Web App: Juvely

Whoa no posts for two months? We have been slacking! Unfortunately over the last couple of months James and I have had loads of work to do for uni and haven’t had much chance to work on Juvely. Thinks have been progressing, slowly. The chat section is starting to take shape which is good, we planned to get loads done over the holidays but I stupidly decided to say to my boss I wouldn’t mind working every day for two weeks. Hmm. Anyway, we are both free from other commitments now so we have been pushing on with Juvely. Or we were, until it became apparent that somebody left the PSDs in Scotland…. So we decided to get started with something different.

James and I have both had a few ideas for other apps we would like to see come into life on the big wide web. Unfortunately most of them have had flaws such as being too big or not having a good enough revenue stream. The next idea we were going to try once Juvely had been finished was a simple social bookmarking site, think Delicious mixed with Twitter. I expect something similar had been done before but we decided we were going to try it anyway.

James thought it would be a good idea to have this done before Juvely to get some exposure so he looked into having someone else coding it. The best price he got would have been £200 each! He did a bit of bartering and managed to bring this down to £100 each if I do the XHTML and he does some designing for this guy later. Still, I am a bit of a cheapscate so I decided to look into it some more and thought it seemed rather simple, so I decided to give it a go!

So far I have been working on it for about 12 hours and have got most of it done. The main challenges involved relearning Ruby on Rails as I haven’t used it for so long! Still we have got quite a lot left todo but we plan on launching by the end of the year (yes I know, that is four days time, but I think we can do it!).

Ill leave you with a screenshot of our todo list so you can see how much has got to be done. Unfortunately I have got to work tonight and all day tomorrow so I won’t get any more done until Sunday. Its gonna be tight…..

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!

It’s been about 5 days since we launched the beta and things are going well. We have had about 25 people sign up for accounts and we are hearing some good comments. However, only a select few people are leaving any feedback, we want you guys to know we are all ears on improving what we have, so send suggestions/thoughts/comments our way and we will continue to work hard developing the app!

What the future holds

Apart from updates/refinements in the current areas of the app in the next major release we are going to include the live chat functionality and are also hoping to push forward the customisation management of the client section (as this is what people are asking for). As we have only just started developing the live chat area, we’d like to know what you think of these ideas.

• Internal chat room for staff members
• Messenger like feature for staff members speaking to users
• A desktop application for the chat/notification of new tickets (probably developed using Adobe AIR)
• Search-able chat logs

For customisation we want to keep it simple but really allow you to take control of your client area. Here are some ideas we are suggesting:

• Your company logo
• 3 or 4 templates
• Changing the colour scheme of those templates
• Allowing customisation of the CSS for advanced users
• Domain mapping (allowing you to point your dns at our servers to use the client-desk area)
• Full white label-ness
• More domains to choose from for the client area

Anyway, its 1am and it’s time to sleep, an early start in the morning. We’ll update in few days to let you know of the progress and as always let us know your thoughts!