Socrata

We’ve been updating blist pretty often lately. Most of the changes have been minor and subtle or subterranean. We haven’t called them out. For example, last week we replaced the default progress meter with what’s a called a pre-loader:

It’s just slightly more entertaining and informative for the 3 or 4 seconds while you wait for the application to load. It’s not a big deal, we know. But it’s consistent with where we’re focused now – on fit, finish and polish.

In addition to more of these subtle, mostly minor changes, today we also released 3 fairly major enhancements.

CSV exports are now somewhere in the neighborhood of 18 times faster than before. Not much explanation required for that. We’ve been making an effort to optimize blist performance and here’s an example of where some effort and good engineering paid off.

Columns Can Now Have Default Values

We conducted a user survey about a month ago. By far one of the most popular features requested was to allow columns to have default values. Now you can add a new column or modify an existing column and give it a default value. That means that whenever you add a new entry, the value for that column will be initialized to some fixed value of your choosing. Here’s an example of me setting the default value of a column called “Stage” to the value “Progressing Well” (maybe this is a column in my weekly task blist). You can set the default value to a literal value like “100″ or “Yellow” or to a value from a pick list, like “Progressing Well” as I’ve shown here.

You can even set a default value for photos and documents. So if you were building a corporate directory and you wanted everyone to upload their own picture ultimately, you could accelerate that by setting the default photo to one of Shrek.

We Continue to Evolve the Dashboard

The Dashboard is the central nervous system in blist. It’s the social hub. It shows you what’s going on around you. We’ve made it quicker and easier to search for blists. We’ve made it easier to see what kind of blists are popular. Under the “My blist” tab we’ve even added a notification section to tell you who’s shared blists with you and when your shared blists are updated by others. Spend some time on the Dashboard wandering around.

We have more in store. Look for more enhancements and refinements over the summer. Some you’ll see. Others you’ll just feel.

Let us know what you’re thinking. What’s the single most important feature or enhancement we can add for you? Let us know in comments or send us an email. You can reach us at feedback at blist.com.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 10th, 2008 at 5:45 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.