August Update
Howdy folks! Nat here, with August's news on StoryTime development.
As I write this I am finishing the final tweaks on that big reorganization to story cards Coby showed you last month. I'm starting to get pretty excited about how it looks. Our goal is to be familiar and "homey" to people who used Tracker, but also to look distinctly ourselves. Check out these button colors!
What I really like about this is that we're starting to get elements in from our original mood boards. All three of us are "90s kids" so we wanted to bring in some elements of our introductions to information management, the just-pre-internet library.
(Does everyone start their company with a manifesto and a mood board, or was that just us?)
Now that we're no longer planning on immediately moving your cheese key buttons in your workflow, we're starting to invite more people into the alpha.
I'm looking forward to getting your feedback. There are still quite a few rough edges and annoying things I can't see anymore because I use the tool so much, so I'm counting on you to help me see those. That said, it's already my favorite project management type thing out there, so I'm hoping you'll also find it pleasing.
The other big excitement this month was fixing a bug where stories could get disconnected from their backlog's linked list under certain circumstances. (Which caused them to appear to be deleted entirely. Scary!) I still don't know exactly what those circumstances are but the functions that move stories around now check to confirm that everything is still connected before they commit the transaction, otherwise it will error and roll back the operation. I'm pretty sure it has something to do with moving stories around in the same backlog in multiple browser sessions, so if you see a big red warning flash while you're moving stories, send me an e-mail at team@storytime.team or nat@storytime.team and I'll take a closer look.
Likewise: We now report whether your client is connected to its LiveView session a little more proactively. You should be able to see your connection status continuously down at the bottom of the screen. If that little button is green you're good to go. We also made the application wait a little bit longer before announcing that it's disconnected, so we can reduce the number of times you see that message when all that's happening is the web socket is reconnecting in a browser tab that was asleep.
Next up:
- Fixing some problems the redesign has caused in the drafts area
- Taking a closer look at that "chain breaking bug" and the session resumption issue
- Better sharing previews and favicons
- Fixing automatic marker/milestone acceptance
More soon,
Nat