May Update!
over 4 years ago
– Mon, May 11, 2020 at 10:41:11 AM
Hey everyone!
I'll keep this update short as you should see most of the product updates are in production and a couple of the bigger non-Kickstarter backed features that we wanted to add are in testing and should be going live soon.
As for the swag items - I'm happy to report that everything made it safely to me, and we're gearing up to start shipping them this week. There were certainly some delays, but I am super happy with the items we created!
I did some work in BackerKit this week to lock in the last few addresses and whatnot, but barring any unforeseen issues, all trays, shirts, and dice will be shipping in the next two weeks.
As a reminder, to stay current on development updates, you'll want to join our Discord server.
Thanks!
March Update!
almost 5 years ago
– Tue, Mar 10, 2020 at 07:39:39 PM
Things have been rolling along pretty nicely with the GMB Team. We've pushed more features to the testing environment this week, and are working on a few more things before we push into production. Here's a list of things that went into testing today:
- The ability to follow/unfollow an Author, and to view followers/followings
- View Archived documents and delete them (we're updating the labels before it goes into prod)
- You can now define what language your document is written in (used for search in the future)
- Fixed user settings screen issues
- Page count logic - used for search in the future
- A handful of other backend things Also, the new GMB default theme is nearly done, and the new Urban and Paper themes are a WIP as we speak.
Also, the new GMB default theme is nearly done, and the new Urban and Paper themes are a WIP as we speak.
To stay most current on what tasks remain, don't forget to check out our public GM Binder Trello board.
Although it looks like we're going to miss our 4/1/2020 deadline for everything, I am confident that the bulk of the committed features will be done - along with a few non-committed features. One thing I want to be clear about - We are making the buildout of collecting and processing of payments for GMB+ the last priority on our list. We want to get these features out there for you to use before we worry about generating new revenue. That said, we will adjust when the GMB+ subscription clock starts so your KS and Patreon backing will still get you the pre-paid months you expect.
I did get word today that our dice and trays are shipping from the manufacturer this week. If that holds true, I think we have a chance of meeting our end of month delivery goal for all physical items. T-shirts were picked up a few weeks ago.
As always, join us in the GM Binder Discord for the latest and greatest!
Development Update - 2/3/2020
almost 5 years ago
– Mon, Feb 03, 2020 at 08:31:48 PM
Hey everyone! This is a short update with some mixed news.
Let's get the bad out of the way first. Although development has progressed really well over the last month, I am hung up and a challenging deployment issue. It's absolutely solvable but is taking more time than I was able to dedicate last week. The upside to this is that it has caused me to make some infrastructure improvements that will result in more stable deployments and scalable infrastructure for those heavy load times.
On to the good news - the new My Library will be going live this week! So this means that the new Home, User Profile, and My Library pages will be going live at the same time. This will be as feature complete as they can be at this point (feedback and reviews will not be there for example) and are a great framework for what is to come down the road. I'm pretty pumped to see these going live!
The next task on our radar is the revamped Search page. The first iteration of this will be pretty similar to what we have today in regards to features but will take on the new look and feel of the site.
We are also hoping to knock out the new default document theme in this sprint, however, due to the amount of overhead/oversight and planning that it will take to launch, we might not see that actually delivered at the end of the sprint.
And finally, t-shirts for the KS have been ordered and should be done mid Feb. The dice and trays have been ordered as well, and at this point, I'm hopeful that the illness outbreak in China will not impact their deliverability. :fingers_crossed:
I think that about covers it for updates this week. You should expect to see some msgs go out once I get through the deployment issues and get things into production.
Thanks!
Quick Update
almost 5 years ago
– Thu, Jan 23, 2020 at 11:16:18 PM
I had hoped to get everything deployed tonight, but I ran into a snag and I'm going to need to wait until tomorrow to move forward. I'll get an update posted here as soon as things are up and running.
Thanks!
Development and Swag Update!!
about 5 years ago
– Wed, Jan 22, 2020 at 12:10:41 AM
Let's cut right to the chase - My updates since the closing of our campaign have been pretty poor, to say the least. Without making excuses, but being transparent, the end of the year was extremely busy for us with client work and growing our team. In the end, I wasn't happy with the progress we were making on GMB and it was disheartening to admit we weren't tracking many updates.
That said, with this update, I'm happy to report things are now well on their way to the finish line! We made a hire at the beginning of January (Hi Sarah!) and her focus is going to be GMB until it's complete. She's getting plenty of support from myself and the rest of the team, and I'm confident that we'll be giving positive updates going forward.
With no further ado, I'm happy to say that the first iteration of the new Home page and User Profile page are going to be rolled out this week. We've also made improvements to our security practices that are mostly behind the scenes too. We did a review of these pages today and had a shortlist of clean up items before going live. Most of these are already completed as I write this and will be wrapped up tomorrow.
Time allowing, we'll be pushing these changes live Thursday night. Due to some DNS changes, there may be a short window where some users see the new site and some see the old site. This should be minimal and short-lived though.
Going forward, we are operating in development chunks called "sprints" and plan to be releasing features at the end of each sprint going forward. These are two weeks long and Jan. 31st will be the end of the next sprint.
During this sprint, we'll be working on the new My Library (formerly My Documents) pages. This will include the new design layout, along with better sorting at a minimum. If things go well, we'll also see a new searching feature specific to your My Library. As Sarah gets more comfortable in the GMB codebase, I suspect our ability to get more done will increase pretty dramatically.
Outside of the software side of things, I did finally get our dice and dice tray samples (literally today for the trays). They look amazing! (Pictures coming soon) Because things are taking such a long time with the swag items, I am going to be placing the full order in the coming days. At this point, we should be able to make our April 1st timeline, but I do have my concerns. I'll give updates on the swag items as I have them.
Oh, and one super positive thing - We keep hitting usage records every month. December saw over 150k unique users and over 425k page views. Over 1.5 million people have used GMB since day 1! This still blows my mind!
Again, I really do need to apologize for having such a long period of silence post-KS. Although I've certainly been able to answer questions one on one and in Discord, I need to make it a priority to update everyone as a whole more often, and I'm going to do this.
Related - Have you joined our Discord server, which is open to everyone. Please join in for more communication!
We also have a public Trello board. If you haven't seen it, definitely check it out to stay updated here: Trello. Reminder: Everything in the 'To Do' is what we plan to have completed by April, 1st 2020.
