We Launched!

There it is in the title. Anyone who wants to can sign up—no more beta signups. Our long national nightmare of asking people to wait is over. Tell your friends!

There’s even a new Aboard.com, which tells the story of this product in a more thorough way with more examples. This is a marketing site designed to grow and scale, with example boards, templates, blog posts, what have you. A website filled to the brim with CCC: Content with a Capital “C.”

iOS Beta Launching Right About Now

We’re also close on mobile—so much so that we can welcome adventurous folks in. If you want to be part of the iOS TestFlight, then reply to this email (or if you’re reading on the blog just email hello@aboard.com) and tell us the email address associated with your Apple account.

If you’re like “what is TestFlight?” then just wait a little longer, but I know for a fact many of you are enormous nerds. Like all startups we’re starting with iOS, but we built the app in React Native and Android should follow soon. We like Android.

We’ve been receiving a lot of feedback, including lots of bug reports and requests for tweaks. That is amazing. That’s what we want. Keep that going. Beat this thing with sticks. We love you for it.

A Great New Feature

We added a feature that is another one of those “oh cool” things but it subtly changes the entire nature of the product. It’s this: When you right click on an image it says “Save Image on Aboard.”

Big whoop right? But one problem we’re solving is that the web is a mess. We knew the web was a disaster zone but we had no idea. One way it’s a mess is that images on the web are not always what you might think of as images. Sometimes, when Aboard tries to pick out an image for a card it’s it can’t find one, because the image is hidden inside a CSS file inside of another CSS file or some other nested-doll nightmare.

Fine, we offer a default image for “blank” cards but that leads to gray pages and is always gonna be a little meh. 

But now! You can right click over an image and—if the browser sees it as an image—you can add that to Aboard and it will grab the rest of the data from the page and make the card. 

What this means is that in, like, minutes you can make super-visual, fun, organized spaces without wrestling with image files or really having to try super hard. Used to take minutes, now it takes seconds.

Personally I had to quit Chrome and restart it to make this work. Then it worked great.

That’s it!

I know launch messages are supposed to be about OUR INCREDIBLE JOURNEY TO CHANGE THE UNIVERSE AND HUG PENGUINS but we’re not going that way. This is a tool to make data—especially web data—easier for normal, non-software people, and we’re excited to help them out. Launch just means that we can be more helpful. A lot of times we look at each other and remind each other of a potential target audience: “Soccer coach in Arizona.” “Mutual aid group in Colombia.” “Insurance adjuster in Des Moines.” “Youth pastor in rural Maine.” “Solar panel installation company.” “Kid collecting Pokemon.” “Queequeg.” (The last one is me because I’m re-reading Moby-Dick.)

That said we had a nice all-hands and everyone told everyone else how much we like and respect each other. I think we mean it! Aboard people are all over the world but maybe we can find a way to have a party. It’s important. 

I appreciate you giving us a little time. There isn’t a lot of time to go around, especially in tech. Thank you. Off we go, to help as many people as we can.