Production Push 25. November 2006

We only did a few minor changes to the site because it’s a holiday in the United States this week. The big one you might notice is a new alert when a reviewer views the page containing your document for the first time. This alert only goes to the author of the document, and you’ll only see one of these alerts per reviewer or approver.

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A Web Services API for Approver.com

We are very excited to announce the first set of Web services APIs for Approver.com this week. These APIs give you the ability to retrieve information about document status on Approver.com, including the documents you need to approve and the list of a document’s reviewers. More Web services — including read/write calls that enable you to create documents and invite reviewers programmatically — will be along soon.

If you’re a developer and you want to play with our APIs, there are three steps:

• Sign up for Approver.com if you haven’t already
• Obtain an application key for use by your application
• Review the developer documentation, particularly the authentication guide

Using the Web service APIs is free for noncommercial use. The calls themselves are RESTful (meaning you give us a URL and we give you some XML back) so they should work with any programming language and platform. We have code examples in C# for now but we’re going to see what we can do to add more later.

I should mention that we are working on a paid referral program for Approver in which we’ll pay you if you refer new users to the site who then convert into paid users. This will eventually be an open program, but as with the Web services APIs, we want to make sure we get all the details right, so for now, if you’re interested and you have a web site that generates traffic that you think might be complimentary to the Approver.com experience, drop us a line on the feedback form.

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Production Push, 18. November 2006

Here are the new fixes and features we pushed today:

• Added support for printable views of the documents created in the browser as well as the reviewer status list, as previously announced.
• Added the ability to invite up to three colleagues to use the system immediately following email verification.
• When you tried to invite yourself or another person who was already a reviewer of a document, an error would occur. Fixed.
• Updated the guided tour to make it reflect the recent user interface changes we’ve done.
• Pushed the initial public version of our web service API for developers who are interested in integrating Approver.com into their applications or web sites.

Printable view and printable reviewer list

This weekend we’ll roll out support for two oft-requested features: printable document views and a printable reviewer list (which for now we’ve decided to roll up into a single feature). The printable view gives you the ability to easily open a clean page that contains only your document and the list of reviewers and reviewer status (did they review, did they approve, and when). When you print the whole thing out, the list of reviewers will print on a separate page for your convenience. This feature will only work for documents you create in the browser using our new spiffy visual editor (if you want to print an uploaded file, you’d need to download it and print it on your computer the way you normally would).

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No push this weekend

We’re eschewing our normal weekend production push this weekend since none of the stuff we worked on this week was user-facing.

We did make some progress on our web service APIs for developers, and we’ll be inviting some of you to have a look at that soon. If you’d like a sneak peek at what we’ve done, please leave feedback and we’ll add you to our beta list.

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SEC Chief Sounds Off on Corporate Blog Disclosures

U.S. Securites and Exchange Commission Director Chris Cox posted a comment to the blog of Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz. Cox was responding to Schwartz’s call for corporations to use blogs to achieve greater transparency. It sounds like Cox is receptive to the notion.
This came up because there’s an SEC regulation about how U.S. public companies have to disclose information (this is known as Regulation FD). The “FD” stands for “Full Disclosure”; the idea is that public companies will release information about themselves in a fair and open way, and they won’t favor one group of investors over another. Most companies use their web sites as one way to disclose information; Schwartz wants to use corporate blogs to do corporate disclosure as well.

After having blogged at a few public companies in the past, we definitely agree, and we think that having easy software tools that enable corporate teams to get the message right are going to be key to this.

Stay tuned…

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Production Push 3. Nov 2006: WYSIWYG Madness!

We just did a production push that appears to have gone quickly and smoothly. (We’re doing this on Friday instead of Saturday because our intrepid build engineer will be indisposed on Saturday morning.)

New in this push:

• Added a visual editor to the document edit page, as previously announced. The new editor enables you to create a document in the browser with rich formatting (including bold, italics, underline, font size, bulleted lists, numbered lists, indentation, paragraph alignment, font color, background color, hyperlinks, tables, and horizontal lines). For the technically inclined, you can also edit the raw HTML behind a document by clicking on the “Source” button.
• We removed the Preview functionality from the document edit page, since with the new visual editor it should no longer be needed. (Note that the old editor interface will continue to be available for older documents you’ve created in the browser, since we didn’t automatically migrate old documents to the new editor format.)
• The “make the edit box bigger” link on the document edit page is now replaced by a button on the visual editor toolbar that expands the edit window to the entire size of the browser. (This feature is so unbelievably handy we almost plotzed the first time we tried it.)
• The list of documents in the My Documents page is now sorted first by priority, then by the date the document was last modified. (This is something that only Pro users will likely notice, since they’re the only ones who will have a significiant number of documents in their queue.)

Enjoy the new hotness, and as always, let us know if you run into any funnies.

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An In-Browser Editor that Sucks Much Less

As we tackle the feature requests we’ve received from users since we launched a mere two months ago, one thing that’s come up frequently is the state of our in-browser editor. It’s a stretch to even call what we provide an “editor” since it’s basically just a standard web edit box with some rudimentary markup formatting smarts built in. But while markup is great for certain cases, it’s awful for the majority of cases — the plain text box is simply not usable for a lot of people, and it doesn’t have anything close to the power of a graphical editor. We even find ourselves occasionally stumbling over the nuances of Markdown (the markup language that we built into Approver way back in Milestone 1).

We realized early on that there was definitely room for improvement, but we didn’t want to write our own in-browser editor (particularly since there are a bunch of free and commercial in-browser editor libraries already out there which have been put together by folks who are much smarter about this stuff than we are). And if you really wanted to do something sophisticated (like create a formatted document with embedded images, etc.), you could always just resort to creating a Microsoft Word or OpenOffice document and upload that.

But we wanted to have an in-browser editing experience that does not suck. So we’ve been researching alternative editor packages for a few months now. We think we’ve found one that fits well with our technology infrastructure. Even better, the editor we chose (FCKeditor, for the technical-minded among you) was an absolute dream to integrate with our existing code. We’re going to do some more tests this week, but if all goes well, the new editor will become available following our next weekly production push (which will happen on Friday this week instead of Saturday).

Update: Click on the screen shot above for a preview of what the new editor looks like.

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