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.

“People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it. The goal is not to do business with anybody who needs what you have. The goal is to do business with people who believe what you believe.” – Simon Sinek via Bobulate

This is so true. I think it’s especially true for someone who really loves your app, and doesn’t know how they ever did without it. For example, lovers of Jumpchart have to appreciate simplicity, and organization. Lovers of Staction have to understand the importance of communication with a minimal amount of clicks, and want the ability to do things quickly. We create apps as extensions of ourselves, knowing (hoping?) that others like us will get a kick out of them, and find them really useful.

If you’ve used Staction, you probably know we’re keyboard people. The mouse is great, but nothing flies quite as fast as our fingers on a keyboard. If you work in the web-dev industry, you probably feel the same. 

Outside of design related tasks, there’s very little that can be achieved with a mouse that can’t be achieved (usually faster) with a keyboard. Knowing your key commands improves the speed and fluency of interacting with your computer.

On that note, we thought we would share some of our favorite indispensable key commands. We bet you know a lot of them- but we also bet you don’t know all of them. So for the 5 seconds a day, 2.5 minutes a month, and 30.4 minutes a year we just saved you, you are most assuredly welcome.  Keep Reading

In Staction, get straight to the point and communicate directly with the person you need. By typing a name in the meta-information box, you’ll keep the conversation between you and whomever you specify, cutting through the general workflow talk.

Last week we announced the all new Staction AIR app. It was the first of many apps that we hope are built by us, and others using the Staction API.

Today we’re excited all over again to announce the Staction widget for the Mac OSX Dashboard.

Learn more about the new widget, and download it here.

When we built Staction we imagined it as a format and a platform as well as an app. The simple tagging system begs to be extended outside of the bowser.

The first step towards that goal was the Staction API. The second step was built from the first, and we’re very happy to announce it today: The Staction AIR app.

Now Staction can live on your desktop, outside of your browser. The app encompasses all the most important features of the Staction web app, as well as some desktop class features like keyboard shortcuts, and update notifications that we’re very excited for you to try out.

We hope this is only the first of many new ways to access your Staction account via the API. We’re working internally and with outside developers to make sure that we push the Staction experience as far as possible…

Learn more and download the Staction AIR app here.

Today it’s even easier to find people and projects in Staction. Now search is context specific to the page you’re viewing. Use it to quickly find projects on the projects page, or people on the people page.

In Staction, any custom view you make can be saved, and is dynamically updated as new content matches the criteria. Individual saved views even have their own RSS feeds.

Check out https://entermotion.staction.com/help/article/9/ for more ideas on how to make the most of your saved views.

Recently a user pointed out via Twitter that our Staction signup process could be smarter about how it handled errors. When you work on web apps, there are about a thousand things you should do better. Maybe a hundred thousand. You’ve worked so incredibly hard on the things you have done, that when someone points out the things you haven’t gotten to, it’s easy to get defensive. We hope that in the future we, and you, can remember this answer we gave to the user’s complaint:

“You’re right; we can do better.”

It’s the only proper answer to give…