Improvements to Beetight mobile

March 21st, 2010

It’s 9am on a Sunday and I’m working. I’ve just released an update with a number of improvements to the mobile version of Beetight.

Firstly, it’s now possible to upgrade to Pro from within the mobile version. You still have to go to the normal PayPal site, as they seem to not have a smartphone-optimised one, but that seems to work ok.

I’ve been having reports that the site can’t be accessed from a Blackberry. I don’t have a Blackberry, and I only have Macs and Linux computers, so I can’t run the Blackberry emulation software. This means there’s no way of me realistically developing for it, so I’ve instead set it so that Blackberrys are taken to the full site, rather than the mobile version.

There are some cases where people may want to visit the full site from their phone, so I’ve made it possible to override the mobile-detection. Click the link at the bottom of the mobile front page and you’ll be taken to the full site. You’ll stay on that version until you click the link up on the top of the screen near the login/logout links to return to the mobile version.

The launch is going really well, so I’m very excited and want to push out updates as soon as I can. We’ve had over 200 users sign up in the past couple of days, and a few Pro upgrades which is great. The more people upgrade, the more time I can justify spending working on Beetight! This is not my day job, so at the moment I’ve working on it mornings, evenings and weekends (much to the annoyance of my fiancee).

Beetight buzz

March 19th, 2010

It’s been a day since our “launch” and we’ve had some great feedback so far. We’ve got over 200 users now, more than half of those in the past 24 hours. There have also been some very nice blog posts about us. Two of my favourites are this one on Mark’s Bee Haven and this one on This Is Not A Farm. We’re so Star Trek, apparently! There’s been a few positive mentions on Twitter too.

Do keep your feedback coming in, and let me know if you’ve written something about us and I’ll give it a link. Likewise if you see something written about us elsewhere. And yes, I do keep referring to “us” and “we” when it is only me here!

- Matt

Buzz buzz tweet tweet

March 19th, 2010

We’ve now got a Twitter account, so if you use it you can follow @beetightapp for Beetight updates that don’t warrant a full blog post.

Introducing Beetight Pro

March 18th, 2010

Until today, there was a limit of six hives per user. I’m happy to (quietly) announce the pro version of Beetight. How does 1000 hives sound? I reckon that should be enough for most people. I wanted to give it a price that was affordable to everyone. I hope that people find $15 per year to be reasonable for what you get!

At the moment, upgrading to Pro gets you the increased hive limit, but I hope to soon add lots of new features for Pro users. This includes more comprehensive asset tracking, as well as an offline version of the mobile app for those of us with bad phone reception. I’ve a few ideas for harvest tracking that may be interesting.

Let me know what you think. Is the price reasonable? Will you be upgrading? What sort of extra features would you like? As ever, keep your bug reports coming in. They really help.

So, what are you waiting for? Upgrade now!

Welcome to the Beetight blog

March 16th, 2010

Hi. I’ve started this blog to give updates on the development of Beetight. I expect I will also include some more general beekeeping notes, and thoughts on hive record keeping. We’re starting to have the first signs of spring down here in Cornwall, and my bees are flying, though there’s not a lot of forage out there at the moment. Hopefully soon I’ll be able to start using it for real inspections!

That’s all for now. If you want to keep up to date, subscribe to our RSS feed.