Web App: Juvely

My first post in a long while. I’ve not been away, I’m actually working really hard. I’ll give you a little update of what I’ve been up to and then I’ll fill you in on where we are going with our products.

I’ve decided that it would be best for me to leave my current university and apply for another. My reason is that I’ve found passion in my life. I’m not talking about with my girlfriend but with design. I’ve completely migrated from my programming routes and gone full time into design. And all I can say is that I absolutely love it. I’ve received an unconditional offer from another university to study “Design for Digital Media“. So it feels I’ve pretty much wasted the last two years of my education I’ve learned a lot of very important life lessons and have really realised where I want to take my career. Now that I’m an official university drop out until september, I’ll be freelancing full time (which is working out quite nicely) and devoting all other spare time to work with our apps!

..So what’s happening then?

Keepsy

Firstly we want to launch Keepsy (the concept of the idea is up and running). The reason behind this is fairly simple, it’s a great little application. It’s really handy and I’ve really taken to it and think a lot of people could benefit from its simplicity. I’ve got some great design updates planned for it, streamlining the user interface and experience, removing bloat and unnecessary UI functionality. Here’s the progress with the current design. (Yep I’m aware that the little photos are exactly the same as twitter, it’s just a concept).

Theres a couple of possible paths we could take with Keepsy. We could launch it as a beta-super-secret-invite-only app, hopefully create some buzz and gather a following. However, we are leaning towards just fully releasing it into the wild. This is still a decision to be made. We hope to have it all done and dusted as soon as possible, most likely a couple of weeks.

Juvely

We have got some great plans (theres a surprise?). However, we are going to put this on hold (yet again) until summer. I’ll be heading to Exeter for a week (to stay with Luca) to finally get it all done and dusted. It’s been an extremely long time, we’re still extremely passionate about the app, it’s just restraints that have held us back. It’s funny to think this all started when I was 16.

Deer & Spiller

This will become the registered parent company for all of our future applications - it’ll be our blog as well. The design is pretty much finished, it just needs to be coded and integrated with wordpress. Once we’ve got the site fully launched, we’ll register the business, hopefully getting everything sorted out (bank, contracts etc) then I hope to write a series of articles helping other young students go about setting up an online business. As well as post tutorials and any other bits and bobs we’re working on.

I’m not a fan of update posts but I thought, its been a while, the loyal readers (yes all 7 of you) might be interested to know where we stand.

Peace out!

This week has been rather busy, we have got quite a lot done, but not quite enough to show yet! Here is what we have been up to and what we hope to do over the next couple of weeks…

The chat section is near enough finished, we just need a few GUI changes here and there, we have started creating an API and an Adobe AIR application! (If you want some cool links on creating an API or Adobe AIR app check out my keepsy feed!)

While I have been busy coding, James got carried away while tinkering with the Knowledgebase UI…

So, yep we shall have a new UI at some point for Juvely, we have also got redesigns lined up for the Juvely marketing site, creation of the Deer&Spiller site (our company name) and integration with the blog. I think James has ideas for a Keepsy redesign floating around too!

Resources on the server are getting a bit tight so I am considering moving to Slicehost (which I keep typing as Slidehost). There is nothing wrong with (mt) by Slicehost are cheaper and they allow you to build your server from scratch as you need it, which will allow us to save on memory.

Oh, and inauguration of the company!

Just an update to let you know whats going on in Camp Juvely.

In the next “major” release there is going to be alot of new functionality, heres a quick overview of whats going on.

Suggested replies

This is a feature that I am quite fond of, it has two main purposes, firstly is what is suggests, it will search through the ticket message and suggest replies based on what content it finds, secondly, you’ll be able to add custom replies via the Manage section, so if you are constantly getting asked the same questions, your replies will be a click away.

Attach existing files

This is a great feature which will allow you to either, attach files that have already been uploaded before (saving you from uploading the same files over again) this will save on your disk space usage alot and it will also allow you to pre-upload files via the manage panel which will always be available to attach on all of your replies.

Live chat

You can expect the normal features of any Live Chat application but we feel that we have really speeded up the work flow by the way we have designed the UI’s, once you are on the chat page itself you’ll be able to search for files, transcripts etc and chat all at the same time. Eventually a couple of types of widgets will be included, firstly the standard “Click here for live chat” pop-up style, then an integrated chat, so customers do not have to navigate away from the page they are viewing on your site to talk to you, we have a couple of other ideas up our sleeves but nothing we want to report yet.

The application

Most other helpdesk services either offer a fully loaded super-duper-mega application or non at all. We wanted to keep it simple. The application is going to act as a Notifier which will do basic things such as notify you of activity and will be used for Live Chat so that you don’t always have to have the browser open to be able to talk to clients. It is also going to use an open API, so if you don’t like our app you can go ahead and write your own!

The user interface

Although the look ad feel of the app will generally be the same, we feel that we needed to make the app look more polished, the older UI’s were a bit of a rush job.

Here are a few “in-development” screenshot’s of the new UI’s. Would love to hear what you think!