Ketchup Soup

Ketchup on 37signals Signal vs. Noise Blog

Thu, 13 May 2010 14:29:00 +0100

Ketchup on 37signals Signal vs. Noise Blog:

It’s always nice to get mentioned, but getting mentioned in the 37signals Campfire room brings a particular swell of pride.

Hi-ho silver.

—P

Ketchup 1.0 is here

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 13:19:00 +0100

Last night, we quietly pushed a new website and turned on billing for Ketchup.

As promised, we’ve kept an always-free plan, along with a Personal plan for €9 per month and a Business plan for €49. Everyone gets 30 days unlimited use of the whole app, even if you’ve already signed up.

This release also brings in a new bonus feature that we decided to add to the Business plan: customisation. You can upload your own logo and company details, and choose a theme to suit your brand.

This is a huge milestone for our little app. Thanks for helping us get this far!

Announcing "Projects" : a way to group and filter meetings in Ketchup

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 17:14:03 +0100

One of the most requested features for Ketchup was a way to group, or tag meetings together.

It’s often really hard to get the balance just right for this kind of thing. Keeping with Ketchup’s philosophy of simplicity and effectiveness, I think we’ve come up with an elegant solution that adds just enough power to the app, without impinging on the cleanliness of the interface.

Project support starts when you’re creating a meeting. You can now type a “Project” for your meeting:

When you’ve added a few projects, when you click the project field, you’ll notice that your other projects appear inline for quick selection using the mouse or the up and down arrow keys.

If you type the first few letters of a project and hit the tab key, it will select from your current projects. Fast, simple.

When you save your meeting, other meetings in that project appear in the sidebar:

A meeting’s project also appears on the meetings index page:

Finally, to switch between projects, use the project selector:

This has been a really fun feature to implement, and I hope you like it. I’m really excited about being able to add such powerful, useful features, without compromising the core values behind the app.

—P

Recent Ketchup Writeups

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 23:29:00 +0000

Wesley Fok, blogging for Canada’s “Globe and Mail” writes:

“Ketchup is so much easier to use that you might start to wonder why you’re bothering with other options.”

Meanwhile, “Online Tech Tips” agrees:

“Ketchup is incredibly easy to use—so easy that we wonder why no one has thought of it before now”

It’s flattering and vindicating to read these and strengthens our resolve to focus on keeping our features lean, focussed, well-thought-out and intuitive.

—P

Ketchup PHP API Wrapper

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:01:00 +0000

We’re delighted to announce a PHP wrapper for Ketchup, available now on Github. Thanks go to Till Klampaeckel. If you run a PHP site and you want to integrate with Ketchup, this library provides everything you need!

The PHP wrapper joins the Ruby library that we announced two weeks ago. It’s great to be able to announce these useful tools for interacting with our API.

—P

We have attachments now. Maybe you’ve noticed. The ability...

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 12:26:15 +0000

We have attachments now. Maybe you’ve noticed.

The ability to attach files to agenda items has been something we’ve been thinking about implementing for a bit, and we’ve received a number of requests for the feature. But it’s a tricky one, because it requires fiddling with the juicy centre of the Ketchup app - the entry of agenda items & notes. We don’t want to mess with that workflow too much.

I’m pretty happy with what we came up with. To attach a file, click the paperclip icon and use the little file uploader. Attachments are listed in a little box above the notes. Easy.

Ever yours,
Brian

You can now export your meetings as a calendar to Google...

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 09:40:00 +0000

You can now export your meetings as a calendar to Google Calendar, Apple’s iCal and similar calendar apps.

Just copy the link from the bottom of your meetings index, and paste it in to your calendar app of choice.

This feature is delivered via our new API: it’s really cool to be able to deliver two interdependent features back to back!

Ketchup gets an API

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 15:36:15 +0000

We’ve had a number of requests for an API since we launched last month, and today I’m putting the official API spec for version 1 live.

The API spec is the first article in our brand new knowledge base & support site.

The API contains everything you need to interact with all your data in Ketchup: meetings, agenda items and notes. It even includes some preview methods for future features.

Introducing features to the API before we introduce them into the main site is a great way for us to get these features tested without them being fully live.

To go hand in hand with this release, the wonderful Pat Allan has prepared a Ruby library specifically for use with the Ketchup API. It’s available now over at Github.

If you have any issues or questions about the API, or if you build something that uses it, shoot us a message over at the API forum.

I’m very excited about this, as it’s one more significant milestone checked off for us, and paves the way for a few more good features to be released over the next few weeks.

—P

We’re paginating! The “Show more…” way...

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 12:12:47 +0000

We’re paginating!

The “Show more…” way to load new items is all the rage, and we’re jumping on the bandwagon. We’re now displaying 20 meetings at a time, and you can keep loading more inline until there’re no more to display.

This is just the start of our plans to help find and filter meetings, which will become more relevant as more people add more meetings to the system.

—P

We’ve reworked the drag and drop sorting for agenda items...

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 18:56:14 +0000

We’ve reworked the drag and drop sorting for agenda items and notes. Given that we’re very particular about trying to do things right, drag and drop sorting has been a bit of a pet peeve for us since we launched.

There were a few other features that we introduced and then killed before launch, but we decided to keep drag and drop sorting: it was clunky, but it was unobtrusive and didn’t interfere with the interface.

Today, we’re pushing a fix that cleans things up. We’ve added handles to notes for grabbing to sort them. We’ve also introduced an icon at the top of the agenda list for folding up the notes, which adds grab handles to agenda items too.

It makes for a much smoother, more intuitive interface for sorting items and notes.

Ketchup Reviewed on BNet

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 01:50:11 +0000

Ketchup Reviewed on BNet:

A strong positive review of Ketchup on BNet. I especially like this line:

“The interface is simple and — dare I say it — almost fun to use”

Nothing quite like taking Ketchup to meetings!

—P

The most requested features turned out to be the some of the...

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 20:05:07 +0000

The most requested features turned out to be the some of the first requested features.

—P

We’ve added a “Location” field to meetings, so...

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 13:35:00 +0000

We’ve added a “Location” field to meetings, so you can see where the meeting is taking place, whether it’s a live meeting, a conference call or a virtual meeting with a URL.

—P

Sharing the Love.

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 17:39:00 +0000

We’ve given the ‘Invite your friends’ page a bit of attention over the past few days. A few of you mentioned that you’d like to be able to: a) add a ‘personal message’; b) see a preview of what would be sent.

Both requests seemed pretty reasonable, so we pushed a few changes over the weekend that will allow you, dear reader, to: a) add a ‘personal message’; b) see a preview of what will be sent.

Thanks so much for the helpful feedback, and for inviting your friends. We appreciate both enormously.

Ever yours,
Brian

Time Zone Bug Fixed.

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 14:07:16 +0000

We noticed a bug where some of the times entered in the app weren’t matching up with the time zone set in account settings. This would lead to discrepancies between meetings for today, upcoming and previous.

A fix has been pushed and it’s live now.

—P

Ketchup featured on Download Squad and Lifehacker

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 23:11:00 +0000

I just noticed a spike in activity on Ketchup and a bunch of new signups during some personal downtime watching some classic British comedy (Outnumbered) …

… it turns out we’ve just been featured on Lifehacker…

…via another article on Download Squad earlier today.

Of course, it all started with yesterday’s mention on Daring Fireball.

Today was another fantastic day for Ketchup, with over a thousand new signups and lots of thoughtful, helpful feedback messages coming through.

Again, thanks SO much to everyone for writing us up, for trying out the app, and for all the great feedback.

—P

What a Launch!

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 14:59:20 +0000

It’s only 24 hours since I posted about the open launch of the early access of Ketchup, but so far the response has been amazing.

To our delight, John Gruber fireballed us yesterday evening, Irish time. Since then, the server’s been running hot, with over 2500 signups overnight. Huge kudos to Engine Yard’s Rails stack. The feedback email account has been hopping too, and it will probably make sense shortly to open up a public issues forum.

Whilst I worked really hard to polish every last detail before launch, some details always slip through. I’ve just pushed a small bug-fix to enable deleting agenda items and notes.

Thanks so much to everyone who’s signed up, everyone who’s sent valuable feedback and everyone who has tweeted support.

Really looking forward to iterating, polishing, iterating and polishing over the coming weeks.

—P

Ketchup Screencast Mark I, with my patented Irish hypnotist...

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 21:52:00 +0000

Ketchup Screencast Mark I, with my patented Irish hypnotist voice.

—P

Presenting "Ketchup"

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 21:51:32 +0000

Ketchup is a place to put your meeting notes.

Ketchup was born out of the need to have a simple way of tracking what was said at meetings.

Too often I’d put my notes on paper, in a text file, in a word document, or nowhere. Too often they’d get lost under a pile, deleted when a hard drive crashed or lost in a wilderness of files.

I wanted a simple solution to the problem: I wanted to be able to log my meetings really fast, to prepare simple agendas that I could share, to be able to quickly add notes, as fast as I could think them.

I’m very proud to present Ketchup, what I think is a very simple solution.

Paul