back up ... Status field is beginning to be used

We have been continuing to make small but significant update to the usability of our site. Three of these recent improvements include:

Surveys are Back! some of our suers wondered where surveys went on www.meetingstarter.com. You can still access them at www.meetingstarter.com/surveys but place to see everything you have been working on is www.gracefultools.com. This will have links for all our meetingstarter, gracefulsurveys and some of our exciting upcoming tools.

Appointments improvements
In our next update (later today) we will add two important features to appointments.
We will begin using the Signup Deadline (by default it is the beginning of your appointment) to hide and disable the availability of an appointment. I know for me this has been annoying to see all the old appointments listed. I also would rather set up a 24 hour signup deadline so I know if nobody has signed up I don't have to rush out and be at the designated location. In order to facilitate this we have begun to keep track of your timezone. We will update the timezone feature more in the near future but currently here is how it works. When you edit a meeting the timezone that you are currently in is recorded. If someone is signing up for an appointment and is in a different timezone than you there is a short note indicated what timezone the appointment times are listed for. This is an easy solution that doesn't add unnecessary text for most users but quickly allows people to clarify when they mean the appointment to take place. You could also use the note field on an added appointment to change this on an appointment by appointment basis.

The Status of Status
You might have wondered if you have been using events, appointments or surveys what the status is of the status column which up until a few days ago remained in a perpetual state of being unpublished. We have changed this. Now you can change the status from published to unpublished.

Unpublished events, appointments, meeting and surveys (as well as archived and deleted ones) will no longer be listed on the the listing pages. In order to facilitate this transition and prevent users events from disappearing without notice we will first update all of your events, appointments, meetings and surveys that are currently unpublished to published (this will not change any of the current functionality since effectively they have been published). We will not do this for any events, surveys, appointments which have their default name.

So that is the status on status....

We in the final stages of hiring a director of operations and communications which is both very exciting and will probably improve our communication to you substantially in the near future.

with joy,
Jon Paris - graceful tools.

MeetingStarter.com getting better every day

This past week we posted some major changes to meetingstarter.com. As a development team we had a fun time adding functionality, improving security and making it look a whole lot better. If you haven't seen it yet take a look.

Over the next couple weeks expect to see continued progress on the site. We are also happy to recieve any feedback you might have for us and the future direction of our projects.