Show your Work: November 2016
This month our focus was on building out the core functionality of the app. Our goal was to completely remove our reliance on third party software and just use Kwoosh.
No more basecamp. No more email. No more iMessage. All ideas, questions, communications, tasks were to be put into Kwoosh.
We succeeded.
Discussions
The key to building great software is communication.
Until now most of our communication has been over iMessage. Being a remote team and working from opposite sides of the world, this quickly leads to a less than ideal situation.
Messages arrive at all times of day; are broken up with general conversation and near impossible to search through.
This leads to a lot of repeat discussions about the same things and annoyance from both sides.
To help fix the situation we added discussions.
With discussions you can create a document inside Kwoosh that allows you to fully flesh out an idea and receive feedback on it. Users can then comment on it and have a full discussion in a single location…making future referencing easy.
Perfect for future ideas, documentation, questions and specs.
Rich Text Editor
Now that we had started to add larger chunks of text to Kwoosh we needed to allow that text to be formatted. We didn’t want to force users to learn Markdown or another markup language, so the solution was always going to be with a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor. We looked into a few before settling on Quill.js.
Our main goal with the editor was simplicity. We only wanted to give the user a handful of formatting options so their focus is on the content, and not picking the perfect font.
We added these anywhere we could input multiple lines of text, so your comments can have bulleted lists for issues to address and your task descriptions can convey intention clearer with italics or bold highlights.
Task Design
We finally managed to get around to finishing off some little design touches with the inline forms and get the cancel buttons working correctly.
We also updated our custom radio button code for the color picker so that it could be used on any background.
Fuzzy Time
Ask a computer to tell you the time and you will get 11:34:08; ask a human and they will say “Eleven thirty”. Yes there are times when exact values are important, but most of the time rough values provide the answer a user is looking for and are easier to understand.
One of these examples is when a notification occurs in Kwoosh. We want to provide some context of when the event occurred, but don’t want users focussed on the exact second it happened. To help us with this we created a fuzzy time display.
Our fuzzy time display turns any timestamp into a rough display of the time, e.g.
- Just now
- 15 minutes ago
- An hour ago
- This morning
- This afternoon
- Last night
- Yesterday
- Monday
- Last week
- Last month
To allow this to work we had to also add individual time zone settings for every user. Meaning an event triggered on a Wednesday lunchtime in Gilroy, California (the self proclaimed garlic capital of the world) can be displayed as “Last night” in Paris, France and “This afternoon” in Paris, Texas.
Kwoosh is a software project management tool we have been building in the open over the past year. You can continue reading our journey, join our mailing list to get updates about when we launch or follow us on twitter @kwoosh.
What are you working on? We’d love to talk with you about it.
