We’ve thought about it and the current free trial/paid model isn’t working. We think it’s too restrictive and too much of a barrier to entry. Soon we’re going to be relaxing the model to the point where using Campus Notes for free is a realistic option.
Phew! Campus Notes 1.0 is out the door.
While the first few months of Campus Notes development was strong we found ourselves stuck in the long tail of application development. The last 10% taking 90% of the time. Fangel had the fantastic idea of making a one weekend sprint to the finish line with the goal of releasing Sunday night. It worked.
It’s fantastic to finally be able to share our months of hard work with everyone.
Campus Notes is far from finished. Probably the best thing about getting a release out the door is that it’s let off the pressure and allows us to start working through the list of great ideas we’ve got for future features. First on our (huge) list of future plans is the publication of our API.
That’s it, try it out, enjoy.
Work is coming along nicely. Only a few people (as expected) are actively testing and submitting bugs at Get Satisfaction but they’re doing an amazing and thorough job. This morning I sent out more invitations to those who’ve signed up since we first released the beta. This post is to let you know what we’ve been doing.
The nature of the Campus Notes UI means the huge majority of our codebase is made of Javascript. Our file that controlled the UI grew quickly, soon got out of control and became a real chore to maintain. Last weekend Fangel did a complete Javascript overhaul separating everything into it’s own class and file. This is a huge deal not only to us (because it makes our lives easier and more enjoyable) but because now it’s a million times quicker for us to debug problems and add features. That means a better application for you, sooner.
One of the many reasons I chose to only support Firefox and Safari was that we’d theoretically be able to develop, test and launch the site without having to boot a Windows machine (or launch it in VMWare). Turns out this isn’t the case and that Firefox on Windows is very different to Firefox on OS X. So different in fact that basic functionality in Campus Notes, like selecting a note from the list and having it display in the right pane simply doesn’t work, rendering the whole application pretty useless. We know about this.
We’re not going to switch to supporting Safari only, we’re going to fix our compatibility issues with Firefox on Windows but quite frankly, it sucks, so it might take a little while.
We’ve squash a bunch of bugs but along the way a few new features have been added too. Download functionality was added to shared notes before realising that it’d be pretty handy for the rest of your notes too, so it’s also been added there. Files download in plain text with Markdown formatting.
The shared icon in the header of individual notes now links to that shared note at your public shared notes. No longer do you need to back of out the main application screen and find an individual shared note in the shared note’s list, you can just click the shared note icon in the note’s header.
A whole new dialog system has been created so we can generate better, more clear confirmation dialogs and alert messages. Try deleting something to see how they look.
That’s it. We’re still working, you’re still helping us. Again, you can sign up to try the beta, we’re sending out invitations pretty regularly.
I’ve just run the script that takes your email addresses, turns them into a username, creates a random password and sends you an email about it. You can login with these details at beta.getcampusnotes.com. If you haven’t already signed up for the beta, it’s not too late, we’ll be sending out new test accounts pretty much daily until the 1.0 provided people are still signing up. We’ve created a shared note that we’ll update with some known bugs but the majority of our support will be handled at GetSatisfaction where you can report problems, ask questions and provide general feedback.
Follow us on Twitter too where we’ll be talking about the problems we find with the beta and what we’ve done to fix them. Bigger stuff will be reported here on the blog.
I think that’s it for now, thanks for helping us make a better 1.0!
We are very, very, like-end-of-this-week close to sharing our private beta with those people who have signed up to help us test Campus Notes before it’s let out in the wild. Once we’re ready we’ll be automatically creating accounts for our testers and we’ll send you your login information. Here’s a bit of information about how the beta will be run.
All our bug reports, feature suggestions, questions and general feedback will be handled through our account at Get Satisfaction. There’s a link to it in the Campus Notes header once you login.
As your information comes in we’ll be making constant changes to the application. So things that two days ago might not have worked quite right might now be working fine and things that once worked might now be broken. Let us know and continue trying different things!
Don’t be afraid to give give us feedback about anything, no matter how small. Try to break things, tell us when you’re able to break it. It’s what this test is all about. Be sure to give us information about your browser and version too if you think it’s important. Remember that Campus Notes only supports the latest versions of Safari and Firefox.
The Help page should clearly explain any function you’re not sure about. Feel free to give us some feedback on that too.
If you have signed up for the beta, thanks! Your help is valuable to us. If you haven’t then what are you waiting for?
Update: I’ve just set up a Twitter account for Campus Notes. It should work really well for publicising small site updates we make during the beta so you all know what’s changing and what’s being fixed.
I don’t even know how long ago it was that I started work on Campus Notes. It’s not the kind of project that has timelines, deadlines, milestones, functional requirements, acceptance criteria or any kind of planning at all. That is, it’s a good project. We’re getting as much done with the time we have and making decisions along the way, dealing with problems when we face them. It’s really starting to gain some momentum now and I’ve had a few people asking “what’s going on?” Here’s what.
Our number of line additions and deletions over time illustrates our momentum nicely.
For me, this past week has been all about refinement of stuff that’s already been built. That’s making the site faster, reducing HTTP requests, re-factoring Javascript, pulling out CSS that’s no longer used and grouping that which is used often. I’ve also been working on support pages like the home page and basic help manual. It’s a great feeling getting to this stage, making what works, work better.
As for Mr Fangel, he’s doing an amazing job creating the Campus Notes API and hooking it up to our UI. It’s an API so good that as soon as we can write some documentation it’ll go public so other developers can write applications that use Campus Notes data. Some of his work is also flowing back into the Javascript and PHP OAuth libraries.
Operating from opposite sides of the globe means we don’t get a lot of time to chat which turns out to be a quite an advantage. Each morning we spend a few minutes dealing with overnight discussion on Basecamp and then we get on with doing real work. We spend less time arguing about whether or not something is a good idea and more time just building it, using it and throwing it out if it’s not right.
Since early this week the UI design and behaviour is complete, support pages like the manual, homepage, blog, etc. are complete. File uploads and most pulling and pushing to the database is complete. There’s not much more to do.
Our loose plan was to make a private beta that, as far as me and Fangel are concerned, is a complete 1.0. Then we’d run a very small (by typical web app standards) private beta which would allow us to field test for a couple of weeks and hopefully would pick up all the things we missed.
Fangel goes away next week which will give me a great chance to really tighten the screws while nothing big is getting added.
It’s not far off. What you should do now is head over to getcampusnotes.com, sign up to be a beta tester and help us spit shine Campus Notes starting in a week or two.
Campus Notes has been in development for a few months now so sometimes I forget that no one has any idea what the app looks like or how it functions yet. Even though there’s a screenshot right there on the home page, I forget that no one’s seen that yet either. So I should add to the little blurb we have in the blog sidebar and our temporary homepage to give people a better idea of what we’re actually doing.
It’s a web application for managing school stuff. We’ve tried to make the experience very much like a desktop application as far as the interface goes but with the advantages of a web application. There’s lots of desktopisms: a three pane, full browser window UI with a source list, note list and then the note view, drag and drop for organisation and ordering, no browser reloads, inline item addition, etc.
Once you login just one screen makes up what you’ll interact with 90% of the time. In the source list are semesters, each broken down into classes as well as folders for organisation outside of the class structure. Depending on what you have selected in the source list, notes will be displayed in the middle column. Click one of them and it’s displayed on the right. Click the note to edit it. It sounds more complicated than it is. It works like any desktop application of this style you’ve used before.
It’s very much like the OS X application Schoolhouse which I desperately wanted to use for a long time but couldn’t because it was just too buggy. Our 1.0 set of features has a much smaller scope than Schoolhouse but the same basic idea, one place for students to keep their class notes, assignments and files.
Campus Notes exists to scratch our own itch.
By the time I graduated I’d tried many different note taking applications, including pen and paper, never finding an ideal solution.
Writing with pen and paper was laborious, slow and I could barely read my own writing. I couldn’t share what I’d written with others, copy my notes or reorganise them. Paper isn’t known for it’s hard wearing qualities either. As a computing student I felt like I was in the stone age.
When I first came across Schoolhouse I thought I’d hit the jackpot. It had a lot more than I needed, like management of individual tasks, people and grades but generally it was fantastic. Until it became clear how buggy it was, multiple times a day it’d crash on something like a window resize or the UI would leave artefacts all over. I hoped for bug fix updates but they never came (and still haven’t).
By the end I was using YoJimbo to manage my school stuff. It was great in that it automatically syncs with MobileMe so I’d have up to date content across my two computers. It’s customisable so while it wasn’t specifically made for class notes and assignments, I could make it act like it was. The problem with YoJimbo was that because it was a desktop application that only synced with MobileMe, I couldn’t access my data in a computer lab or on friend’s computers and short of exporting the note and attaching it to an email, there was no easy way to share what I’d written.
So that brings us to Campus Notes. It solves those problems. It’s stable, it’s made for students, there’s no need to sync because all your data is in a central repository, you can access your data on any computer with an internet connection, it’s super easy to organise and share the stuff you’re recording.
Despite not having a 1.0 release or a private beta or further still, a public beta, we have a blog and that’s what makes Campus Notes a legitimate endeavour. First things first, a bit of an introduction.
While we’ve just got a blog, the project is actually a pretty long way along. We don’t want to spend all our time (or even a significant amount of our time) talking about and hyping a project that’s not released yet. In a couple of weeks we’ll start a private beta with hopefully around 50 or 100 users. We’ll take another couple of weeks to iron out all the bugs and then we’ll get it out the door.
My name’s Jim Whimpey. I’ve run a blog called Valhalla Island for a while now. I’m a fresh university graduate from Southern Queensland in Australia. My job on Campus Notes is devising the UI for everything, marking them up, styling them and making them do some basic things with jQuery.
My partner is Morten Fangel, his programming skill picks up where mine ends and just keeps going. He’s a CS student at the University of Copenhagen.
Your only option is signing up to be notified when we launch. Soon we’ll create another mailing list for potential beta testers. Or I’ll add the option to also sign up for the beta on the current form. Haven’t decided yet.
Update
I did decide to add a checkbox to the mailing list form so you can now head over to getcampusnotes.com to sign up for the launch and for the beta in one fell swoop.
