OpenSource Connections
Category: Uncategorized
As the newest full time developer working on Opensource Connections search relevancy tool, Quepid, Im happy to announce that our newest release, codenamed “Athena”, is now live. This release is the first in a series named after Greek figures in mythology that aims to add powerful new features for our tool.
Athena
Athena (In the Vatican)
So what does the Athena release of Quepid contain? We focused on user feedback to guide our development efforts, so most of our efforts went into squashing bugs and adding minor, but useful, features. Several users wanted more initial guidance in their usage of Quepid, so now a helpful wizard guides you through the initial setup of usage. An oft requested feature was the ability to delete cases, and that was implemented quickly. We also added some functionality focusing on microinteractions, such as the ability to hover over certain objects to get a popup with their functionality. We fixed several bugs, and one of them relating to our frontend took our team on a deep journey into the innards of Angular (specifically, digging through Angular source code to discover how ng-repeat actually tracks objects submitted to it…). Quepid should now run more quickly and feel quite a bit more responsive!
Boreas and Beyond…
So whats next for Quepid? In our next release, codenamed “Boreas”, we want to help people better understand the significance of the search results returned, and why those search results were returned. This will most likely include visualizations that better show the exact factors causing results to return for a query.
After Boreas, we plan to add even more features, respond to more recent user feedback, and improve our UX. Much of this will focus on improving Quepids ability to handle very large (1k+) sets of queries. Our user exerience in this area has stayed the same since Quepids prototype stage when it was designed as an internal tool, and OSC never needed to use more than 100 queries. Quepid definitely works with a large number of queries, but redesigning Quepids interactions and microinteractions to be more pleasant and efficient in those use cases is a priority for us.
If youve tried Quepid out and have some ideas or suggestions, Doug (the mastermind) and myself (his righthand lackey) are always looking for feedback, whether its tweeted, emailed, or written on the back of a twenty dollar bill and mailed to… just kidding.