Welcome to the first episode of the CreativePro Podcast. My goals for this podcast series are to introduce CreativePro Office to potential users, help the existing user base work with CPO more effectively and describe the future goals of CPO.

This first episode talks about who I am, why I developed CPO and what the long term vision is for the application. Some ideas I have for future podcasts are:

• Instructional podcasts, how to use CPO,
• User profiles and interviews with CPO users,
• New feature spotlights,
• Reviews of other online office products,
• User Q and A podcasts.
  

I hope you find these podcasts informative and maybe a little fun.

Episode 1: Welcome to the CreativePro Podcast

This revision log has been discontinued. Please see the new revision log in the forums at http://forum.creativeprooffice.com/topic/22/ 

April 29, 2007

Added team member display to project view. Now you can click the Team tab in a project view screen to view the details of team members associated with that project.

April 28, 2007

Created Google Gadget and Netvibes module to display CreativePro Office dashboard widgets within Google Homepage and Netvibes.

April 26, 2007

Implemented UTF-8 support to allow for better extended character set handling.

April 25, 2007

Added internationalization features: countries other than U.S., time zones other than U.S., foreign currencies. To update your currency, time zone or country, click the settings icon in the upper-right part of the screen.

April 12, 2007

Added tagging to project file uploads. Fixed sort function on project file list. Fixed some bugs in the client entry form. Fixed invoice number increment bug.

April 8, 2007

Completed the dashboard task widget which displays outstanding tasks ordered by project. Learn more about the task widget here .

April 6, 2007

Fixed numerous bugs on the finance reporting page that displays the YTD finance charts. Still more work to be done here.

April 5, 2007

Fixed a bug in the dashboard RSS reader that prevented feeds from being displayed when the widget was opened from the widget menu.

March 17, 2004

Finished the bug reporting tool. Now a user can submit a bug report from anywhere in the application by clicking the icon in the upper-right system menu.

March 14, 2007

Reworked how RSS feeds are read. Initially, RSS feeds would be read before the dashboard page load when a user logs in. If a user had many feeds, it could take 30 seconds or more before the dashboard would render. I moved the RSS read operation to take place after the dashboard renders. I still don't like how it works but it'll do for now.

March 8, 2007

Added tagging feature to Projects, Clients, Project Files and Invoices.

March 2, 2007

Repaired bugs in user signup process.

March 1, 2007

CreativePro Office beta is officially released.

CreativePro Office has a nice feature that lets you upload files to individual projects and then make certain files visible to your clients. For example, you've just finished 2 Photoshop comps of a brochure for a client. Upload them to the project, make them public and your client can now view the files and comment on them in their client area.

The problem is that this feature is not scaleable right now. CPO currently exists on a shared hosting platform and without venture funding or a solid revenue model, this is the ways it's gonna be for the near future.

For the past few weeks I've been looking around for an online file storage service to integrate with CreativePro Office.  I first looked at Box.net because they are integrated with both Pageflakes and Netvibes .  Box.net provides 1GB with their free plan and they have great API documentation.  However, the API requires that you login to your account at the Box.net website.  That won't work.

Then I found Omnidrive .  They also offer a 1GB free account and their API can be accessed from within CPO - users are authenticated through a REST call.  The only problem I've run into so far is their API docs - they're terrible.  But I'm making some progress and once I get a working prototype, I'll release the PHP API code in a blog post.

Thanks for reading.

Jeff 

If you've been following the GoPlan Blog for the past few months, you'll know they've been able to generate quite some buzz with an invitation only release a few months back. Well, GoPlan is now available to the masses - I signed up for the free account last night. It is impressive and kudos to the guys at WeBreakStuff.com for producing a nice app!

If you don't know, GoPlan is an online project management suite with some nice collaboration features built in. From the GoPlan blog...

Goplan is an online project management solution. It allows teams and individuals to collaborate through tasks, file management, real-time chat, online calendaring, and many other features.

Ok, I created my account and I logged in and was immediately infatuated with the eye candy. GoPlan looks great. It's got an intuitive layout, pretty icons and a soothing color scheme - maybe a bit like Blinksale . Now I realize look and feel is very subjective. 37 Signals and their Basecamp product have the whole "simple is genious" thing going on and that's fine. But frankly, I'm a bit shallow. When I'm using an app for an hour or more, I want it to be pretty. Ok, enough said about that.

So yeah, I wanna be GoPlan - I want CreativePro Office to be just as pretty and just as simple to use. But playing with GoPlan for awhile brought me back to just why I built CPO in the first place. For example, GoPlan has no invoicing feature - yet. It has no expense tracking feature - yet. It has no timesheet feature - yet. I say 'yet' because GoPlan is very much in an early release stage and the team may add these features later. Or they may stick with the core feature set they have now and that's great and it will work stunningly for a lot of users.

But my vision for CPO has always been a complete end-to-end solution for the single developer or very small (2-5 people) development team or the single developer with 2 or 3 subcontractors, etc. By end-to-end I mean from drafting an estimate to sending the invoices - every stage of the project life-cycle is handled by one app. Back in the day, I used to get really tired of creating estimates and quote in a Word template, then tracking my hours online, using Outlook as my default task manager (you know what I mean), and then creating invoices with an Excel file. Things are much better these days and apps like GoPlan do a lot of the heavy lifting. But I still need to access 3 or more apps to get everything done.

For now, I'm sticking with the end-to-end approach with CreativePro Office and we'll see how it works out. Maybe it's just too darn complicated to pull off well.

Thanks for reading.

Jeff

So I've had a couple of questions recently concerning IE support on CreativePro Office. Currently, the layout breaks in IE 6 and 7 and there are some JavaScript issues with IE as well - surprise, surprise! And CreativePro Office hasn't even been tested on Safari yet.

Yes, I do intend to support both Safari and IE (6 and 7) in the near future. So, what's the holdup? Well first of all, CPO is in beta (some might even say alpha) release which means things are changing and changing daily. Also, when building any web app, I prefer to work exclusively in Firefox as do most folks. Once the layout and JavaScript behaviors are nailed down in FF and I'm happy, then I know how things are supposed to work. I've found that testing in multiple browsers as I develop is a massive waste of time because the testing scenario usually goes something like this:

1. Build layout in Firefox.
2. Test layout in IE - find that it breaks.
3. Fix layout for IE.
4. Tweak some styles, elements, JavaScript, etc. in Firefox to accommodate changes made for IE.
5. Test layout in Safari - find that it breaks, though not nearly as bad as IE.
6. Throw out an entire chunk of the UI or JavaScript code make way for new features.
7. Go back to #1 and repeat.

So until users are satisfied with a stable release of CPO, plan on using CreativePro Office with Firefox on a Mac or PC. I'm sorry if this presents an inconvenience and look for enhanced browser support some time in May of 2007.

Thanks for reading.

Jeff

OK, here we go. The CreativePro Office beta officially launches today - no more putting it off. I missed my original launch date by 2 months but a lot of good stuff has happened in that time...

• Tasks and milestones can now be added to projects,
• Tasks can be viewed as a Gantt chart,
• Files can be uploaded to projects,
• Multiple users (employees, contractors, administrators) can now be added to a CPO account,
• An integrated bug reporting tool has been added,
• The app was converted to PHP 5 and lots of code was refactored.

• The client area needs a lot of work. The client area allows your clients to login with credentials that you assign and view their projects, invoices and public project files.
• Invoice editing has a JavaScript bug that incorrectly calculates the invoice total when tax or shipping is included.
• The tasks dashboard widget needs to be built.
• The task Gantt chart feature has some formatting issues.
• The Office Search feature needs to be completed.