Headway — Easiest way to keep your customers in the loop

@joshuapinter Thanks man! Every time you publish a new changelog the widget gets updated, and the badge becomes red showing that there's something new under there, is this what you're looking for? If not can you elaborate a bit?

@oskar Yeah, I guess that's decent enough. I was looking for something a bit more obvious - most of our users wouldn't notice (or care to notice) that badge. Intercom does a preview thing from the right side that is impossible to be ignored. It would be great to setup like a open-on-new-item option for the widget so if a user has a change that they haven't seen it would open up the widget on first landing. Then it could be ignored but and just leave the badge until it was actually viewed or something.

@joshuapinter Hmm, interesting, while I do like the idea, I'm wondering if that wouldn't be too obtrusive – aren't you getting angry messages from your users about that Intercom sidebar popping up? Just curious. What we're planning is this thing we're calling Progressive Eyecatcher, which would animate the badge and progressively make the animation more eyecatching, all the way until it gets ... a bit too annoying not to click on it and read what it has to say.

@oskar I agree with you that if it can get annoying. We haven't got any complaints yet with the Intercom approach but I imagine users generally like seeing new features being released. However, I like your "Progressive Eyecatcher" approach. That would solve the problem of it being missed.

@igcorreia Early on we've decided not to have sub-accounts as from our experiences this makes thing super difficult to maintain. We might re-visit this idea if there's demand for this. So far, three people asked for this – not that much considering how many people signed up for Headway.

@yoavanaki Thanks, I love it too! We haven't tested any other variations, there was a very clear and specific vision of how it should work (the widget presentation), and this was the best way to present it + having a tagline and CTA on the left. I've spent quite some time getting the scrolling presentation to work – the main issue I wanted to work out is not to "steal" or alter the native scrolling inertia in any way, also even though the screen doesn't move, to show where the user is when they scroll. I'm quite happy with the results. I think this can be opensourced.

@andreasduess Thanks for the heads-up. We'll look into that.

@oskar Great product. One important thing that is missing is styling already read messages. A user now has no way to figure out which ones are being read and which ones are not. I see it uses `data-read` attribute, but it would be nice to have a way to style it with custom CSS or if at least by default read items had different style (e.g. grayed out)

@restuta Thanks! Absolutely agree, adding an unread indicator is top ticket on our list. We won't provide a way to style it with custom CSS but there will be an indication.

@oskar That's great that you're planning to distinguish read messages from unread ones. Another thing that would be great is if you could mark all messages as read either as an option when opening the menu or by clicking a link that says "Mark all as read". If you look at the way Facebook or even Product Hunt works, that is probably the least clunky way - it clears the unread counter as soon as you've opened the menu. You don't have to click on each item to clear it. Anyway, great work! We're thinking of using it for Resource Guru :)

@oskar Hi Oskar, it's been a while and I see other features landed, but not this one. Is it reasonable to expect this one sometime next month?

@restuta It is reasonable, yes.

@conarro was your system time correct there? That time difference calculation is made in the browser, we could probably move it to the backend not to run into issues like this one. How is your experience so far, is headway already running on your website?

@majkelcc yeah, my system time was correct. We haven't gone live with it, but I have played with it locally. My initial thoughts: Marking items as read: It'd be nice if the items were marked as read just by clicking the notification badge (to avoid having to individually click each item even if there is no additional content to see by doing so) Show full unread notification count (independent of limit in popup) Right now if I have 5 unread but the settings limit to 3, the badge shows 3. It might make sense to show 5 in the badge, 3 in the list, and then a "see all" link underneath to link to the full page. Customize page title / logo It'd be nice to be able to change the page title (we probably wouldn't call it a 'changelog'). Also adding a custom logo would be nice to improve the branding. Customize 'read the whole scoop' button So it better matches our branding/language. Link to full changelog page in popup (maybe the popup title?) It'd be nice to link to the full changelog page since people otherwise won't know it exists. Link(s) to external resources It'd be nice to be able to link to an external resource (help doc, blog announcement) for bigger changes. We currently have a feed pulled in from our blog for big feature releases. If headway had a "Title URL" or "External URL" field for a changelog item, we could just link to the announcement straight from the headway changelog and ditch our custom thing. Without this, we could add the link in the changelog description but that's not as ideal (requires a click on the badge, click on the item, click on the link inside item description). -- Extras RSS Any plans to allow users to subscribe to a changelog via RSS? That'd be very nice. Github integration Agree that Github integration would be useful. To me, associating a changelog with one or more GH projects would be nice. Then you could pull in recent pull requests as suggestions for what to include in a changelog item. API In lieu of a formal Github integration, a proper API would allow people to build their own integrations. I saw mention of "API" on the help docs but there was no actual content (yet?). I also came across this little UI bug in your changelog: https://www.evernote.com/l/ACfSm... Really like the simplicity of the product. Hope this helps, let me know if you have questions!

@conarro many good ideas, I think most of them will end up in our roadmap, so thanks! As for the github integration I was thinking about the same - extracting suggestions from commit messages/pull requests. Stay tuned to our changelog :)

@bob6664569 This is something that we've been thinking about, but ... There's a lot of downsides about pushing tech-talk commits to the whole user-base – and if we don't want to show all changes/commits, do we create a whole panel where you can pick commit messages to publish? This would be a difficult thing to plan out, so it fits everybody. If you have ideas on how could such a feature work, let me know! In my opinion, a public changelog should be written so non-tech people can easily grasp it.

@oskar yeah for sure, that's why I mentioned it as a "helping" tool, where we could choose to add it and/or edit the changes in order to make them more public-friendly. I easily see the GitHub changelog used like a kind of todo-list with Headaway, where we could see if we reported everything side to side. Anyway, keep up the good work, it's a clean and useful project, wish you the best with it ! Cheers !

@bob6664569 @oskar Second this request — thinking of Github closed pull requests as a to-do list for this would be exactly how I'd want to use it.

@adam_b_long That's the thing, we had now a few requests about "integration with GH", and literally everyone wanted this to work differently. Ones with tagging commits or with PR's, others will all commits, posted daily, or weekly, or per amount of commits, or not at all (just draft it). I don't really see any common grounds for now, on how could this work so everyone's happy. We'll think about it, that's for sure.

@jbrooksuk Thanks! I'm keeping a track of these requests, if more people require this we just might reconsider our decision on not having multiple sub-accounts.

@kamilrejent Thanks for the kind words! I really felt like Headway can help a lot of people around, especially companies that don't want to waste time and resources on creating and maintaining their in-house changelog solution.

@kamilrejent hey, Survicate is actually our first registered account! 🍾 Don't forget to CNAME your changelog subdomain to our domain (I see you set it in your account's settings).

@tattle_jz Wow, fantastic to hear that! 🍺

@oskar Great product. I just have one small design question - Is there a way to add a logo for display on the changelog page? There seems to be blank space for it. If not, it would be awesome if the padding on #body-cont was set to 90px instead of 185px, as right now it is just a very large gap between our title and the start of the content.

@tattle_jz So that white space is a design decision we felt really good about at first, but now that you point this out it does look like it's a bit excessive, by at least by a few pixels. We might just reduce it a bit. The heading will eventually have a logo that you can upload, but at the moment it's not yet implemented. We'll do it soon.

@exentrich Thanks man! So a static message would be a pinned one so it's always somewhere at the top? Custom labels are being worked on, definitely something we'll have. For now you can kind of work around it, and substitute text in labels (in the widget) with the provided one, more on this in the docs: https://headway.gitbooks.io/docs...

@oskar I prefer this text in the bottom, so it must look different than change log posts. Btw I really like the idea of Headway, it's definitely what I am looking for.

@exentrich Interesting, I'll put this on our list, this might get in handy for some users. Thanks for the idea Rustem!

@damien_merali drop me an email with a url to your website and we'll try to help - michal @ headwayapp.co

@bensales Well said, we always wanted to do just one thing, sure a WP instance can do as a changelog page, but then it's a whole cow of an app. Instead of creating something massive to align itself with a blogging platform, we want something super light, something that does one thing and does it really well.

@gmeliustm Thanks a lot! For now you can change the color accent on the public changelog page to match your branding better. But, we absolutely want to give the ability to upload a company logo. This will be added really soon. Adding a +1 to the sub-accounts request. Gmelius looks like a great app!

@jurajivan I use Slack daily, and don't see similarities in the UI beyond the very commonly used font (Lato). I don't know, maybe I'm biased since I work with both all the time.