When we launched Appify a month ago, we did it knowing that there were several major elements missing from the site.  Not minor features, but major components, things that were totally central to how we envisioned the site working.

We did this because we figured that if we waited to get everything in place before launching, we might never launch at all.  It would be better to launch sooner with elements missing, and get some users, get some feedback, evaluate, and meanwhile keep working on those other elements as we went.

So that’s what we’ve been doing.  We’re building this site in public, throwing on the missing pieces as people use the site. 

Sometimes that leads to the site being more compelling (as when we first launched, and people threw themselves into asking and answering questions from strangers), and sometimes it leads to the site being less compelling (as when, last week, the home page backed up with dozens of unanswered questions, causing people to balk at answering anything). 

This is all part of the process, as the product gets built before your very eyes.  As we get more and more of the elements built, the whole thing should click into place more and the experience should become a lot more satisfying and effective.

If you’ve been using Appify so far, thanks for doing so - you’re giving us the valuable feedback we need to build those other parts, just by doing what you’re doing.

If you’re watching Appify but not using it yet, keep watching - the site will start clicking into gear more and more in the coming weeks.  Starting (hopefully) next week, with one of several new feature rollouts.

And if you haven’t even heard about Appify yet?  Well… you will soon!

John

What are your friends’ favorite apps?  And what are their favorite apps for, say, New York City?  Or for exercising your brain?  Or for being on mushrooms in the hills of Santa Cruz?

Now you can invite them to Appify to find out, because we have an “invite your friends to Appify” feature on the site. 

So go - invite your friends now!   We want to know what their favorite apps are.

(My favorite app right now, btw, is Babelshot, which was added the other day by RajMahtani).

John

One of the big things that bothered people about Appify, whenever I ask them for feedback (which is all the time) was that the content area was so narrow.  Why is it so damn narrow? they would ask.  Well, I would say, it was one of those things that got baked into the site very early on, that we then had to live with for a bit because we had bigger fish to fry.

But today we’ve widened the content area, and the results are going to be great.  It gives us a whole new space to start adding new kinds of meta info into the pages: who are the most active users, what are the most-viewed questions, etc etc.  New ways to slice all of the great data that is accumulating about what the coolest apps out there are and who knows about them.

And with the wider area, Appify is starting to look like a real site. 

Of course, the space is empty right now.  But it gives us some much-needed growing room.  And we’re already starting to grow.

John

When you’ve only got two developers on your team, having your lead dev go on summer holiday for a week pretty much brings things to a stand-still, which is why we’re so happy that James is finally back from his romp around the eastern states. 

Welcome back, James.  We now begin launching new features again. 

Since we launched Appify a few weeks ago, we’ve been operating with a very outdated codebase, one with ancient legacy algorithms left over from the very earliest iterations of the site. 

It’s been driving our developers crazy, so tonight we’re installing a brand-new codebase, one that is much tighter, more in line with where we’re going now (as opposed to where we were going the first week we started coding), and one that should cause a lot fewer bugs to occur.

If you find yourself wanting to add a new app to Appify at, say, 3 am EST and the site is down, do not worry!  Just come back in an hour or two and we’ll be back online, with a stronger, sleeker, smoother codebase for you to enjoy.

John

The other day we mentioned that the question form wasn’t working on the home page.  Well, this is just a quick note to say that the form is back in action.  So post away!

We should have a cool new feature added to the question form pretty soon - stay tuned for more info on that.

-j.

Sorry all, the question form on the home page hasn’t been working today.

Yes, it will be working again very shortly.

We pushed some new code live before it was ready by accident.  It’s one of those things that happens in the very early, cowboy-ish days of a website.  Good thing too, as it’s causing us to put better protocols in place for deployment, etc etc.

Sorry if you’ve been asking questions and they haven’t appeared on the home page.  We’ve got em in our DB, and we’ll post them as soon as the form is up again.

In the meantime, check out some of these questions that don’t have answers yet:

What is the best road trip planning app?

What’s the best app for London buses?

Apps for allowances/kids’ bank accounts?

I want answers to those! 

Who has them?

John

Last week saw the first real use of Appify, beyond just our friends and FOAFs, and the result was exciting (well for me anyway).  What it showed was what what we were thinking it would show:  that getting people to share what their favorite apps are for any particular situation would be super fun and illuminating, and would allow everyone to learn lots from everyone else. 

I learned lots myself, and as a result got a bunch of new apps to play with for the 4th of July weekend.  And man there are some cool apps out there!  Here are some of my faves that I tried last week, that I absolutely wouldn’t have known about without other people posting to Appify:

Locavore - submitted by liabulaong. i popped this open the other morning in bed and immediately discovered a farmer’s market near us on vacation. nice!

Younicorn - submitted by Schlomo. we’ve been taking hilarious photos of each other for the past 3 days and emailing them to people.  3 minutes of fun, and a lifetime of regret after you send it to your friends…

Weeels - submitted by Sonicribbon. i tried this before I left Brooklyn, and it quickly found me a ride into Manhattan for half of what it would have cost me to take a cab.  This looks like an awesome app.

Bloom - submitted by sct. An app co-authored by Brian Eno, turns anyone into an ambient guru in 3 seconds.

Weather Radar - submitted by anthonymobile. I can’t stop checking to see if there’s rain near me!

Pandora - submitted by paulmwatson. I guess I’m clueless, but I had no idea Pandora had an app.  We’ve been playing it on my phone all weekend long.

And these are just some of the ones I’ve had time to try.  I haven’t even caught up with a quarter of the apps that people have posted that I want to check out.

We’re going to need filtering by friends and by topic soon, just to keep people from getting overwhelmed with all of the greatness.  Good thing that is just around the corner. 

But in a nutshell: sooo many cool apps out there.  Glad people are pointing us to their favorite ones on Appify, because they’re making my life a lot more interesting. 

John

I posted yesterday about things that still need doing on Appify, and we are already following up on the first few items on that list.  (Now that there are more than a handful of people using the site, we need better ways for people to follow the people/conversations they care about FAST). 

But at the same time, we got several tweets, emails and GetSatisfaction suggestions from users, with ideas that weren’t actually on our list. And they were really good ideas, and all have gone into our to-do list.

So we wanted to throw it out to everyone using this brand-new site: what do YOU want to see on the site next?  What is missing that is really bothering you?  If you haven’t jumped in yet, what is keeping you from doing so?  What is the one thing that you want to see most right now?

Any and all answers are welcome.  You can reply below, on the blog, or you can tweet it to us @appify, or you can email us at hello@appify.com. 

Thanks - and now back to work!

Whenever you launch a new site, the list of things that need to get done is always long.  With Appify, it is longer than most, because… well, just because.

Anyway, here’s a little glimpse at our to-do list, so that you wont look at Appify and think “#$@!!%????”  There are some really obvious things that are missing from the site at the moment.  Do not worry: we will have them up soon.  And as we bring them online, the site will go from being an interesting, fun and fairly useful thing to an interesting, fun, really useful, and really easy to use thing.

So here are some of the things at the top of our to-do list:

1. allow people to follow other people

That’s the whole idea with Appify, right?  See what people you know and respect are saying about apps.  Well when you can actually follow those people, imagine how easy that will be…

2. allow people to follow questions

“Questions” are kind of like many-to-many channels around a topic of shared interest.  Following along with the discussion around a particular question will be really fun and useful.  Coming soon.

3. make people’s actions more visible on their profile pages: what questions have they asked, what questions have they answered, etc etc etc

The profile pages right now look pretty darn bare.  They could have a LOT more information on them that would make it more fun and useful to look at them.  Enough said - that’s on the way.

4. allow people to find other people more easily

No need to explain that one.

5. get a UX designer to make our hacked-out UI look/feel/be nicer and more pleasurable

All of my UX friends look at Appify in horror.  Those tiny images, the narrow column of content, the fact that you can’t even read the name of an app on the home page.  They throw up their hands in despair.  Well, we’ve been working with a skeleton crew, with everone doing UI as best they can.  On our to-do list: get a proper UI person to do some proper UI for us.

6. get a site redesign

See “De-designing Appify” - our next step will be to RE-design it, so it has the look and feel we want.  Exciting.

7. about 100 other things that we wont bore you with right now.

The list goes on and on, ad infinitum.  Wont get into the details.

The main thing to know though is this: what you see today on Appify is a tiny sliver of what we have on our roadmap.  We’ve left a lot of totally obvious things undone for now, because we needed to launch and start observing how people actually USE this thing.  Now that we’re doing that, we’ll start cranking all of those things out as quickly as we can.

John