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
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Monday, January 28, 2008
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.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
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
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
seeking to serve,
Jon Paris - Graceful Tools
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
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
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
Sunday, January 20, 2008
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
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
Thursday, January 17, 2008
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
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.
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.
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