As we close out March, I wanted to share the latest new in terms of our progress. We’ve made some exciting progress this month, and, more importantly, we’re still on track to launch around the middle of the year. Right now, we’re targeting a public release in early July.
The Application
The most important aspect of all of this is obviously the application itself. We’re over the hump with most of the foundational code and interface elements, and we’re at a point where we can comfortably do daily releases. This is a huge turning point, because those daily releases are the small wins that help us stay on track and gauge how well we’re marching towards our live date. It’s also nice because it lets us see regular progress instead of drifting along towards a distant release date.
Name & Domain for the Application
We learned a little while back that we wouldn’t be able to use “Tracker” as the name for the application. Given that we’ve informally been using that name for as long as I can remember, it was a little disappointing, but we’ve finally settled into a new name that we love even more. We should be wrapping up the identity design in the next couple of weeks, and we’ll share all of the behind the scenes details of the design process when we’re done.
Public Chat
Earlier this month, we held a public chat for anyone and everyone to partake in an open-ended discussion about the issue tracker. The response was much better than I anticipated, and hopefully can we hold them more often. More importantly, it gave us a chance to understand what people were wondering about so we could keep you in the loop about where things are at. We compiled a list of popular questions and answers from the chat, just in case you missed it.
Just Around the Corner
We’ll be sharing the application’s name, logo, and domain in the coming weeks, and if all goes well, we’ll start sharing screenshots of working pages and share some behind the scenes looks at where we are in the development process. So, once we start to finish out pages, I’ll be able to share more examples of design decisions and their implications.
Don’t forget. If you’re into more frequent updates, we have a Next Update Twitter account where I’ll be posting regularly about some of our small wins.