I’m super happy to announce that Simple Schedule is now, officially, open for public beta testing. I can’t believe that I have come so far already with the app and am excited that I have come to this milestone!

This week I concentrated on getting a new website up for the marketing site, to replace the holding site, and also worked on tweaking the actual app to give a bit more information about the beta. I added a few ‘support’ articles but feel I need to expand this even more. At the moment there are no guides on how to add events and do other things.

Development certainly will keep going as I build out the rest of the features and squash bugs.

It feels weird and exciting to open it up… even though I had a dev url always available this feels different.

I wrote my first email to go out to everyone that registered interest on the holding site. You can see this below or view it in a browser. (It’s not sent just yet but will at Feb 15th 10:00 AM Pacific).

Hey, this is Vincent, the creator of Simple Schedule.

I want to thank you for signing up to the beta email list and taking an interest so early on in the development process. It means a lot to me!

I’m happy to announce that Simple Schedule is now open to everyone as a public beta. To celebrate I also created a new homepage.

"Beta" means… stuff might just break! By opening it up I’m looking for feedback about the service, learn more of your needs and work towards completing everything necessary to implement features and fix bugs.

The app is 95% functional at the moment, as envisioned when I had it on the drawing board. It is missing a few features that will hopefully ship during beta. These are listed below:

Appointments
Events with time slots
Billing (Boooo!)


During the beta, the service is free to use and there will be more updates on pricing structure as I go.

For your information you can always follow along the blog posts that I write daily or weekly. You can head over to a special section of my personal site to find out more.

I urge you to keep an eye on the public Trello board I created there. This contains everything I’m working on. It will show bugs, features, design tweaks etc. I’ll be adding to it as you report bugs and have feedback for me.

I really do appreciate any feedback you have during this time and I’ll do my best to please where I can. Email me or just reply to this very email: [email protected].

Once you are registered, you can click on the “beta” badge on the top right to pull up (“down”) contact details and links to the website.

I rely on word of mouth, so if you know someone that would find the service useful please share.

I’m really excited to where this project can go.

- Vincent

If you like to contribute, please email me or let me know via Micro.blog. There is also the Simple Schedule site where you can sign up for a beta. On top, there is now a public Trello board with beta site progress. You can visit the 'beta' website to play around.

For other posts on the challenge, check out the links below:

1. Code challenge - from zero to web app in 60 days.
2. Code challenge - Prelude and Day 1 - Setting things up.
3. Code challenge - Day 2.
4. Code challenge - Day 3. Holding page.
5. Code Challenge - Day 4. A login page and a few tweaks.
6. Code Challenge - Day 5. Registration page and preliminary app navigation.
7. Code Challenge - Day 6. Getting in the groove, new events, MVP considerations.
8. Code Challenge - Day 7. 'My Events' view.
9. Code Challenge - Day 8. Burning the midnight oil, loud music and good progress.
10. Code Challenge - Day 9. Progress, changes and regrets.
11. Code Challenge - Day 10. There are no events, pricing thoughts and badges.
12. Code Challenge - Day 11. New logo, further changes to event details and a tiny tweak.
13. Code Challenge - Day 12. Final frontend stretch.
14. Code Challenge - Day 13. Choosing Rails, getting into the swing and thoughts on a multi tenancy app.
15. Code Challenge - Day 14 & 15. Blog post thoughts, passwords and learning.
16. Simple Schedule - Day 16 & 17. Register, Login and sharing progress.
17. Simple Schedule Dev Diary - Week 4. Profile, Settings, Passwords and Attendees.
18. Simple Schedule Dev Diary - Week 5. Events, bookings and getting ready for the beta.