It’s been a bit quiet here for a while, and a lot has happened since our last post. Let’s take a quick look at some new features, before delving into the latest news in our next entry:

New deployment strategies

Apart from tuning, fixing and updating our existing deployment strategies, we introduced a bunch of new ones:

• Windows 8 adds meta information to nicely integrate into the Windows 8 dashboard. We even generate a nice tile color from your app icon to make your app look even better on there.
• Ubuntu Unity adds a pre-configured script to make your app installable on the standard Ubuntu desktop and its launcher.
• Optimize images lets you (losslessly) compress images and strip their metadata.
• Social network sharing improves the sharing of your app URL in social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Feedback API and widget

You can now collect feedback from your users by either activating the Feedback Widget deployment strategy or using the API directly from your app. People really like how simple it is, and that you can set a mood in addition to your message. Some of our users already gathered tons of feedback and were able to improve their app accordingly.

UI

We’re still not 100% content with all of the platform’s user interface, but we already improved many things like the sign-in, app creation, your app index, app switching from the app panels, and more. Every week we ship some improvements in this area, and we hope you like them as much as we do.

Infrastructure

As an infrastructure provider, maximum uptime and short response times of your apps are part of our core priorities. So we made a lot of improvements to our infrastructure during the last months, making sure you can rely on our platform at all times. Monitoring, redundancy, failover options… we probably added something from every letter in the DevOps alphabet.

remoteStorage

Our data storage based on the open remoteStorage protocol is probably the most invisible part of our platform, but we know that many of you signed up in order to check it out. We’ve been working with the project from the day we started, and we made a lot of improvements to both the front- and back-end of our provider implementation.

We even decided to launch storage accounts as a separate product soon, but more on that when the time comes. For now it means that your data is already stored redundantly, and we have failover handling for both the storage backend and the app servers running the API. So by signing up for our “experimental” storage, you actually get a fast and reliable, professional-grade service for free at the moment.

Feedback

That’s it for a quick rundown of some developments of the past weeks and months. As always, your feedback on anything we do is most welcome! We’re all ears for your opinion and suggestions via Twitter, the support site, or a plain old email.