It’s strange- we used to think we were in the business of creating web apps.

What we sell isn’t bundled up javascript, and glossy buttons… We sell a process. We sell conceptual ways to work and organize. 

The thing to keep in mind is that people are actually buying into something completely different when you think they’re buying nothing more than your product. They’re buying…

... the attitude of your company.

... the belief that the process you preach is better than the alternatives.

... the experience of participating in your brand. Keep Reading

A few weeks ago we posted about the benefits of using hash tags to help keep track of important pieces of information in your Staction stream. Another little use of the hash tag is to mark the status of your various projects. This can be a godsend for teams that include a project manager. Keep Reading

An API for Staction. It’s a pretty exciting concept to us and one that many Staction users have been asking about for some time. With a public API, all sorts of things are possible – after all, the goal of an API is to give you access to your data from outside of an app. And there certainly is a lot of data in Staction. We’ve been putting in a lot of thought into what an API for Staction might look like. Keep Reading

Most of the time when you assign a task, you assign it to a specific person. This avoids duplicative work, and compartmentalizes accountability. Staction makes it easy; you just add their name as a tag to a todo post.

But did you know you could add more than one person? Keep Reading

Recently we’ve been thinking about how to more effectively use Staction; and, being programmers and designers our minds first turned towards graphical or programmatic methods that we could implement in order to speed up our work flow within the app. But in the end, the most graceful solution turned out to be the simplest one; and typically, the hardest one to see. Keep Reading

The excitement of launching your app has passed, the rush of emails and tweets and blog posts has subsided, and now you find yourself asking, “What do I do now?”. Maintaining the motivation and the desire to keep updating and improving your app can be really difficult. We’re going to share just a few techniques that have worked well for us during the development, launch and update cycles of both our web apps, Jumpchart and Staction. Clearly, these ideas may not suit your app or your workflow, so please read on with a grain of salt. But if one or more of these ideas do work for you, all the better! Keep Reading

Since launching our group communication tool, Staction, in January we’ve been blessed with quite a few nice words and plenty of user suggestions. We love hearing suggestions – it’s always good to hear how our users would change Staction because it gives us great insight into how people are using Staction.

Well, you asked and we listened: Today, we’ve upgraded the user and storage allowances on all Staction plans. 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

This morning, at approximately 11:30 am Eastern Time, both Jumpchart and Staction were unavailable for approximately 25 minutes. This was due to a complete outage of our hosting provider, Media Temple. The issue appears to have been caused by a problem at one of their data centers. According to their network status page, they are looking into the problem in detail and will post more details as they become available. Keep Reading

This morning we pushed out an update to Staction that added SSL security to the Super and Deluxe plans. If you are on either of these plans you can now turn SSL encryption on and off from the new Security tab on the accounts page. This is a free update for existing users – just something we thought our Super and Deluxe plans deserved – so you won’t see any change in your month to month billing.

SSL encryption does a very good job of protecting the data that you send through Staction; however, you will notice a slight decrease in the performance of Staction with SSL turned on, inherent to the encryption and decryption step added to every transfer. If the stuff you talk about on Staction is very private (and needs to stay that way) turn SSL security on. If it isn’t confidential we’d suggest leaving SSL turned off in order to keep Staction performing as fast as possible on your account.