August Updates and Planned New Features

This is a quick update about what has been going on over the past month since our last release. We’ve also included a glimpse of where we are headed with new features in development.

Communication is the central theme of this update. Over the past month we’ve had lots of conversations. Thanks to all the users who took time to contact us in the last month. I am not sure what happened but we hit some communication inflexion point. The insights into how Primary users are modeling has been invaluable to us. It has also led to decisions and work on some new major product features.

Before we talk about the future, let’s go through the shopping list of updates:

1. User Avatar

We now have a user avatar that displays next to comments. By default it uses Gravatar, so you may have your custom image there already.

2. Commenting updates

There were many updates to the commenting system rolled out this month, so many I’m going to give them a bullet list:

• # tags — you can create and filter by custom # tags. I am using #TODO as a standard way to keep track of things I need to change in the model.
• Filter and Search — the Message Centre now includes a filter and search feature to find comments.
• Release Comments — release comments are sandboxed so that working branch comments don’t appear to a viewer of a specific release. No need to air the dirty laundry during your model walk-through.
• Better linking of comments to their parent Flows and Elements.

3. Show Interfaces in Share View

You can now toggle the display of interfaces in the Flow overview in the Share View.

4. Input behaviour standardisation

There were a few annoying quirks and differences between the various input fields. We’ve done a lot of work to straighten these out and make them all consistent.

New Directions

We have two major projects under way, the first is a revamp of the pdf output. The current output is a little ‘dry’ to say the least. We are creating a framework to generate the pdf directly from the app, and following this we will be working on some nicer flow visualisations. Getting your stakeholders to appreciate your genius is so much easier with some pictures!

The second project involves a new meta level of User Journeys. This feature allows a high level pathway to be described. Activities on this pathway may or may not relate to Flows within the app being modeled. Accordingly the User Journey activities may be linked to one or more User Flows. Flows can be added as stubs in line to be developed later on.