Timberline is now in early access!

Anthony Bertolo
4 min readJun 21, 2020

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As of this posting you can now find the Timberline app on the Apple Appstore for iOS and Play Store for Android. There is still much to be done but these apps have feature parity with the web and desktop versions.

Before we continue, let’s make one thing clear: Timberline is alpha!

Come chat with us in the Official Timberline Org

It’s pre-launch software that is rapidly being developed. We’ve just made the decision to drag you guys along with us during this journey.

Wait, Who’s Us? Hi Pat!

Pat has worked with me since the dawn of time. Most recently, Pat was the Director of Development at Vacasa and helped them grow their tech department from a mere dozen people to over 200. Another important thing he did there was lead their DevOps efforts.

The Pat

With the increased experience and horse-power, Timberline development has tripled (exponential effect of collaboration). There have been a lot of gains in server-side reliability and I’m lucky to have him as a co-founder.

We’ve got some new features!

It’s been a while since a true update. Because we’ve been working hard making Timberline better in just about every way. Here are some of the highlights:

Push Notifications

The main reason to download the iOS and Android app is to get notified when someone is trying to talk to you on Timberline. Push notifications are currently only sent for direct chats, but mentions are coming soon and those can also trigger push notifications.

Call Menus

Call Menu’s allow you to setup a phone system for your team, business or even just yourself within seconds. You can set your call menus to go straight to an external phone number* or present them with a series of prompts to make sure you’re sending them in the right direction. A major useful feature of call menus are Queues.

Call Menu Editor v1.0

Teams

If you’ve worked in even a small team, sometimes it’s nice to be able to separate your communications by team. Teams allow you to create Team Channels, Voice Rooms and Queues. When a Queue has a call, it will show up on your side bar, and get out of the way when it’s not active.

Team chats and Voice Rooms are now organized by team in the side bar. Don’t need teams? No worries, the app works as it is by default, and you only see team functionality when you create or are added to teams.

In the very near future, you can even have team specific integrations and plugins.

Organized Channel Bar by Team

A Lot of Quality of Life Updates

The list is rather big, so we won’t go into every single thing, but some very basic and needed functions were added.

  • Better desktop notifications
  • Message editing and deleting
  • @ Mentions (including @ here and @ channel)
  • Public Organization Invite Links, And Invite by E-Mail and SMS

We Have a Mascot

We knew we needed a good mascot. If not for anyone else but ourselves. We are happy to introduce to you Timber, the Yeti:

Timber the Yeti

Though Timber doesn’t have the kind of presence a paper clip might, you’ll mostly see Timber hanging out in help screens and blogs.

What’s on the Horizon

There is still a lot to do, and even though we feel like it’s ready to be used and tested, there are still a lot of things that need to be added that we feel are fairly basic, while also adding a few things that are cool and unique to Timberline.

Just a few things we’re working on:

  • More actions in the phone system (webhooks and queues!)
  • Plugins
  • Meetings (Video, Screen Sharing)

Thank you!

So far, you guys have given so many positive comments and we’ve got a number of great pieces of feedback. We appreciate your support and hope you enjoy using the tool we’re building.

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Anthony Bertolo

Just a somebody running around being a nobody with a lot of somethings to do.