The day has finally arrived. This morning we pushed a major update to Jumpchart, our collaborative content wireframing app. Jumpchart has a new face and a whole host of new tools in it’s utility belt! We’ve been working really hard over the last few months: Thinking, designing, building and living within the new Jumpchart and we’re really proud of the result.

If you’ve read through our Jumpchart preview posts (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) you’ll already know many of the changes that have come to the new Jumpchart, but not all of them. Let’s take a quick tour of some of the most exciting parts of the new Jumpchart. Keep Reading

If you’re an iPhone developer, you’re faced with a tough problem. You have to differentiate your app from the 25,000+ other apps in the app store, many of which solve the same problem that your creation purports to solve, and convince people that they really do want to spend their money (and their time) on your app.

Let’s face it, selling is hard. Really hard. You can try and list out features and benefits, or you can focus on the beautiful design of your product, or, if you’re Sandwich Dynamics, you can just make a lighthearted joke out of your new iPhone app as a way to introduce it and explain what it is and what it does.

The beauty of the video is that by the end of it you feel as if you are watching a couple friends goofing off. They are genuine and genuinely funny – which makes it much easier for you to open your wallet. Which illustrates an often forgotten, but tremendously important, point about selling. If you treat your customers as friends, instead of users, you’ll not only have an easier time making the original sale, but an easier time throughout the entire customer life cycle.

By now, you’ve probably heard that we’re in a global economic recession. The International Monetary Fund has projected that the world’s economy will shrink by around 1% in 2009. Around now you might be saying to yourself, “Well 1% isn’t that bad.”, but think about the scale of those numbers for a moment. Global GDP for 2008 amounts to around $69,490,000,000,000 (yes, that’s $69.5 Trillion), so one percent of that equates to, roughly, the combined GPD of Japan and India (who have the third and fourth largest economies in the world, respectively). No way around it, that’s a pretty bad prediction. But the doom and gloom spouted by 6 o’clock news can be a good thing. You’re a small business, not a mega-conglomerate car manufacturer or a giant bank who’s facing a balance sheet full of toxic assets, which means that this recession can work in your favor, you just have to know how to work it. Keep Reading

We’ve been teasing you with little bits and pieces of the new Jumpchart for long enough. It’s time to come clean and show you the whole picture; the full monty, as they say. This is the third post in series previewing the new Jumpchart, you can find the first two posts here: It’s all in the details: Preview of the new Jumpchart and More details on the new Jumpchart. So let’s get right to the point: Keep Reading

We’re constantly listening to what people are saying about our apps. Whether it’s on Twitter or someone’s personal blog we listen and, when we feel we can help, we try to respond. Besides being a great way to gauge public opinion, these conversations have given us quite a few good ideas for new features and blog topics and, for our users, its a great way to let them know that someone on the other end is listening.

Since releasing Staction in January we’ve been seeing more and more mentions of it on Twitter and, like the proud parents we are, we’d like to share a few with you. It makes us especially happy that a few of the tweets from users sound like they’re having great success at simplifying their workflow with Staction.

Keep Reading

Every day one of our great customers let us know about a cool blog article they’ve written about our products, and we think it’s time we gave something back.

If you’ve written, or are writing a blog article about Jumpchart, or Staction, let us know! Until next Friday the 20th, we’ll give you a $5 iTunes gift card for the effort, and the interest.

No obligation, and you don’t even have to give us A+ to qualify, -we just want to say thanks for spreading the word and caring about these apps we’ve been working on.

• Any blog article written after March 1 is eligible, – but even if you’ve let us know in the past, -drop us a line again.
• If you live in a country without iTunes, -let us know something else we can get you online of approx. $5 US value.
• Whether you give us a good review or not, -please write a quality article! We’re really easy judges, but we won’t reward those who make an obviously crap effort.

Thanks everyone. We worked really hard on these apps, and we want as many people as possible to know about them. Send an email to info@pasteinteractive.com if you want credit for an article.

From the beginning, Jumpchart has always been about making website planning quicker and easier. As designers and developers, planning has, historically, not been the most rewarding part of our jobs. Jumpchart was created out of a strong desire to ease the pain of planning. Originally, we built Jumpchart for ourselves and used it internally, but we quickly came to realize that there must be a lot of other people just like us. So we set Jumpchart free into the world, hoping that others would benefit from it just as we had, and hoping that we could create a viable source of revenue from it as well. Almost a year and a half later, it makes us incredibly proud that so many other studios have adopted Jumpchart for their website planning (12,000+ accounts and counting) and we’re happy to say that we are in fact turning a profit. But after 16 months, it’s time that we take Jumpchart to the next level. This is part two in our open ended series highlighting some of the changes coming to the new and improved Jumpchart. You can see the first post here. Keep Reading

One of the most powerful aspects of Jumpchart is that it allows you to share your Jumpcharts with the other people that are working on the project. From the client, to the designers, to the developers – everyone is on the same page, literally. After a recent chat with a user about sharing Jumpcharts we got to thinking about all the different ways that you can accomplish sharing in Jumpchart, a few of which you may not know about. So, without further ado, the 4 ways to share your Jumpchart: Keep Reading

It’s been 16 months since Jumpchart first launched and, so far, it’s been great. From the very beginning, Jumpchart was blessed by many great reviews and even more exciting to us is that Jumpchart has become such an integral part of so many people’s daily workflow (including our own). But now it’s time to take Jumpchart forward. For the last few months we’ve been working on a major refresh of Jumpchart: Internally, we’ve been using the new version for some time now and we’re really excited about the changes, both in terms of UI efficiency and in terms of the features that we’ve added. While we’re working out the final details and getting ready to send this update out into the world we thought it’d be nice to share some of the finer points of the new Jumpchart. Keep Reading

So you’ve finished it. Your web app is finally ready to send out into the world – your UI is beautiful and simple, your platform is powerful and flexible and you’ve already nailed down how you’re going to scale the thing when the users begin to overrun your current server setup. You throw the switch, the site is live and … no one is paying attention. So you post links on your Facebook page, your mySpace page and on your blog, you tweet about it repeatedly; and over the first month or so a few people sign up, but not that many, certainly not the server crushing tsunami you had envisioned. You’re faced with a tough question, How do you grow your customer base? How are you, the single developer or small company, with very limited marketing dollars going to raise awareness and build a following? Turns out, the answer to that question is a little more old fashioned than you might think, and it doesn’t cost a dime. Keep Reading