In the current version of Sifter, the status bar does a great job of communicating and reminding you of the status, but it overwhelms the other significant attributes.

We recently made the switch from our previous email provider to Postmark, and we couldn't be happier with the results. However, we have had to make some minor adjustments.

One of the most frustrating things about software development is receiving condescending or otherwise rude emails about your software. I suppose that It comes with the territory, but I felt like there had to be a way to minimize it.

After some reliability issues with a service provider, we're temporarily disabling email replies until we can be confident that your replies will work without any problems. We wanted to explain what went wrong and what we're doing to improve.

Now that we've been using Sifter in the wild for well over a year in addition to receiving tons of feedback during that time, we've really been able to develop a clearer vision for what Sifter should look like and how it should work. As a result, we've been able to be much more thoughtful about how it all fits together.

The devil is in the details. It's a bit overused and certainly clichéd, but it summarizes a valuable truth when designing. Now that we've sorted through some of our information architecture challenges, I wanted to really look at our new designs and question the value of every pixel to edit the interface down to it's simplest necessary elements.

It's time to return to our regularly scheduled status updates. We're multitasking pretty heavily, but most importantly, we're catching up and beginning to have tangible things to share. Naturally, not all of this is exciting, but we feel it's important to share what we're up to.

It's been almost exactly a year since we shared any information about Sifter here on the blog. It's time we returned to our roots and brought everyone back in the loop. Also, I'll be full-time on Sifter from here on out.

When I set out to start this little software company, I swore to myself that Sifter was a marathon, not a sprint. While I've done a pretty good job at staying true to that oath, I'd be lying if I said that it was easy. Balancing time between customer-facing features and back-end refactoring and upgrades is difficult.

We're big believers in evolutionary design rather than revolutionary design. With milestones, this became especially true. I briefly shared our thinking behind designing and building milestones into Sifter, and this is a follow up to show how our thinking and the interface have evolved.

Earlier this morning, we finished making some long overdue, but behind-the-scene improvements to Sifter. We've been working on these changes since our unscheduled downtime a couple of weeks ago, and taking steps to make sure that doesn't happen again has...

Sifter was down for several hours late last night due to a hardware issue. The problem has been resolved, and, naturally, we're taking steps to prevent any recurrences of the problem going forward.

Since I began thinking about adding milestones to Sifter, I've been thinking about some really cool integration throughout the interface. That thinking led to a significant amount of time sketching and designing how they would work. The more I designed,...

Sixteen months after leaving a comfortable full-time job to try and make a living off of a hosted web application, I'll be going full-time on Sifter. I put together a visualization showing how Sifter has grown over time and marked the significant milestones in our history.

If there's anything about Sifter that I have a love-hate relationship with, it's managing feature requests. On one hand, feature requests and customer feedback are the most valuable ways of understanding where we should steer the ship, and the people that take the time to share are priceless. On the other hand, some people request features with the entitlement of spoiled children who have never heard the word "no" in their lives.

We've got a lot of things going on, and while there haven't been any major updates since the visual refresh and OpenID, the next few months should be big.

We recently released an update to Sifter that included search, and despite the deceptively simple name of "search", it's actually a fairly complex feature. I wanted to run through everything involved in getting search up and running. This was written...

This morning we rolled out search and cross-project issue filtering. There's not much more to it than that, but I wanted to give a quick overview of the highlights from the release. Search One of the most challenging aspects of...

For those of you who use Fluid to create site specific browsers for your web apps, we've finally created a high quality icon for you to use with Sifter. When we set out to create the original icon, we intentionally...

I'm thrilled that we won't be having a status update this month because the status is simple. Sifter is live and now accepting customers. After 4 months of beta testing, we're ready to share it with everyone. It's worth mentioning...