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We pushed out some minor fixes tonight. - Leap year issue - There was one scenario around leap year that was causing users to receive our error page. That has now been fixed.
- Notifications - For notifications around private events, we were not sending out the correct email to attendees of that event. That has now been fixed and if you are an event attendee on a private event (and have elected to receive notifications), you will receive an email with full details. Previously an email with no details was sent. Thanks Tom!
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The process that sends emails from our system shut down over the weekend. As such, you may receive a series of late emails that should have been sent out prior to tonight. We apologize for any inconvenience that you may have experienced due to not receiving your emails in a timely manner. Due to the outage, we are extending the subscription of our paid and trial subscribers an extra month. You will find the credit on your Account page in MyHomePoint. We apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused. We are taking steps to more pro-actively monitor the email processes. Please us know if you have any other questions.
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This year, Daylight Saving Time is four weeks longer than last year due to passage of the Energy Policy Act in 2005, and will begin at 2am this Sunday evening. Until recently, MyHomePoint still saved calendar events using the old DST rules, meaning that without any changes, many events and reminders would be one hour off starting next week! We have already taken measures to fix this, and everything should work correctly (i.e., you should not notice anything change at all). However, as with all changes like this, there's always the possibility that something slipped through the cracks. If you notice that any events do not look correct beginning next week, please try updating the event as needed and see if that fixes the problem. If that doesn't work, then please post in the forums or send an email directly to support@myhomepoint.com letting us know what issue you are seeing. Hopefully the government won't decide to change things like this very often, as it makes our jobs a lot more challenging!
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Things have been pretty quiet on our site lately. Partly because we are currently being pulled in many different directions and partly because we are trying to revamp the site in an effort to be a little more Web 2.0-ish. In an effort to let everyone know that we are still around, we are going to try to Keep the Posts Coming. We will definitely try to include some tips and tricks about using MyHomePoint, but more often than not, we will be passing you on to helpful posts and articles that we have run across. While we would love to be able to write our own original content, for now, we will just settle for filtering relevant content that others are writing. We have a number of good articles that we want to pass along so check back soon. Once you start digging, it is amazing how much family and organization content that is out there.
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We haven't made any big new feature releases lately since our new import functionality, but that doesn't mean that we're not working hard! We finally decided that since the calendar is the hub of MyHomePoint, it is due for a little makeover. We are currently revamping our calendar interface to bring it to the next level of functionality and ease of use. We will be rolling out a beta version internally to some of our existing users for testing, but it won't be long after that that we'll release it to the public. Believe me, it will be worth the wait!
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OK, so you can't be online using MyHomePoint all the time -- we understand that.  Martha Stewart Living presents a wonderful idea for creating a custom chalkboard-based calendar painted directly on your wall. Four shades of chalkboard paint and a few hours of your time is all it takes for convenient offline scheduling. This tip would work great in a home office or even a kitchen with an open wall. Check out the original article on the Martha Stewart website [via LifeHacker]
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We just added the ability to import calendars from other popular calendar applications like Outlook, Yahoo, Google Calendar, Apple iCal and others. Please log in (or sign up) and hop over to the Tools tab to give it a try -- there is a help link on that page that will assist you if needed. In the near future we will be adding often-requested features like multi-calendar color-coding, iCal subscription/publishing, and more, so please keep an eye out for those soon! And as always, if you have ideas for features that you'd like to see, please let us know.
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One of our competing calendar vendors, Trumba, has formally announced that they will no longer support personal/family accounts. From their blog:
"We’re discontinuing Trumba Basic and
Trumba Professional because, as an early-stage company, we need to
focus on our most profitable and “right sized” customers. The
free Trumba Basic product was simply too confusing to potential Trumba
Connect customers who wondered why we were applying a consumer
marketing approach to selling a business-to-business product."
A "business-to-busines" product. That's really a shame, and I think it perfectly characterizes the problem in calendaring for today's families. Most of the big players, in order to compete and stay afloat, feel that they have to go where the money is -- chasing after big business. Now to use Trumba, the entry-level pricing is $99 every month!
At MyHomePoint, our plans are simple -- we want to grow slowly and steadily in a way that allows us always to focus on our single goal -- solving the problem of scheduling and organization for today's modern family. If you have used Trumba in the past and are now looking for a new solution for your family, please give us a try. Is there a feature or two that you had in Trumba that you're missing now? Let us know. We are here to server you.
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You can now import contacts into MyHomePoint from any application that can export contacts in Outlook CSV format (including Yahoo, GMail, Plaxo and others). Contacts' birthdays will automatically be added to your calendar as well! To give it a try, log in and click on the Tools tab.
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One of our most anticipated features lately has been contact management. Well, it's finally here! We released our initial version earlier tonight, and although we still have a list of things to add, we feel that it's a solid start. We don't yet offer bulk import of existing contacts from other systems, but that should be coming along soon (hopefully later this week). Our take on contact management is slightly different than what you're probably used to if you've used other systems based more-or-less on the static Outlook contact model. Our contact system is dynamic and highly flexible so that you can enter exactly the amount of contact information you want in the format that best suits your needs. It can take just about anything can throw at it! We are also introducing support for "favorite" contacts that will also show up on your dashboard page (look for the "favorites" concept to appear in other parts of the site soon). Within the next week or so, we hope to put together a webcast on some of the tips and tricks for getting the most out of the new contact system, so keep an eye out for that. As always with major releases of new stuff, there may still be a kink or two to work out. If so, or if you have any other feedback, please let us know in the forums!
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This month's (October 17th) edition of Family Circle magazine gave us a brief mention in their family section as a good organizational resource for families to track their schedules! If you haven't seen it or don't regularly read Family Circle, you should check it out. It's a great magazine for busy families. Thanks FC!
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UPDATE: As of about 11:30 am CDT, the application is back up. It seemed to be down for about 20 minutes or so. Sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused. The application is currently unavailable due to an unplanned outage. We are currently working with our hosting provider to try to get this resolved ASAP and will update this post when we have more information.
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If anyone was using the site last night, you may have noticed the maintenance message as we brought things down for a couple of hours. This was to make some significant internal improvements to our application. We upgraded both our database and our code framework to newer versions, and reworked some structural aspects of the application. The bad news is that, if we did things correctly, you shouldn't really notice much difference in the site. There were no significant visible changes -- everything was behind the scenes. If you notice something that changed drastically, then there's probably an issue! If you find anything wrong, please let us know in the forums. The great news is that we've been holding off on starting into new feature areas for some time now, just waiting to get this transition under our belts. Now that it's done, we will be moving pretty quickly to start cranking out useful new stuff. Our goal for next week is to introduce tagging and (possibly) calendar color-coding. It's been highly requested, so hopefully you'll enjoy it! And there just may be a new Contacts tab coming up in the near future... :)
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We released a bunch of improvements to the site last night. Here are the highlights: - A new account page is accessible to account owners (look for the "Account" link at the top of the page when logged in). You can update the family display name now, and in an upcoming release, all subscription activity will go through this page.
- Events can now be made tentative on the event form.
- Events can also be made private with several levels of visibility to choose from.
- The group captions on the dashboard page ("Today," etc.) are now linked to the calendar.
- Most forms now have the action buttons repeated at the top for less scrolling.
- The look and feel has been slightly updated, significantly so for the aqua style.
- The preferences page now has tabs for ease of use
- A variety of minor buug fixes
Our subscription processing capabilities with PayPal are also in final testing this week. By early next week, we should be opening up our registration again to a wider audience and enabling subscription payments. The public features we've released lately have been relatively minor -- most of our big efforts have been more internally-focused in preparation for subscription processing and our transition out of Beta. Now that we are close to reaching that milestone, you should start to see some new rounds of major features coming around the corner... Thanks for your patience. :)
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We released some fixes to a few bugs this evening. Mostly minor, although one of our users did report a somewhat significant calendar display issue related to daylight savings (thanks Amy!). Got that all fixed, so we are back to working on some bigger (and more interesting) changes. Pretty soon we will be releasing some new features like event color coding that so many people have been asking for in the forums!
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