A quick update…

Not a ton to report this week. Jeff, that magnificent coding genius, informed me that contacts are now editable! So, if you’ve just been staring down at a list of phone numbers and keep having to remind yourself who they belong to, you don’t have to wonder anymore.

Sometimes it’s the simple updates that make me smile the most.

Next week, I’m going to write a little something about the first ever dub5 offices (which we no longer occupy). It’s a tale of hilarious woe, beer and junk food. Stay tuned!

Sign me up

You know what I’ve never been a big fan of? Signing up for things. In my youth (ed note: still young, relatively speaking; other ed note: I am both the author and editor, so this who parenthetical statement is rather superfluous), there was part of me who liked filling out forms, writing all my vital information down, recalling that — yes! — in fact I am a male, and thank you for asking FORM. Nice to make your acquaintance!

The novelty wore off rather quickly. As more and more services online require me to fill out fairly detailed information I’m finding myself increasingly more selective about what exactly I’ll signing up for. This is precisely the sort of thing we want to avoid at dub5.

In a perfect world, everyone who comes across our system — either organically or through vigilant encouragement from dub5 founders and our champions — will sign up. But as history has proven, this world is hardly perfect. Users are like me: selective. They aren’t going to go through an onerous sign-up process unless it’s going to benefit them significantly. And even then, asking for too much information from users creates a pretty hefty and sometimes unnecessary barrier to entry.

Who cares, right? We all know this, savvy Internet denizens that we are. The point is we’re working right now on integrating Facebook Connect with dub5!

I met with developers and founders Andy and Jeff today (at the very lovely Remedy Cafe on 109 Street in Edmonton), and they were pretty excited with the app’s progress. Jeff mentioned that he’s working on a few others new dub5 developments which I touched on in the last post, and he’s hoping to deploy them early next week (including the ability to edit the contacts in your list — something I DEMANDED. I was nice about it, though).

What else, then? We’re creating a new, more functional corporate site over the next month or so, and it will integrate a “proper” dub5 blog that matches the look and feel of the rest of our web presence. It will pull together the app login page as well, so all the dub5 information you need you’ll have in one location.

Oh, and you can also follow us on Twitter (@dub5). I’ll be maintaining our Twitter account, so if you start using d5 and come across issues, you can get me there, or you can complete a bug report right in the app. That’ll get your results sooner, of course, as Jeff and Andy are always on top of that stuff. But I’m way funnier than those guys, and a good listener.

Right, fellas?

Describing software in analogies

Jeff and Andy, dub5′s two developers, often joke that there’s really no way to describe how they’re writing the software for dub5 and what it does. Everything is explained to Clark and I — the business development guys — in analogies. Yesterday, Jeff and Andy pushed out a new version of the site, which you can look at and play around with here. It improves the navigation quite a bit from our previous site version, and it even previews a few new GUI features coming down the pipe — particularly the use of a traditional calendar view to navigate around your schedule.

Jeff did his best to describe the work he and Andy have been putting into the site — basically ensuring that the code we have is a solid foundation upon which we can continue to build:

“Since we all love analogies, what you see on the site now is a new foundation, new framing, and a new roof. The individual rooms themselves still need work, but that can be remedied with a bit of plaster and a new coat of paint. It will be much easier to add new rooms in the future. It’s as if Mike Holmes learned how to program. Wearing overalls.”

See, that I understand. But you start throwing out terms like “Ruby on Rails,” and “Cascading Style Sheets,” and suddenly you’ve lost me. So, we have the basics in place — a solid base from which to continue to build. We’re currently proceeding with developing the follow mission-critical things:

1. Implement month navigation on the sidebar (currently only an image placeholder)
2. Implement “nicknames” for contacts (no more User 17804353454 in your list)
3. Implement simple but complete group support

These are our three priorities right now. It’s not all we have on the go, but we view these as critical to enhancing the dub5 user experience .

Some of the other things we have on our radar:

1. A more robust “Edit Event” panel.
2. A less buggy day calendar that spans the full 24 period of a day.
3. A better looking “event information” page.

This stuff will come as the guys get the time to get it done.

Meanwhile, we’re continuing our push to integrate the system on campuses in Edmonton. We’re working closely with the U of A Students’ Union to get things moving — they’ve been really helpful in helping to guide our efforts. It should be an interesting 2009. Nay: it will be.

Remember, you can email me here if you have questions about dub5. If you want to, you can start using the system right now!

A New Year, renewed vigour

The last few months of 2008 saw the dub5 team holed up in our Secret Labs® trying to get a site refresh done. Since we had a chance to rest over the Christmas break, we’re all over the challenges of building with renewed vigour. We’re aiming for a site refresh in the next few weeks, though it might not be super-noticeable to casual users — a lot of the work we’ve been doing in cleaning up the back-end code to make sure the system runs more smoothly. However, we’ll be rolling out new features soon, and we’ll keep you posted on those as well.

As we get rolling this year, we’ll be providing you, our users and stakeholders, with weekly updates. So check back regularly, and follow our progress.

We’ll talk to you soon,

adam