We're Looking Good

by Ted on July 30, 2008 at 1:07 AM

It is always amazing how quickly time can fly. July is almost completely gone. My plans for a small mid-month release morphed into a grand vision for a major end of month release. Today we witness the achievement of that milestone. We have an amazing and hard-working team that has continued to do wonderful work.

The first thing you will notice is that the entire site has been visually refreshed. Our goal in this was to make the site more visually stimulating and intuitive. We've redesigned the footer of every page to include the latest news and links to information about the site and the people behind it. Each page has its own custom sub-header with a large icon to help more clearly identify the page.

The next thing you should notice is the brand new home page. Previously this was identical to your profile page, but we've re-organized it a little so that it is a bit more useful. In addition to your personal and published stacks lists we've added a customized list of the latest site activity. You can find this list on the right hand side of your home page.

If you look at the navigation bar that is at the top of every page, you will notice that the Community tab is missing and in its place is a direct link to this blog and a new Help section. Although we're working hard to make TileStack as easy to use and understand as possible, we recognize that people still need to be able to go some place for help.

Our help section is divided into two parts. The first is the highly requested and much needed documentation. Although it isn't complete yet, it's complete enough to start being useful. Also, all of the help topics are indexed for fast searching.

The second part of the help section is our "Question and Answer" section. If you can't find what you need in the help topics, then you can search through all the questions we have been asked about the site, and see what we and other community members have said in response to those questions. If you still can't find what you need, then feel free to ask a new question, and we'll get back with you as soon as we can.

If that's not enough for you, we've also improved our iPhone/iPod Touch interface, enhanced the embedding support, added the ability to download any published stack as a Mac OS X Dashboard widget (video coming soon), and made several improvements to the TileStack player and Speak language.

All in all, we think this is a pretty compelling release. We think you're going to like it so much that you'll want to tell your friends. Over the next few days we're going to be giving all of our registered users invite codes to give to their friends. When you log in, there should be a link next to your display name at the top of the page indicating how many invites you have left. Clicking the link will show you the codes, and give you a place to enter your friends' emails directly.

Also, we're on Twitter so go follow @tilestack, @gertzen, @tedchoward, @robrohan, and @jakemarsh (if you're not already). We're also on Facebook and we've been known to hang out from time to time in #tilestack at irc.freenode.net.