Business Startup Week 8: Amberleaf's New Look

Just a short update this week, as most of my time was spent working to improve the Amberleaf interface screens. The revamp is also complete (here's a few sneak previews on Twitpic) and I'm looking forward to pushing the new release shortly.

Sneak preview of Amberleaf's new dashboard

As well as its first email newsletter (thanks to MailChimp), this week finally saw Plymouth Software get a logo. This is another step in the right direction for branding and marketing. There were also a few tweaks to the website, including a move to the sinatra platform.

Sinatra is a fantastic tool for building lightweight web sites and apps, and I'll be using it a lot more in the future for smaller projects where dynamic content is needed, but Rails would be too heavy. I've looked at moving this blog to Sinatra, but haven't yet found a blog engine that quite matches up to jekyll.

The first sales of Outlime are now trickling in. Last week, I released a free version of Outlime, Outlime Lite, to the Market. Outlime Lite has now been downloaded over 250 times, letting people try Outlime's sketching features.

What's Next

This week, I'm refining Outlime's code so that it can provide better functionality in the next few releases. A couple of minor upgrades this week saw orientation support, so rotating the screen now adjusts the menus. There's also an option to discard sketches without them automatically saving.