You’re good at what you do. But now there’s a tool to help make you great. If you’re a designer, programmer, copywriter, project manager, art director, or all of the above, you know how much work goes into planning a website. We originally created Jumpchart to help keep you organized — now Jumpchart does so much more than just organize content. Introducing Jumpchart 5. 

What’s New with Jumpchart.

Organization Boosting Interface. We’ve taken an extra step to help keep you more organized. We’ve moved some buttons, made content formatting easier, and put the features you use most right at your fingertips. Intuitiveness + Edginess = Jumpchart’s new interface.

Resources. The all-new resources section gives you an aerial view of all the files used across an entire project. Instead of being limited to viewing files on a per-page basis, you get an incredibly helpful at-a-glance view of your uploads. Read more about the new resources section.

Better Sitemap. The newly improved sitemap view is much easier on the eyes. Up against a versatile grid background, you can see the entire site in a clean, clear layout – including parent pages and subpages. Click any page to view the content in detail. This view is great for collaboration meetings and at-a-glance architecture analysis.

Homepage Organization. Your Jumpchart homepage is now organized visually. If you’ve uploaded a mockup, that mockup will serve as the project icon, helping you identify what’s what just by glancing at it. If you manage lots of projects, you won’t believe how such a simple thing can improve how you use Jumpchart.

Team Member Avatars. We’ve found it’s helpful to visually associate a team member when collaborating on Jumpchart projects. Now you can identify who’s commenting on which pages just by looking at their avatar, bringing communication full circle.

Content Formatting Options. You’ve always been able to format content inside Jumpchart – nothing new there. We improved how you move inside the content edit field; we took the most frequently used features of Jumpchart, and put them at the tips of your fingers.

Revised Plans and Pricing

We’ve added a new Freelancer plan that we think will be perfect for a lot of you, so be sure to check that out. In addition, if you pay in advance for a year, you get a discount (who doesn’t like discounts?).

We’re really psyched about releasing Jumpchart 5. We’ve been using it internally for a while now, and we can’t wait to hear how it improves your workflow. We’d love your feedback, so as you dive in and (we hope!) watch your productivity skyrocket, shoot us a note!

Check it out yourself.

• Redesigned look. More so than ever, Jumpchart feels like a place.

• Faster. Jumpchart is now 20-30% faster. Which means you are, too.

• Add multiple pages. Now you can “quick-add” multiple pages to the hierarchy of your site. Get more done by doing less.

• Redesigned navigation area. The navigation panel is faster and, well, better.

• New content insert bar. Formatting content has never been easier- or more convenient.

• Personal e-mail messages. Now you can add a personal touch to your project invitations.

• Keyboard shortcuts. A robust new set of shortcuts to make you more efficient.

• Better print style sheets. Sometimes it helps to feel the paper in your hands.

See it here!

We’ve sent it through testing, testing, and more testing. It’s ready- really ready- right here!

So what’s it all about?

Well, we thought the world needed a PM app that was just that- a box of essentials only, to help you keep your ducks in a row. What’s the point of your task manager- to organize your stuff, right? When you have to sift through settings, drop-downs, permissions and who only knows what else to organize your todos… it can quickly defeat the purpose.

Paprika is the love child of Simplicity and Efficiency.

It lets you stop worrying about organizing your todos, and start checking them off the list. It cuts away literally every single abstraction between you and what needs done. Quit fussing around, messing with sublists, fiddling with moving calendar dates and so on. Get back to work.

Okay, so that’s the heart of Paprika. Here’s what makes up the bones.

It’s Realistic.

We stripped away all the excess features, and made Paprika an extension of your thought process. You have a note, you type it up in one fell swoop, hit save, and get back to work.

In that one swoop, you can tag your note, date it or make it a todo. All the most obvious ways to keep track of your workflow, made possible by fluid movements of your hand along the keyboard.

• Use a hyphen at the beginning of a line to make it a todo.
• Add #important tags to keep your thought process in line with itself.
• Have a deadline on 7/14/10? If you typed it, it’s tracked.

It’s Text-Based.

Again, extreme simplicity works in your favor. Paprika uses simple textile, so you can always dump your information somewhere else, easily retrieve it, and effortlessly edit it. This fast and simple method of tracking your todos makes organization feel like second nature…

You can use it a couple different ways because of this. You can create one big long list, and track your notes with tags, dates, and todos, or you can separate your lists into individual projects and do the same thing.

• You can use simple Textile to format your text.

• When you edit a document, it’s plain text. When you save it, you get the formatted interactive equivalent.

• You can use a hyphen at the beginning of a line to make it a todo.

It’s a Great Complement.

Paprika can be integrated really easily into other areas of your workflow. For example, we use Staction to communicate with each other, and to track our projects. Now we create a single todo list, share it, attach it to its corresponding project in Staction, and collaboratively work toward completing the project. Assigning a task to someone is as easy as tagging their name, or initials. Then, when the person to which the todo is assigned has completed the task, they can check it off so everyone knows it’s done. The Paprika list can be edited along the way- adding todos as they come up.

Sharing is just as easy. When you’re in edit mode, a simple link shows you whether or not the project is being shared, and even provides a URL to share it with. If you want to stop sharing, click the link and it becomes private once again. It’s a natural process.

It’s FREE.

That’s right, free. In it’s current state, you can have Paprika for no charge whatsoever. As with all our apps, there will be updates, and feature additions- which will be available for a fee later on.

We know this app isn’t going to be for everyone- and that’s okay. But for those who value simplicity in it’s most effective form, we think you’re going to love it.

Sign up for Paprika!

• The Idea.
• The Name.
• One Button.
• Panicky Sweat.
• Beta Testing.

In the spirit of the above mentioned series, we thought we’d add one more piece about the single moment we realized we needed Paprika.

Simply put, it all began with a wish. I think a lot of apps are born this way, or at least the ideas for them. Somewhere, someone thinks to themselves: “I wish there was a tool that let me do this more easily.” That person thinks about how much this app would positively affect their productivity, and how they could integrate it into their workflow. Research is done, and when it appears there’s nothing out there exactly like the conceptual application, the excitement begins because development is looming in the future… but let’s go back to the wish part.

In my opinion, there are two types of people: those who don’t realize they need something until they already have it, and those who create something because they realize they need it.

Personally, I’m the first type. I love it when an app is an extension of my thought process- but I’m not sure I would have figured out my need for it on my own. I work with the second type of people, though, and I’m starstruck when I watch them think, and follow the progress of their thoughts.

If you’re an app developer, wishes take on a whole new meaning. Although the connotation of the word implies that wishes are relatively unattainable (that’s why you’re wishing to begin with), developers have the power to make it happen. It’s a mindset I think more people should adopt. I can boil it down to this: nothing is impossible.

So this wish for Paprika came from dissatisfaction- failure to find a tool that was an extension of the way we already thought. We (and by we, I mean Paste- collectively) knew if we were unhappy, chances were others were unhappy, too. The dissatisfaction led to the wish, which led to the research, which led to the excitement, which led to the work, which brought us Paprika.

Now if we could just find a genie to grant us the other three wishes we don’t have time for…