Graceful Tools Blog

Recent Updates

2008-11-10T23:19:00.000-08:00

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

2008-04-26T11:40:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-06T00:25:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-22T00:35:00.000-07:00

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

2008-01-29T16:40:00.000-08:00

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...

2008-01-28T15:32:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-24T01:26:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-24T00:13:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-22T19:16:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-20T23:46:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-17T11:53:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-08T18:51:00.000-08:00

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.

What's New This Thanksgiving

2007-11-21T11:09:00.000-08:00

Happy Thanksgiving! Those of us who have been working on Graceful Tools and www.meetingstarter.com are thankful for quite a bit this holiday season. Over the past couple of months we have seen many ideas become a reality. We have seen many people benefit from our tool and have received tremendous feedback from many of you on how to help serve people better. Thank you!
This post is intended to help catch you up on how far we’ve come over the past few weeks, just in case you missed them. Below, you can find some brief descriptions of our tools and some of the features that have been added over the past few weeks. Take a look… These tools have been created and modified to serve you so you can spend less time trying to organize information and more time with the people you love.
Blessings,

Jon Paris
jonparis@meetingstarter.com

MEETINGS
We believe life is better when we get together. We think you do too. That is why all of us have meetings. We want to make it as easy as possible for a group of people to decide when to meet, where to go, and what to do. We are sick of crowded inboxes or having to decipher dozens of emails for the important information. We want to make it fun and easy to get together with the people in our lives face to face!

NEW OR IMPROVED FEATURES:

Import your Google calendar
Rank your time preferences
Improved user interface
Compatible with more browsers

COMING SOON:

Quickly confirm one or more meeting times
Import your Outlook calendar

APPOINTMENTS
Many of us want to set up individual times with friends, students, or clients but it takes a lot of work to schedule individual meetings. The goal of our appointments tool is to make it easy to meet with people one on one without having to email back and forth about time and location. Imagine a teacher who wants to meet with the parents of every student in their class. This is incredibly important but the complexity of scheduling makes it all the more difficult. Our appointments tool makes this easy. Simply list all your available times and then let people pick them on a first come, first serve basis. Now you only have to send out one email and others will choose times fitting to them. It is as easy as that.

NEW OR IMPROVED FEATURES:

Quickly send out emails to those you want to meet with.
Ability to request payment for an appointment through PayPal (great for anyone who runs a small business where they meet with people. Whether you are a therapist, a tutor or a babysitter)
Add Photos to your appointment page (Great if you are meeting someone you haven’t met before at Starbucks!)
Cleaner user interface
Ability to have a public link that is easy to point people to 4(i.e. www.meetingstarter.com/ivstanford/meetwithjon)
Email notification for both the person who signed up and person hosting the meeting.
Supports more browsers

COMING SOON:

Continued user interface improvements
Support for more easily setting up multiple locations (like in meetings)

EVENTS
Whether it is a birthday party or a large conference, events are great... as long as you are not in charge of organizing them. We want to make getting together for an event both easy and fun. There are other websites that can do some of this but many of them have ridiculous amounts of adverting that promote diet solutions or picture scantily clad women selling underwear. Needless to say these are not the sort of things that we want to be displaying alongside the invitation to our child’s birthday party or our church retreat! For those of us who organize conferences many of the tools out there are prohibitively expensive and require you to be a web designer. Our events tool makes it easy to gather rsvp’s for a party or do complex event registration all with one simple interface. We want it to be graceful.

NEW OR IMPROVED FEATURES:

Ability to receive payment through PayPal
Simple RSVP mode with public comments
public links that are easy to point people to (i.e. www.meetingstarter.com/ivstanford/meetwithjon)
Cleaner user interface
Email notification to those who rsvp/register
Supports more browsers

COMING SOON:

Continued user interface improvements
Ability to export your event listings to Excel
Support for more easily setting up multiple locations (like in meetings)

ENTIRELY NEW GRACEFUL TOOLS

SURVEYS
Almost every one of us needs to gather and organize information from time to time. Whether it is a list of phone numbers, birthdays, or evaluations from an event - gathering information quickly and keeping it organized is important to many of us. There are other tools out there to do this but most of them are overly complex and clunky. Gracefulsurveys.com is our newest tool and aims to be a simple, elegant, and convenient way to gather the information you need.

FOLDERS
One of the things that we think makes graceful tools so great is the way they feel and how easy it is to use many of these tools. We have implemented folders so all your public appointments, events and surveys can be found in one place. Then you can simply tell your friends to visit www.meetingstarter.com/youremail and they will see all your surveys, events and appointments. We have even made it easy for you to add links to all your surveys, events or appointments on your own blog or webpage. See our blog post on how to do this easily.

COMING SOON:

List an event, survey or appointment in multiple folders simultaneously.
Make folders private using a password
Tour of how to use this feature well

About Graceful Tools

2007-10-17T23:06:00.001-07:00

Graceful Tools was founded during the summer of 2007 by three friends living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Our mission is to create simple, powerful tools to serve people. We believe that e-mail, instant messengers, and even phone calls are poor substitutes for face to face interactions between people, so we've developed tools to make it easier for people to connect in person.

We hope that MeetingStarter will make it easier for people to interact in deeper ways, whether it is through one-on-one appointments, group meetings or larger events.

The God of the Judeo-Christian tradition declares "it is not good for man to be alone." We agree; we believe that people matter, relationships matter, and life is better when we get together. So go ahead! Get together!

Welcome to Graceful Tools

2007-10-17T14:30:00.000-07:00

We are glad you are taking a moment to check out our blog for Graceful Tools. The goal of our products is to provide elegant and powerful tools that serve people. Currently this includes http://www.meetingstarter.com/ where we help people get together and http://www.gracefulsurveys.com/ where we have an easy application to help people collect information gracefully.

We are in a phase of rapid development so we will use this blog to let you know about the new features and products that are coming out as well as any fixes that we will be putting out. In the mean time try out our sites and let us know what you think. We think you will like what you see.

Warmly,

The Graceful Tools Development Team