Hi everybody! It’s been a while since we’ve posted to the blog, mostly because we’ve been cranking away getting things ready for our public beta this fall. We just pushed out some pretty big changes, and there’s lots more coming down the road.  Here’s some details on the major changes in this release:

• We heard from those of you who are trip planners who want to come back to your book over and over again before you leave on your trip. You told us that you want to add & edit information like itineraries and extra chapters on places to go, people to see, and things to do. Now you can do that – and still make sure to get your printed book a few days before you leave on your trip. This also gives you the additional benefit of getting the most up-to-date event listings, weather reports, currency exchange rates, festival information, and the like, printed up right before you depart.  And there’s a “print now” button for people who don’t want to wait. 
• You can rebuild guides up until the last day of your trip – so if you want to download the guide while you’re in your hotel room or on the go, you can take advantage of getting the latest and greatest information, right at your fingertips.
• Email reminders: You’ll now be emailed reminders about your trip every other week (or month, if its more than 6 weeks away) so that you can keep track of your trip, and make sure to add in any extra info you want into the book.

We made a bunch of usability improvements as well, based on your feedback:

• When you preview a section on the table of contents page, all sections inside of it show up in the preview (and are grayed out if it’s unchecked)
• We’ve moved the coupon code field to make it more obvious to you that if you’re using a coupon for a free book, a credit card isn’t necessary
• A/B tests are now also implemented, so we can now test different layouts and see how people respond to them

There’s lots more coming, and I promise that we’ll stay in touch as we roll out more fixes and changes…

This post aims to accomplish two things – let you guys know what the development team has been up to this week, and to prove that there is an xkcd comic for everything.

• Add/edit a chapter! You can add, edit, and delete custom chapters – add in your favorite information you’ve learned about where you’re going, your flight information, your emergency contact information, whatever – it will all get bound and printed in your book, and be ready for your trip! http://xkcd.com/404 (D’oh!)
• Better IE6 support: http://xkcd.com/198/
• Order history bug fix: Orders made more than a few weeks ago sometimes showed up in order history as from December 31, 1969 – that’s been fixed! http://xkcd.com/376/
• Softening guide failure: If a guide fails, you’ll get a PDF that contains the error, and a picture of a cute furry animal to look at while our techs are dispatched to figure out what went wrong and fix it. http://xkcd.com/231/
• Real preview and page counts! You can now see a real preview (meaning it looks like the books) and see the approximate page count for books on the table of contents page. http://xkcd.com/294/
• Blog fixes: Our blog now has dates and links to the main page http://xkcd.com/239/

So I guess we learned that there isn’t an xkcd for everything. It’s kinda like finding out there’s no Santa Claus. Oh well! The best part of all of this? It’s so much fun putting out features, learning, and getting all of your feedback. We sure do love you guys!

We’re pushing hard to get to public beta, and we’re adding people from the waitlist every week, so if you want to get in to the private beta, sign up early!

Ahoy Travelers!

Today we released a new version of the private beta site, with a ton of improvements!  The primary goal was stability and usability – however we did manage to sneak a few new features in.

One of the features that was added with this release is full previews.  There was a version of previews before, however it only included the first few lines of the chapter.  Now, you can view the full text of each section before you check out – click on the “preview” links to the right of each chapter and section item of the book when you view the table of contents.

Another new feature is the ability to see all your guides as they go into production- before, if you built more than one guide, it only showed one of them being built. We’re also including a first release of Order History so that you can see (and download again!) any books that you’ve built in the past.

Enjoy the new release, and as always, let us know if you have any problems!

Howdy travelers!

We’ve been hard at work on version 1.1 since our first beta was released on June 1st. We’ve been going through your excellet feedback, and hopefully have fixed many of the major bugs that were lurking on private beta launch!

Our main goal with this release was stability- hopefully, you’ll notice a big difference. We cleaned up some of the styling and site content, streamlined the guide creation even more than it already was, and squashed a whole bunch of bugs. As always, if you run into problems, be sure to let us know.

We’re also testing a few new features, including the most popular feature request: When building a guide, you’ll notice a new “preview” link next to each section and subsection when the table of contents is generated. This will let you preview the information in that section before you build the guide. Note that it’s not perfect- you’ll notice that the preview is often incomplete (or missing altogether) – it also doesn’t include images or maps yet. We’re working on it!

Be sure to let us know what you think- we want to hear about the good and (especially) the bad! We’re not just looking for bugs and errors – if you find anything that’s not completely clear or doesn’t work exactly like you think it should, please email us at product@offbeatguides.com!