Coming Soon: 6 Exciting New CD Innovations

First off, I'd like to introduce myself. I'm Trey Hyde and I've been leading the Engineering team here at Central Desktop since the Spring of 2008. Over the coming months I'll be trying to keep you up to date with what is going on in the trenches here at Central Desktop Product Engineering.      

Last Friday (July 10th) we took a day off from our two week-long development sprint and instead we got to decide what gets done rather than the ever seeing, ever knowing, product roadmap. Why? Because every once in a while you just have to get excited about a project, whether it be scratch an itch, do something out of your comfort zone, or just some downright fun. The point is to give each developer a choice so we can see what innovation they can dream up.   

The Rules:

1. Do something you can accomplish in once day. It doesn't have to be 100% ready to ship, but there needs to be a reasonable proof of concept. 
2. EVERYONE in Product Engineering must participate, including our CTO, Scrum Master, Systems Engineers, and QA Engineers; this is team exercise.  

The Goals:

1. Create compelling new features for our customers
2. Work outside of your comfort zone--learn something new 
3. Make it a fun opportunity for professional development.  

The Plan:

Start the day a bit early with 15-30 minutes sprint planning where we agree on everyone's tasks and goals for the day. Execute. Pizza and status check. Execute. Execute. Team demo and retrospective. Drive home. Sleep.

For those of you that are familiar with the SCRUM methodology, this is essentially a complete sprint (ours are normally 2 weeks) compressed into one day.

We're certainly not claiming ownership of the idea--it's becoming a fairly common practice, especially in places that utilize agile development (SCRUM, XP, Lean, etc). Some call it "hacker day", some call it a "hack-a-thon", others a "Fedex day" ("Fedex, we deliver" is the theme).  Some companies, like Google, take it a bit further and dedicate up to 20% of their time to doing these sorts of things. 

What did we get done?

A lot. Keep in mind it will take some additional time before our customers see all of this in the product, but you should expect everything here to show up before the end of this summer.

SMS Reminders

Soon you'll be able to optionally receive an SMS reminder 10 minutes before events that you've added in one of your Central Desktop calenders.

Rich Text Editor Enhancements

We've added an "advanced mode" where you'll be able to use all kinds of advanced text and media editing features such as specifying CSS style, embedding flash, and floating content. For developers, we get an extra treat with full code highlighting and line numbering in the editor.

Google Maps Integration

We now show an embedded Google Map on everyone's user profile page that has an address listed. There is also a new "Google Maps" application block where you can specify any address and display the map on any Wiki page or Online Document in the product. In the future, we will have an app block to show all members of your company or workspace on a single map.

Central Desktop Mobile

A very lightweight first attempt at a mobile accessible version of Central Desktop. With it, you'll be able to create tasks, browse files, and search your Central Desktop account from any mobile phone with a web browser. 

WebDAV

You will be able to access your Central Desktop files and folders right from your computer, natively, without having to download them manually, and return them to Central Desktop after edits. What's WebDAV?

Here you can see WebDAV in action browsing the folders in one of my development accounts from my iPhone.

JS Template

This is a good example of a "scratch an itch" project. We haven't found a JavaScript-to-HTML rendering engine we have liked, so we wrote our own. We like it and after we put it through its paces, we're going to open source it. We've been active in a few open source projects in the past, but we plan on expanding our presence in that community; it's time to give back to the community--after all, we've built our business on it.

What's Next?

We had a lot of fun last Friday, but what's even better is that we got a lot of results and I think all of our customers will be happy with what we came up with. Look for EVERYTHING we did last Friday to show up in the product this summer. We don't know how often we're going to do this...possibly every month or a few times per quarter. What should we come up with next? Let us know, start a discussion in our forum today!