The Net Effect Blog

We here at Vitalist hope everyone had a happy holiday season and would like to wish everyone a prosperous and productive new year. We thought that as everyone starts to settle down now after holidays and breaks, it would be a great time to announce our newest update to Vitalist.

For the past couple of months we have been working on a new version of Vitalist that represents a major overhaul in both the front-end UI and back-end code. Since our last major release, many features have been added or changed that have made the interface and interaction with Vitalist more complex than we would like. So with this release we are concentrating on simplifying and streamlining the Vitalist user-interface.

Here are some of the improvements that will be included with the update:

• Improved UI
• Speed Enhancements
• Easier Batch Editing of Actions
• Edit screens will be consolidated into one (fully functional quick-edit)
• Improved Sharing - There will no longer be a ‘My Shares’ section, all shared items will be available from the main lists
• Saved Searches - The ability to create a specific search/view and save it for quick and easy access later
• SSL ability on iPhone version

We will be beta testing this update as we finish it’s development. If you would like to help us test the new version before we release it, please send us an email at beta@vitalist.com with the email you use for your Vitalist account. We are planning on starting the beta test on Monday of next week, and we will notify the testers when it is available.

Thanks and Have a Happy New Year!

First off, we would like to apologize to all of our users who feel as though they have been mislead by the recent change in our pricing structure. Although this was certainly never our intention, we recognize that some of you are upset. We also understand that these changes may cost us a portion of our user-base, but we feel they are necessary to maintain the health and development of Vitalist.

The main reason for this change is that the advertisements on the free accounts never seemed quite right to us. We always felt they were too intrusive and detracted from the effectiveness of Vitalist. In the end, we did not feel that the little revenue generated by the ads was worth the negative aspects.

After deliberating over the feedback and emails we have received since announcing the changes, we have decided to modify the structure of the free and basic plans. The free plan is meant to give users enough functionality to be able to decide whether Vitalist is for them and worth upgrading to use. To that extent, we are raising the number of projects (active), contexts, and contacts available in the free plan to 10 each. Also, because the Basic plan ($5/month) is designed to have enough functionality to satisfy the vast majority of our users, we are bumping the number of projects (active), contexts, and contacts to 50 each.

Lately, we have been working on creating an alternative to Paypal for our customers who choose to upgrade their Vitalist accounts. While Paypal has served our needs very well so far, we realize that it required extra effort on the part of our customers to upgrade. Therefore, we have created our own payment processing system that will run alongside Paypal. This system will give us much more freedom in how we set up our subscriptions. In the future, we will be able to run promotions with free/reduced rate months as well as set up referral and affiliate programs.

The first change we are introducing is the addition of a new rate plan and some changes to the free Vitalist plan. Vitalist plans will now be broken down into 3 plans:

• Free: Free accounts will include unlimited actions and up to (Edit: 10) projects, contexts, and contacts each
• Basic ($5/month) Basic accounts will include sharing, file attachments with 250 MB of storage, and up to (Edit: 50) projects, contexts, and contacts each.
• Premium ($10/month) Premium accounts include unlimited projects, context, and contacts, as well as sharing, SSL security, and file attachments with 1 GB of storage.

Other changes include the ability to pre-pay for 1 year of Vitalist with a 2-month discount, and the removal of all advertisements on free accounts.

For our customers who have already upgraded your Vitalist plan: We will upgrade your accounts to the Premium plan you will continue to have access to the Vitalist Premium plan at $5/month for as long as your subscription is active.

For our customers who are currently using our Free plan: We will upgrade your account to the Premium plan which you will be able to use until September 16, 2007, at which point you will be prompted to upgrade to continue using the Premium plan. If you upgrade at any time in the next month, you will have access to the Premium plan for $5 per month.

We have recently upgraded Vitalist’s email-to-inbox feature to work with file attachments. If you have a premium account, you can now attach files to the emails you send to your Vitalist inbox and the file will automatically be attached to the newly created action.

We are excited to announce that we have just pushed our latest update to my.vitalist.com. A few of the new features and changes in this release include:

1. Drag & drop re-ordering
2. Drag & drop between groupings
3. Drag & drop re-arranging of the filter boxes to your preferred order
4. Lists are loaded through AJAX rather than a page refresh
5. New dashboard, start page, and print settings
6. Better international language support

Unfortunately, the archives and the number of inbox items indicator are not available at release time. These should be added in the next day or two.

If you have any issues with the release, please let us know in our forums or at support@vitalist.com.

Also, we would like to thank our beta users for their testing and feedback on the update.

Just wanted to let everyone know that we are planning to introduce the newest version of Vitalist this Friday at around 7pm central. Your Vitalist acount may be inaccessible for a few minutes at that time, but we believe a Friday evening release will reduce the inconvenience for everyone.

While we still have several features left to finish and a couple bugs to iron-out, we are confident this gives us plenty of time to get everything done.

For the past few weeks, we have been working on a new update for Vitalist that will include drag & drop functionality and a few other feature enhancements. This update is nearly ready for release, but we would first like to try it out with a few beta testers to help us work out the kinks.

If you are interested in testing out the new system, please send an email to beta@vitalist.com including your Vitalist account email address. When we are ready to start the beta, we will email you back with instructions.

All data entered into the beta will be for testing purposes only and will have no effect on your current Vitalist account. As we plan on this being a short beta test, we are limiting the beta to the first 50 users who signup.

Also, please use the Beta section of our Vitalist forum to submit feedback and report bugs.

The long awaited context groupings are now back in Vitalist. You will now see the option in the upper right hand corner of the screen, along with the project grouping option. Make sure to refresh/clear your cache to see the changes.

We have been working hard on this update and were able to release it much quicker than anticipated. Hopefully everyone will enjoy this feature.

Next up on our plate is adding back the drap-n-drop functionality, which we will be getting out to you as soon as possible. As always, if you have any support related questions, please email us at support@vitalist.com, do not post them in the comments.

Obviously some of you are anxious for us to bring back the action groupings, and I am pleased to announce that Project groupings are now back in Vitalist. Now in the upper right hand corner of the page (next to the print button), you will have the option to group your actions by project.

We are also releasing some more features that everyone has been asking for:

• Persistant filters. Now your filters will be remembered when bouncing around different pages and edit actions.
• “No Project” and “No Context” filters. Now you can filters on actions without projects or contexts.
• Filters defaulted when adding a new action. Now when you are filtering a list, that filter will be defaulted as a selection when adding a new action.

We hope that you enjoy these new updates. We have been working hard to get these out to you as soon as possible. Contexts groupings will take a little longer to bring back, mainly because of the complexity of being able to have multiple contexts per action. As always, please direct any support related questions to support@vitalist.com.

Just wanted to let everyone know that we have just finished fixing some of the usability issues that were found in the new Vitalist. The fixes and changes include:

• Added the “Save and add another” button
• Added a “Waiting On” field to make it easier to move actions to the Waiting list
• You can now add a new Project or Contact directly from the add/edit action screen
• The forgotten password page is back
• Projects and Contacts are now sorted alphabetically in the drop-down lists
• Filtering by project now includes all appropriate sub-project actions

We are still working hard on bringing back the Context and Project groupings. We are going to be adding drag & drop re-ordering to the new system, as well. Please bear with us, as these features are complicated and will take longer to release.

Thank you for your patience.