Yesterday I posted an article on our main weblog that talks about some of the reasons behind goplan’s slow launch, and about the benefits of taking things easy.

We are fans of the “release early, release often” model of agile development, and live by it. Small numbers means measurable feedback and quick response. By limiting ourselves to around 250 users for the first week, we managed to get the right feedback and act upon it, by releasing daily updates to our feature set and fixing the issues we encountered along the way. That made people happy, and one happy planner beats a few thousand unsatisfied users.

Click here to read the whole article.

It’s been a week since we opened our public invitation phase on Goplan, and even though we haven’t invited that many people in yet, we do have quite a few passionate users. People who either email or send feedback (through the application itself) saying how much (or how little) they like what we’ve been doing.

But I wanted to extend the question to the rest of you following the blog and using Goplan. What do you think of it now? And more importantly, how is it helping you manage your life and your projects? You don’t need to leave a reply if you don’t want to, but if you have something to say, do get in touch.

We took the downtime in the last hour to update the live code to the latest stable revision, and with it came a couple of new features that some people will be interested in. These are an improved file display (see the screenshot below) and preliminary printing support, for those of you who need to keep physical copies of your project’s updates.

We’re doing some necessary maintenance work on the servers today, which means Goplan will be down for about one hour from 1PM to around 2:30PM PST (21:30 to 22:30 GMT). We’ll keep you updated on the news.

Update: Okay, we finished up 15 minutes earlier, and everything turned out fine. We did some big changes behind the scenes, so let us know if you find any kind of unexpected behavior. Have fun during the weekend!

In the last couple of days, we’ve been working on fixing some outstanding issues (again, thanks for the feedback, everyone) and adding some new features that were missing out. If you want the full details on what’s changed and will change soon, keep reading:

• Calendar was rebuilt. Now supports Microformats and iCalendar integration.
• RSS feeds now work properly on any feed reader
• Dates are now easier to insert all across the application
• Some user interface quirks were fixed

Feature plans, Microformats, developer API

Feature plans: We’re working on improving the experience for file and asset management, in order to make it easier for you to share files with your colleagues and friends in your projects. We’re also working on features that’ll be very useful to software developers, but we’ll get to those in a future post. Oh, and yes, IE support is coming.

Microformats: I’d like to take some time to highlight the icalendar integration and microformats support. We’ve been fans of the Microformats project for quite a while, and are working on bringing Microformat compability for events (in the calendar, as well as due tasks) and people. This allows us to provide developers with more ways to export project-related data. For more information on microformats, see the microformats project homepage.

API: We’re working in a developer API in order for you developers out there to build applications (web or desktop based) that integrate with Goplan’s functionality. If you’re a software developer working in the areas of collaboration, project management or asset management, get in touch - we want to hear from you.

24 more hours are in, and a bunch of updates were issues about one hour ago, based on Bug reports and feedback we’ve been getting (thanks to everyone who’s been sending those in). Here are some of the major updates:

• General: Feedback message input fields are now cleared on submit
• General: Updated error messages and buttons for consistency
• General: Simplified functionality in several places
• Notes: Users with permission to create notes can now delete any note as well
• Calendar: Calendar now shows month and year in the title
• Calendar: Tasks with due date are now shown in the calendar
• Calendar: Fixed missing menu items in the calendar menu
• Tasks: Fixed bug in task screen where editing a task category broke quick task creation
• Tickets: Ticket view now has a proper title screen
• Chat: Chat now shows day updates
• Files: Browsers based on khtml (Konqueror) don’t crash on file upload anymore

As always, use the “Send feedback” link on your top menu to send us bug features, suggestions, or just your opinion on what we’re doing right or wrong. Thanks in advance. There will be more updates soon, including news on the future pricing model and major planned features.

… we just don’t like it much.

It took a while but today we got an email about how broken the Goplan layout is on Internet Explorer 6. Trust us, we already knew. Two things back our decision not to care (much) about the browser during these first days:

• Internet Explorer 6 - which is about to be replaced by its 7th major release - has very grave bugs in terms of standards support. And we prefer standards over hacks (at least until we publicly launch)
• There are numerous better alternatives to IE, with far better standards support. I have a strong opinion about this because I’ve worked with standards (and promoting them) for a long time. My bottom line is, get Firefox.

Now, this doesn’t mean we won’t be supporting IE soon - we will. It just means we recommend Firefox (or any other standards-compliant browser) for a much better experience with Goplan, and for secure browsing everywhere else.

So the first 24 hours are gone, and boy was today a great day. We got a lot of feedback, a lot of clever uses of our features, and lots of people asking for invites (you all went into the queue, don’t worry - your time will come).

It was also a time for a lot of code updates and bug fixes (1 day of testing beats 2 months of development - keep that in mind if you launch applications), and this was the result:

• Clear quick task form on submit
• Project timezone now defaults to the users’
• Fixed profile creation without a name
• Project Settings menu item was missing from users list
• Alias URL in project creation page is now correct
• Timeline - Chat link was broken
• Timeline - Deleted task links were broken
• Timeline – Link to “Project Created” was broken
• Hash has been renamed to invite code
• Login has been replaced with “E-mail” in the login box
• Ticket description is now properly escaped
• Changing your access password now gives feedback
• Alias length is validated in the same request that validates its uniqueness
• “Add users” is now in the user list
• Timestamps now shows the correct value for all timezones
• Blog comment count is now working
• Support system
• Changing a project features gives feedback
• Chat actions now visible: view log, download log and delete chat room
• Login screen error message
• Increased note input box

This brings our known issues down to near 0. More importantly, there’s a new link on your header when you’re logged in to leave feedback messages, so please, do use it whenever you have a bug to report or a suggestion to present. If today wasn’t a proof that we are listening and want you to help us build a great product, nothing is.

Thank you, and remember to have fun!