Archive for the ‘Staction’ Category

Happy Holidays!

Hey everyone! Once again the holiday break is upon us. It’s been an amazing year, but truth be told we’re ready for some good old fashioned downtime. We’ll be out of the office from December 24th until January 5th. Our response time might be a bit slower than usual during the break, so thank you for your understanding.

If you have an emergency during that time, though, just shoot us an e-mail – we’ll do our best to get you taken care of as quickly as we can.

Happy Holidays!

- Paste

WIP

Joe 07/17/14
Staction

Screen Shot 2014-07-17 at 1.30.44 PM

Staction – A History

Joe 06/19/14
Staction

Let’s cut back to 2008. 37 Signals had been on a productivity march unprecedented in web application development. They were the de-facto standard in most web apps, as well as the voice behind how the new web studio worked.

37s

We drank the Kool-Aid more deeply than most. We made our first foray into remote workers, our first pushback against meetings, and a concerted effort into being a next generation development studio. All of this was built on the back of 37s apps.

Sure, some of us seemed to struggle with the organization of the apps. Sure, the remote workers among us always felt slightly more isolated than the rest. Sure we split our time between multiple browser windows always wondering what was happening in the other.

We were logging our time in one app, chatting in another, keeping track of most things in another app, but a few others in another app still. Finally we were doing the bulk of our work in Jumpchart, and feeling even more disconnected for it.

Un/luckily we hit a relatively slow period in our design studio workflow, and we decided to see what we could do to fix the problem.

We started with chat, and built on top of that. We wanted to keep the keyboard central to the experience, and push the mouse to the secondary experience. (maybe because we’re primarily programmers?) What eventually evolved was “Staction” —a weirdly named app that was a sort of Twitter that also allowed you to tag jobs, and todos right there in the stream of the chat.

Early Staction mockup

No joke; Our workflow changed overnight. We were so much more connected, so much faster, and honestly, so much happier. Staction was our water cooler. Our meeting room. Our buddy chat.

Staction sales site

As much as we loved it, Staction was also a commercial failure, never making more than a few thousand dollars a month. We still use it today, but it’s apparent that it is on it’s last leg. Slower, weirder, and more out of tune with the modern web all the time.

Change the world?

Despite our effort to change world, Basecamp is still a world dominating force, and Staction is an aging novelty. Why? We built Staction for nerds. That’s not to say a niche product cannot be successful, it can! but it needs a unique marketing pitch, and a unique process to sell. We built a niche product, and marketed it like a mass market product.

So of course the history is written. Basecamp owns the world of productivity, so much that 37S is changing their name to that of their most successful product. Staction never owned a fraction of a percent of the mass market… But we still cannot give the stupid thing up. Here are a few reasons why:

  • We hate switching between apps, tabs, and keyboard to mouse.
  • Basecamp, apologies to the king of the world, feels like talking to a filing cabinet.
  • Speed.
  • We need to log time as we work, not as yet another thing to do.

So we continue to try out Basecamp, and a myriad of other apps. All brilliant at some facet of group work or more, but even more-so deficient in the next. And so we continue to use an app that we haven’t found time to update much since 2010 for our day-to-day.

Cut to today

We’ve been actively working on a new version of Staction for quite a few months now. It’s been a wild mess, and we’re having a blast digging into it. We’ve already got one failed demo under our belt, and we’ve started in on a few new exciting rounds of mockups. Maybe this is headed nowhere, but we want to share some of our progress with you.

Showing people your half baked ideas is terrifying really. It’s going to be great!

Something that didn’t happen.

Joe 06/18/14
Staction

For almost a year now we’ve been experimenting with the idea of resurrecting Staction. This is a look at one of the mockups that never went anywhere. It had some potential.

Staction-2-mock

Do it Better.

Creating something totally, completely, brand spanking new is sometimes, well… rocket science.

I don’t think that means we should quit working our tails off to create the best web app or website just because something similar has been done before. I do think it means, though, that we should not feel defeated because we’re working with ideas that existed before us.

We knew we were reinventing the wheel to some extent when Jumpchart was born. Fact: there are other website organization tools out there. Same thing with Staction and Paprika. But we felt we could do it better. We didn’t look at wheel reinvention as a negative. Instead, we recognized how important it is in the grand scheme of things. Versions are what get us to the best.

I mean think about it. Writers don’t publish an unfinished book. Architects don’t let tenants move in before the building is done. Hundreds of logos are sketched before a winner is chosen. There are steps to finishing a project, and many versions are created along the way.

Sixty years from now when we’re all old and wrinkly, there could be a revolutionized way of organizing website content that works for virtually everyone. And that’s great – it truly is.

All we hope is that Jumpchart somehow played a small part in its existence.

Don’t Let Brand Loyalty Screw You.

It feels like I’m seeing it more and more. Why do companies offer shiny, sparkly, drool-worthy deals to brand new customers, and those of us who have stuck around for years get little more than “gee, thanks?”

I’ll admit, I’m bitter about my recent experience with my cable company, but it’s opened my eyes. For years at my house we’ve been putting up with crap like intermittent service during big games, a stubborn DVR box that works only when the stars are perfectly aligned, missed recordings because of “unknown technical difficulties” and only the rarest of opportunities to talk to a real human being when we need help. Not to mentioned we get absolutely zero monetary refunds to cover our emotional damages from getting so worked up. When we finally called to find out how we can get more for our money (and threaten to take it elsewhere), we were not-so-politely told deals like that are stubbornly reserved for new customers only. I didn’t feel so much shocked as I did betrayed.

I Would Like Some Cheese with My Whine, Please.

Alright, I’m just going to say it. What about me?

I’ve paid for their service for years, and even sent them business a couple times. I trusted them to give me the best quality possible, and haven’t cancelled our account when they’ve fallen short on their promises. And then when I so desperately need them to come through for me, they made me feel like I was two inches tall and not worth their time. #bigcompanyfail Keep Reading

Staction: After the Job is Done.

Joe 08/27/10
Staction

Occasionally we publish support emails on the blog. Usually if one person asks, – more people want to know, but just haven’t asked yet.

QUESTION: (referring to the boss)”...The time entry feature will be great for us, but he will want to know if can it be integrated into his billing process. Basically, does it have the ability to go beyond project communication and management to reporting and billing?”

ANSWER:
I think a lot of this answer depends on your particular workflow, and tools. Here are a few random thoughts that might help:

Keep Reading

Making Sessions Smarter

Staction SessionsStaction is built in PHP. For all it’s occasional syntax weirdness, it is an amazingly flexible and liberating language. PHP does so many things incredibly well, and we’re big fans.

One thing however that it’s not so great at (in our opinion) is session management. The default garbage collector from PHP isn’t perfect, and consistently removes session files that it shouldn’t, almost totally ignoring whatever setting you have for expiration time. It’s frustrating for us, and often causes untimely logouts for our users.

A few weeks ago we started working on a bespoke database driven session system for Staction. The first part came together much easier, and better than we expected. But we still had a problem. After launching the new programming on our dev server we were still getting booted and timed out. Or more to the point, I(Joe) was still getting booted out.

I’m a long time Safari user, and Brian, who was working on the programming, is on the Chrome side of life. Not everyone here was having the problem on Safari, so we started thinking maybe it was just me. After resetting Safari totally, the problem still persisted. Brian, who had also started using Safari as a daily browser for testing, started experiencing the problems, too.

Lots of research, and trial-and-error later we wound up here: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=12078357 -10 pages long of people with the exact same problem. Safari occasionally, and arbitrarily sends a new HTTP header without any session information. So after our WTF moment, we started thinking of a workaround.

After a couple other ideas that were non-starters, now once in every 50 calls (approx.) we regenerate the session data, duplicating it into a new session, wiping out the old data and sending the browser a new cookie.

We’re incredibly happy to tell you that since making that change we haven’t been logged out once on our dev server. On Safari, or any other browser.

This morning we pushed out the new session management programming to all Staction accounts. We hope to push it to all the other apps in the next couple weeks.

As we always like to learn from an experience, here are our takeaways:

  • Don’t always assume the problem is with what you’re doing. Check external factors too.
  • When you start to work on solving a problem, be prepared for the problem to evolve as you learn more about it.
  • Make time for solving the little problems with your app. There is nothing glamorous or exciting about improving our session management programming. We can’t say “With sessions that actually keep you logged on!” on our sales site. But we think improving the foundations for these things helps make the app more satisfactory to use. You’ve got to do them, even if it would be more fun to work on email-in on Paprika, or new Jumpchart import/export features.

Input from a User.

We recently received the following e-mail from a curious user about how we, and other people use Paprika:

“I’ve been a staction user for a while now, and I started to “get” the flow of using staction after a few days. Keep Reading

The All-New Staction Web App.

By far our most requested feature on Staction has been an iPhone optimized version. I think a lot of users may have just considered us obstinate for not having one sooner. It seems like such a small thing to do… Shrink the interface, and call it good.

Unfortunately, we had a big problem. The Staction website is designed to be used with a keyboard. The whole application is built around using the mouse as little as possible. But on the iPhone the keyboard is, well, small. Using a tiny keyboard to bang out tags, and a clunky half-visible auto-completer just wasn’t the experience we wanted to give our users. It wasn’t the experience we wanted for ourselves… It just wasn’t great, – believe us, we tried it.

After lots of experimenting, eventually we realized we had to rely on touching and scrolling for tag input. Like with lots of ideas, -it seems quite obvious looking back.

As of Today

As of today, all of our paid accounts have access to the Staction web app. Simply visit your normal account URL, and you’ll be directed to the optimized site. (You can still access the regular site if you like.)

Once logged in, you’ll have access to all the most commonly used features of Staction. Creating todos, logging time, and keeping up with your teammates.

Make sure to tap “+” and add Staction to your home screen, – it works really well that way.

If you want to see the web app, but don’t have an iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad you can visit your normal account URL and add a /m at the end like this:

http://accountname.staction.com/m

We think you’re really going to like the web app experience. In some ways it’s the best Staction experience yet.

Why Not the Free Account?

We’re going to be honest in a way that I don’t think most companies would. We really hope that the web app drives upgrades for us. By far the biggest portion of Staction users are on the free account. It seems that when we created our plans for Staction, we gave away too much on the low end.

It’s no problem, -we’re happy to have our users, on any account that fits their needs. But we do have to make money to keep our jobs!

Talking over the problem, we came up with a plan that we hope will make sense to you. As we add new features to our apps, you’ll probably see most of them added only to the paid accounts at first. As we recoup the cost of our development time through the upgrades that the features drive, we hope to trickle the features down to the free accounts as well.

We’re hoping this is a sustainable system that can keep everyone happy. Paid accounts just get the features a bit sooner than everyone else. We hope you’ll think it makes as much sense as we do.

Paste Interactive is a small app studio that makes cool, smart tools to help next generation workers work better, simpler, and faster.
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