Development Blog

Still Here

Just a quick update about what's been going on with Courtyard. It's been 3 whole years since the last update on this blog. We have done a little bit better at actually making updates to the site, although those too have been pretty sporadic. Paul and I have both had a lot happen in our personal lives over last 3 years. (We've both had children and bought houses, and Paul oversaw a year-long renovation.) Between our family responsibilities and our full-time jobs, the time we have been able to devote to Courtyard has been pretty limited.

Nothing about that picture is going to change. Going forward we are still going to be limited in the amount of time we spend working on Courtyard, but we are going to try to be more organized about the time that we do spend. We've put together a roadmap for what we want to accomplish in 2015, and I will be keeping this blog up to date as we make progress on that roadmap. We have a pretty good idea of what the most critical needs are from all the feedback we have received, so we will be concentrating on the issues that will make the biggest difference.

I do want to make a few (belated) feature announcements. We have added a Combined PDF export that displays family photos alongside all of the family's contact information. This was a common request, and was a bit tricky to figure out, but I think the results are quite nice. We also re-architected our photo exports to be pre-generated, so if you have a large directory it will no longer take like an hour every time you try to download one.

But I think the most exciting update is that just recently Paul rewrote the iOS app for iOS 8. This was quite a bit of work since the code was several years out of date, but it now runs nicely and fits in with the iOS 7 / 8 look and feel. (We know that the Android app has also fallen behind the latest design guidelines for that platform, and rest assured, that is on our roadmap!)

Finally, I'd like to thank all of you for choosing Courtyard, and for sticking with us over the years. It is an honor to have you using our software. My hope is that a year from now it will serve you even better then than it does now.

Posted by Austin Taylor on 03/27/2015