Funny thing is, even now that we're ready, things are still coming up. Or down, rather. The company hosting our server has frequent attacks to its network, and tonight just had to be one of those times. But within the next 24 hours, http://classvibe.com/ will finally have something to show besides a lame splash page.
We've been working on the code since mid-October; planning the code's architecture started months before that, and the dream started over a year ago. It has all come along wonderfully in the last month or two, thanks to the help of our growing development team. And a lot of Ryan Adams.
So why are we in beta? Because the site only barely touches our vision of it. We decided to start with the key feature of the site: the Editor, an application for taking notes in class. With that came the Class List, a way to store and organize your classes. Even so, they are both only a start of what they will be.
The point of a beta is to discover things about our site that we wouldn't on our own, by letting normal users try things out. Things will probably break. There will probably be parts of the site that are ugly, or that don't work as well as they should, or that don't work at all even. We beg that you'll email us or use the Feedback link on the site to let us know about those things! The beta testing period is useless without the feedback of our users.
As a note on the ugliness issue, the site will perform best when viewed with a standards-compliant browser such as Firefox. IE7 isn't exactly standards-compliant, but it's better than IE6, and it works fairly well, other than some rendering issues that we still need to account for. Our site looks stellar in Safari 3. Opera 9.26 chokes, but the 9.50 beta works well. Some font sizing issues cause some problems when run from Linux or OSX, but those will be ironed out soon.
So, have fun, use the site, try to break things, and let us know what we're doing right or wrong! And look forward to these features that'll be coming down the road:
- A calendar that tracks when you have notes created, let's you import your personal calendar, and shows upcoming events for your school
- A collaborative center that will let you chat with your classmates, send notes to friends, and schedule online study groups
- Predictive editing in the Editor app
- Resizable cards
2 comments:
Hi, I am an adult student at Midway College studying CIS Management so I will use your site this semester to see if I can break it this semester. I am also looking for experience in this are so if you need any help I can work in the evenings for pretty cheap since I have a good job at Toyota. I'll keep in touch about your Beta version.
Thanks! Let us know if you run into any problems. And keep an eye out for some big changes in the next couple of weeks, before the fall semester.
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