...or "What I did on spring break"
It turns out that launching in a private beta release was a very good idea :-). It helps a lot to get feedback from some new people that are starting without any preconceived ideas, or at least different preconceived ideas, and are certified kool-aid free. We're also fortunate to have beta testers that used Eluma across a wider set of use cases than we could ever hope to do internally.
So what did we learn?
Web Access
Although we always had browser based access to a user's data high up on the product roadmap, private beta escalated this requirement. So as a result, we are implementing browser based access to public collections, and we're also working on providing browser based access through a secure sign on process so that an Eluma user can see all of their folders and subfolders, tagged and flagged items, and smartlists from any machine via a browser.
Offline Access
Eluma's offline access capabilities were an important feature to many users. There were some good suggestions for how to make it better, like caching more content (such as web pages) for offline access. So you'll see even more content available when you're offline.
Local Search
Providing a local search tab (restricting search to your local data) was also on the list for this release, so it was no surprise that the beta testers confirmed that it's a vital feature.
More search engine options
This one snuck up on me. I am pretty much search engine agnostic so I was OK with having no search engine options. However, based on user feedback, it appears that users don't want to be forced into using a specific vendor's web search, so we now allow you to choose between Google, Yahoo!, Ask, and Microsoft search in the browser toolbar, and Google and Yahoo! search from the desktop application.
Usability
We've put a lot of effort into improving the usability of Eluma, consistent with our goal to make using Eluma be second nature, especially for casual computer users - people that just go online to check email and search for a few sites. Some of the features we're adding include:
- Improved navigation menus and behavior in the Eluma Desktop. You'll see that our left hand navigation pane provides a lot more room for objects, and the behavior is more predictable. We've also changed the navigation tree based on some good feedback we've received.
- There are new options for desktop alerts. One new option that we are working on that may NOT make it into this release is the ability to Collect/Rate/Tag/Flag an Alert item from the popup. I hope that we can squeeze it in, but we have to draw the line somewhere. :-)
- We have added the ability to Collect/Rate/Tag/Flag individual RSS items in a feed, and we treat the items like bookmarks. I love this feature, it makes reading very active RSS feeds like Engadget or Digg so much easier and more efficient.
- We have improved the navigation of collected content from the browser toolbar.
- We now support automatic completion of tag names, and we support multi-word tags. These two were really "no brainers" we just had to get to them on the list.
Performance and Additional Platform Support
It might be boring to the typical end user, but I am glad that we were able to make significant performance enhancements across a variety of areas in the product, including search, synchronization of content across multiple machines, and for communicating with the server. We've also added support for 64 bit support machines, and for the Firefox 3 browser.
We think that these new features promise to make the public beta version of Eluma 2.0 significantly more functional and even easier to use than the private beta version. We're excited to wrap up public beta and get it out to you shortly. We appreciate all the feedback we've gotten from you so far. It's hugely helpful for us.
Thanks!