Pudding with Custom Branding and Site Layout Realigned

Pudding now has custom branding! I'll be posting screen shots and (possibly) a video some time in the next week of the feature in action.

I've been wanting to realign the layout of ProjectPudding.com for a while now and I took this feature launch as the opportunity. Unfortunatley, I haven't yet added all the screen shots and videos to the site, but it's about 2:00 am and I need to sleep!!! :)

Please let me know what you think of the new layout. (And keep in mind there will be more screen shots showing the features soon!)

Pudding, now with Smart Printing

I got an email from Kathy King at UThinkIt Graphics, and she was incredibly disappointed in the way Pudding printed out her creative pieces. (Pieces = proofs/concepts/mocks) The printing in Pudding was so bad that under some circumstances the image wouldn't even appear on the page!

I never paid attention to printing before. I figured everyone would want to view everything through their browser. Now, even if I did take the stance that printing isn't the main focus of the application, there's no excuse for how wretchedly (that's actually a word?) terrible the printing in Pudding was, so I fixed it.

Let's say you've got the Greatest Client Ever, and you create them logo. This is what it looks like when you upload it and view it in Pudding. (Awesome logo design, huh? I did it myself. :) )




Originally when you printed it, all the navigation would show up , the form elements, etc...

Now, when you hit the print button in your browser, this is what you'll get.

I want to show you another view. Let's say you upload another version of your piece, it is approved by the Greatest Client Ever, and you decide to hide the comments. This is what you'll see in Pudding.


And this is what you'll see when when you print from your browser.

I call the improvement, Smart Printing, and it's now live in Pudding.

Design Studio, Creative Agency, Freelancer? Pudding Helps You Work with Your Clients. Pudding is a simple visual collaboration tool. You upload images and invite people to review, comment on, and approve your work. Sign up for your free trial at ProjectPudding.com!

Future?

READ THE UPDATE
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Hello Everyone,

I haven't done much for Ataraxis Software and my darling little application, Pudding, since the birth of my daughter. I was in a mad rush to get Pudding launched before she was born, and I did it!!! I was able to finish a small feature after launch, and I (finally!!!) got up a "tour" video of Pudding.

Unfortunately, Pudding hasn't exactly been as huge of a success as I would have liked.

During the last couple of months of Pudding development I knew it would be a long shot for it to be successful. Pudding is a very basic application, and with competitors like ConceptShare and a host of other photo-sharing-editing-viewing web apps out there, Pudding looks very 2005. Which, oddly enough, was the year it was conceived.

2005 was kind of the birth of the whole microISV/AJAX/web 2.0 era, and if Pudding launched within 3 months of me thinking it up, the product would be in a very different place right now. I could have built out the feature set, came up to speed with the sophisticated UI technologies like Flex, and implemented a totally sick Flash interface sometime in the beginning of 2006.

I tried to play catch-up this year. I convinced a couple of buddies of mine, one amazing artist, and one amazing programmer (Java/Flex - he would have picked up Ruby in about 2 hours), to join me in the development of Pudding 2.0. We came up with some really amazing UI concepts (on paper). I really believe the UI ideas we came up with would really stand up to, and in some ways beat, the current offerings in visual collaboration.

After a year and a half of Pudding development I was completely burned out. But working with these guys got me totally inspired! It was like catching a 5th wind.

Unfortunately, we all have full time jobs, and not everyone is willing to sacrifice every waking moment of their life for a software startup. The three of us have unofficially stopped working on Pudding 2.0. There's no hard feelings, it's just, life got in the way.

I'm now at a very difficult point in this journey. My options are....

1. (by myself) Come up to speed with Flex and implement a completely bad-ass UI/feature-set that will make all competitors bow to the awesomeness that is Pudding. Hopefully launch this mind-blowing/competitor-terrorizing version sometime before 2010.
   
2. Maintain the status quo because I just can't let go of my baby, Pudding. Essentially limp along and continue to run up my business credit card on hosting fees, while spending cash on banking fees.
   
3. Give up and stop. Focus on my day job and the skills I need to learn and enhance to one day work for a software company. (Program Manager anyone??? ;) )
   

This blog has captured a lot of this crazy "Ataraxis Software" story. I've learned so much. I've met some really nice people via this blog (Ian M. Jones, Ian Landsman, John Topley, Mike Rhode, etc...). But I think I've finally run out of steam.

To be continued.....

Pudding Video Tour

I just updated the Pudding tour page with a video tour of Pudding. I used the $20 iShowU app to record the tour and iMovie to stitch it together and handle the compression.

Now that's a video on the cheap!

I'll wait here for the, "....and it shows", jokes. :)

New Feature, Feeds!

Pudding now has the ability to deliver you an Atom Feed of your projects. You can subscribe to an "Account Feed', which will give you updates for all your projects, or you can chose to subscribe to specific projects.

I've decided to hold off on the "History Manager" I mentioned in a previous post. All the entries are stored (for the Feed), but I'll wait to put it into the app's UI until I feel like there is a real need for it.

"Thanks" goes out to the Rails HTTP_AUTHENTICATION plugin and the blinksale.com guys for this ATOM Feed snippet.

And..... just in case you missed the announcement, Pudding launched!

Next for Pudding

I've got a lot of very interesting things going on with Pudding, but unfortunately I can only say so much publicly. For the stuff I can't talk about, let's just say I'll be much more competitive it in the "visual collaboration market", and I'm expecting development to be able to move a lot quicker than it has in the past.

Now for what I can talk about!

I've been working on a RSS feed/History Manager feature for Pudding. The more I use Pudding, the more I really really really want to be able to subscribe to a feed of the projects I've got in there. The History Manager will be a nice addition too. It will be the same information that is provided in the feed, but you won't need to be subscribed to see what the heck has been going on in the project.

A feature like this is where Ruby on Rails really helps out. I downloaded the http_authentication plugin (I couldn't install it from the command for some reason), and I found this .rxml template. The security and delivery of the feeds is already available to me. I just need to (finish) implement(ing) the data model.