Ministry Centered Technologies

I love featureless features…these are the features that you can’t really list on your website but these are the ones that differentiate between great products and good products. I just deployed a release of Planning Center that was full of featureless features. I will list the types of featureless features below:

• Bug Fixes: These are very critical, you can’t list this on your website but your clients will know by the quality of your site. And in a web application you should be able to keep your list of known bugs very close to zero.
• Performance: Lately we have been adding a lot of “real” features to planning center, well each feature has a performance cost to them, so over the last couple of days I have worked really hard to make the important tasks run really quick. People do not want to wait, no matter how many features they get for the wait. Side Note: All IE users rejoice I believe I have fixed all of the memory leaks that were happening, you should have a much better experience.
• Featureless Feature: Well I guess I don’t have a better name for this type of feature and the only way to explain it is an example: When you add a person to a plan you need to specify the category and position this person has. Usually a person’s position does not change so I had people asking me to make it so they would not have to do this. One suggestion would be in the edit person dialog, you would specify the default position and category for each ministry. But that seems like double the work, so what I decided to do is just look if you have scheduled this person before, if so, use the information from before. It’s quick, easy and requires no setting up, that is a great featureless feature.

Well that’s it. Have fun with the update.

Oh yeah, T-1 week to launch!!!! Wooohoooo

Jeff

Hey Everyone,

I just posted an update with some cool features. First off, I have redone all of the code behind the dialogs, now they are more responsive and there are hotkeys. The hotkeys are only available when you are editing a plan, if you can think of another place to put them please let me know. Here are the hotkeys as of now:

Control + Alt + H = Add A Header
Control + Alt + S = Add A Song
Control + Alt + I = Add An Item
Control + Alt + N = Add A Note
Control + Alt + P = Add A Person
Escape = Closes any open dialogs

Secondly, I have modified the file storage to use a new system that allows us to give better pricing on storage space. One thing you notice is that when you upload a file it will need to be transfered from our web server into the storage system so it might take a couple of seconds before it is available. This small drawback gives us the the ability to offer a lot more space (and we might increase it in the future as we see how it goes). You can see the new pricing at our sign-up page.

There are a bunch of other miscelaneous enhancements (like deleting a plan) and there will be a lot more later. Well that’s it for now.

In Him,

Jeff