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.

Complete Javascript Refactor

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.

Firefox on Windows

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.

New Things

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.