New Feature | Editable Attendee Name

Just a small change which we hope you'll find useful, you can now edit an attendee's name after its been created.

We've also removed the helper panel at the top of the calendar page which showed the first day everyone was available.  We decided this wasn't giving much value since its just as easy to scan the column headings to see the first one with nobody set to busy.  Also the first day everyone is free might not necessarily be the best day to meet up.  

I intend to write a further blog post to elaborate on this but any thoughts in the mean time please let us know.

New Homepage Design

Today we've updated the look and feel of the Meetifyr homepage and made a couple of minor changes to other pages.

The idea was to get rid of clutter on the page and give a more professional look.  We've removed the unnecessary 'marketing' text and put a focus on getting users to actually try the app to see if they like it.  We hope you like it.

New Features | Preferred Days and Last Updated

There's been a couple of changes to Meetifyr recently, the biggest of which is the ability for an attendee to specify a day as 'preferred'.  This allows them to say "although I'm free for this event on several days, these are the days that suit me best'.

So for a particular day an attendee can be either one of three states; Busy, Free, Free + Preferred.  The idea is that adding this extra option will better enable people to find a day which suits everyone best.

To accompany this option we now total the number of Busy and Preferred people in the column headers.  This was already a feature that had been suggested through user feedback but with the introduction of the Preferred option it was even more important to clearly show how well a particular day suits everyone.

The other change we've made is to start showing the last time an update was made to a particular attendee and also the last time a calendar was updated (we also took this opportunity to improve the look of the attendee list).  Again this was a suggestion from user feedback with the aim of making it clearer to see what had changed since the calendar was last viewed.

We'd like to take this idea further and give a more personalised view of what has changed since someone viewed a calendar but first to make this possible we need to start identifying users, either through logging-on or cookies.  If you have any thoughts on this feature or any others please let us know.

Automated Testing with Watir

WARNING: Slightly geeky content.

With Meetifyr attracting more and more users its becoming increasingly important we don't introduce bugs or break things when trying to improve the site.  Previously we've been manually testing everything before releasing to the world.  This is acceptable when there's not much to the site but soon becomes laborious and in turn less effective with more functionality or when you're trying to release regularly.

To reduce this burden of manual testing we're started to use the Watir browser automation framework.  Using Watir we can write a few scripts in Ruby to test everything works on the site as it should.  Our full suite of tests run in under a couple of minutes and give us confidence we've not broken anything to badly in the name of progress.

The bottom line to this is that we can now make changes to the site with more confidence, which means more regular changes and so you should see the site improve quicker.