Hello hunters!
This is super exciting, after a few weeks of squashing bugs and finishing up features, we've decided to officially launch Headway on Product Hunt.
Some background on why Headway came to be. Many months ago, it was a typical day at the startup I co-founded, was doing some analysis, and digging through some customer feedback. I could see there was a recurring question or even doubts in the head of our users "is your app was even worked on" – this was a pretty surprising thing to see since we've tweeted about changes added blog posts. And hell yes, we've worked on it, ALL THE TIME – how dare you think otherwise!
It came to me that there has to be a better way to inform users about changes, every change, not only big features. Because as it turns out, every change counts, every piece of info that you can share with your user-base, you should.
I figured a public changelog page would be a good idea, but that only solves half of the problem, what about the people who use your app but don't necessarily want to browse through some navigation to find the changelog page. That's when the idea of an embeddable widget came.
There are so many companies, startups, even small apps that don't communicate about smaller changes (the ones that you add daily, or weekly), only focusing on a big blog post about the new amazing feature they've been working for the past year.
And that's exactly where Headway comes in, it's your public changelog page, and it's your embeddable widget.
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@oskar Great product. One important thing that is missing is styling already read messages. A user now has no way to figure out which ones are being read and which ones are not. I see it uses `data-read` attribute, but it would be nice to have a way to style it with custom CSS or if at least by default read items had different style (e.g. grayed out)
@restuta Thanks! Absolutely agree, adding an unread indicator is top ticket on our list. We won't provide a way to style it with custom CSS but there will be an indication.
@oskar That's great that you're planning to distinguish read messages from unread ones. Another thing that would be great is if you could mark all messages as read either as an option when opening the menu or by clicking a link that says "Mark all as read". If you look at the way Facebook or even Product Hunt works, that is probably the least clunky way - it clears the unread counter as soon as you've opened the menu. You don't have to click on each item to clear it. Anyway, great work! We're thinking of using it for Resource Guru :)
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@oskar Hi Oskar, it's been a while and I see other features landed, but not this one. Is it reasonable to expect this one sometime next month?
Super awesome! Some feature requests: custom static message in widget (for example ad about pro subscription), custom tags for posts, links to Twitter/Facebook in widget.
@exentrich Thanks man! So a static message would be a pinned one so it's always somewhere at the top?
Custom labels are being worked on, definitely something we'll have. For now you can kind of work around it, and substitute text in labels (in the widget) with the provided one, more on this in the docs: https://headway.gitbooks.io/docs...
@oskar I prefer this text in the bottom, so it must look different than change log posts. Btw I really like the idea of Headway, it's definitely what I am looking for.
@bensales Well said, we always wanted to do just one thing, sure a WP instance can do as a changelog page, but then it's a whole cow of an app. Instead of creating something massive to align itself with a blogging platform, we want something super light, something that does one thing and does it really well.
@jurajivan I use Slack daily, and don't see similarities in the UI beyond the very commonly used font (Lato). I don't know, maybe I'm biased since I work with both all the time.
@kamilrejent Thanks for the kind words! I really felt like Headway can help a lot of people around, especially companies that don't want to waste time and resources on creating and maintaining their in-house changelog solution.
@kamilrejent hey, Survicate is actually our first registered account! 🍾
Don't forget to CNAME your changelog subdomain to our domain (I see you set it in your account's settings).
@bob6664569 This is something that we've been thinking about, but ...
There's a lot of downsides about pushing tech-talk commits to the whole user-base – and if we don't want to show all changes/commits, do we create a whole panel where you can pick commit messages to publish? This would be a difficult thing to plan out, so it fits everybody. If you have ideas on how could such a feature work, let me know!
In my opinion, a public changelog should be written so non-tech people can easily grasp it.
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@oskar yeah for sure, that's why I mentioned it as a "helping" tool, where we could choose to add it and/or edit the changes in order to make them more public-friendly. I easily see the GitHub changelog used like a kind of todo-list with Headaway, where we could see if we reported everything side to side.
Anyway, keep up the good work, it's a clean and useful project, wish you the best with it !
Cheers !
@adam_b_long That's the thing, we had now a few requests about "integration with GH", and literally everyone wanted this to work differently. Ones with tagging commits or with PR's, others will all commits, posted daily, or weekly, or per amount of commits, or not at all (just draft it). I don't really see any common grounds for now, on how could this work so everyone's happy.
We'll think about it, that's for sure.
This is really nice, awesome work guys!
One thing I've seen others request, but was somewhat shunned is the ability to have multiple change-logs under one account. At Alt Three we run StyleCI and Cachet, so there would be multiple changes occurring. Just another vote.
@jbrooksuk Thanks!
I'm keeping a track of these requests, if more people require this we just might reconsider our decision on not having multiple sub-accounts.
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This is great. I was writing a feature update email to our customers in another tab while browsing Product Hunt when I saw this. I just made 3 posts and now I'm installing the widget on our dashboard. I look forward to watching this product grow. Best of luck.
@oskar Great product. I just have one small design question - Is there a way to add a logo for display on the changelog page? There seems to be blank space for it. If not, it would be awesome if the padding on #body-cont was set to 90px instead of 185px, as right now it is just a very large gap between our title and the start of the content.
@tattle_jz So that white space is a design decision we felt really good about at first, but now that you point this out it does look like it's a bit excessive, by at least by a few pixels. We might just reduce it a bit.
The heading will eventually have a logo that you can upload, but at the moment it's not yet implemented. We'll do it soon.
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