Pre-Purchase Invitations Going Out

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Yesterday, we started sending out Timeline 3D (v3) pre-purchase invitations via e-mail. Customers who pre-purchase the software upgrade will gain immediate access to the current beta. The upgrade costs $25 USD.

We are inviting people to pre-purchase in the order that they became customers, starting with those who purchased our software in 2005. After those folks have a chance to give us feedback, we'll extend the invitation to those who purchased in 2006, etc... We will extend invitations at a pace that allows us to fix the bugs that are found and the respond to the feedback we receive.

If you would like to check the year that you first purchased BEEDOCS Timeline, you can enter your license information in this web form and see.

There are a couple of very important things I would like you to keep in mind if you plan to try the beta:

• This is beta software. Sometimes it crashes. Sometimes data can get lost. The intent of a beta is to get valuable customer feedback such that we can launch a stable public release a few months from now.

  We reserve the right to make changes to the software that would impact timelines you create with it. In particular, the web publishing service is brand new and may experience downtime as we make upgrades. We also reserve the right to remove timelines that are posted to our web servers during the beta. Please don't embed the web timelines in high profile websites during the beta.

  We will try to make the beta experience as smooth possible, but please don't use the beta for important work. Please don't send us panicked e-mails the night before a deadline asking us to fix something in v3. Our customer service priority is going to be customers using the shipping version of the software.

• We would love to have bug reports on anything wrong that you come across in our software. The more detail we have about the problem, the quicker we can fix it. Here is a simple format for reporting bugs that I recommend:

  1. What steps did you take leading up the bug?
     Example: I dragged an image from a webpage in Safari (www.apple.com) and dropped it onto an existing event in my timeline.

  2. What did you expect to happen?
     Example: I expected a small version of the image to be displayed in the event.

  3. What actually did happen?
     Example: The image flew back to Safari and my event remains unchanged.

  The hardest part of fixing bugs is often understanding exactly what the customer is seeing and then reproducing the bug on our own machines. If you follow the above format, it will really help us get things fixed quickly.

Hopefully that does not scare anyone away from giving the beta a spin. I just want to set expectations clearly. Elise and I have been using v3 to make timelines for several months now and, though the software has bugs, we think it is pretty cool and we hope that you will think so too.

Labels: beta, bugs, feedback, v3