Now that we’ve entered 2017, we wanted to take a moment to recognize the year gone by.  2016 was an exciting year for our company and for Simple In/Out.  We grew our family of customers, our family of products, and our family of employees.  Thank you to all those customers that use Simple In/Out.  You all inspire us every day to come to work and make Simple In/Out better and better.

Here are just a few of the many features we delivered in 2016.

Users belonging to multiple groups and having multiple phone numbers

This seems like such a trivial thing, but it really opened the door to a bunch of exciting new ways to organize your users.  With multiple phone numbers, we’re an even better employee directory than ever.

A new API

APIv3 allows third parties to update data for the first time, enabling countless possibilities to customize Simple In/Out.

Automatic updates from your phone’s Wifi connection

Although only available for Android and Windows Phone users, automatic updates based on the internet hardware you already have in your offie is a real win for check in/out accuracy.  Hey Apple:  could you please add this capability to iOS so we can do this for everyone?

Linked Companies

For a whole new class of customers, Linked Companies offers the strict separation to manage multiple companies under one user account.

The Simple In/Out Partner Program

For resellers, we offer a great program to share Simple In/Out and our host of solutions with your customers.

Simple In/Out for Mac

We launched an entirely new application to the Simple In/Out family for our Mac users.

Automatic Updates from your desktop

Now that we have desktop apps for both Windows and Mac, we launched another exciting way to have Simple In/Out update your status automatically.  We now can use your computer activity to determine if you are In or Out, which for users on their computer all the time is a real time saver.

Schedule future statuses

A big request over the years was to be able to set a status that would automatically take effect when the time comes.  We delivered on this in 2016.

Notifications for Windows Desktop and Windows Phone

For our Windows users, we now deliver notifications when other users you are following update their statuses.  This has long been a feature of our other phone apps and now Windows receives the same love.

Spanish support

We translated our Simple In/Out apps and the logged-in website to our first foreign language.  This is no small feat and for our Spanish users it’s like having a new solution entirely. We hope to make more gains in internationalization during the new year.

Simple In/Out TV for Amazon Fire TV

Simple In/Out TV can now be downloaded for free on the Amazon Fire TV Stick, which at $39.99 is the more inexpensive way to show your users on a big screen in a common area.

New reports

We shipped a couple of new reports this year.  We also focused on improvements to our date and languages to make them even better for our overseas customers.

It is also worth noting a few non-feature things that happened in 2016.

Started Wednesday Webinars

We now have a webinar every single week for users to see new features, ask us questions, and provide us feedback.  In its first year, it has been a resounding success.

Moved to a new office

In September we moved to our new office, still in the heart of downtown Fargo North Dakota.

Hired a web developer

For the first time in Simply Made Apps history, we hired another web developer.  It’s hard to imagine what life was like with only one, and the pace of fantastic updates will be noticeable in 2017.

It was a busy year, and 2017 promises to be an even busier one.  We can’t wait to share the great things we’re working to bring to our customers.

Hot on the heals of yesterday’s announcement that Simple In/Out TV has arrived for Amazon Fire TV (and Fire TV Stick), today I’d like to talk about some of the great changes we’ve been making to reports within Simple In/Out.  For many of our customers, reports are the life blood of their in/out board.  Customers use them for payroll, to find discrepancies, and to simply see what happened in the past.

Today, we’ve launched a new report within Simple In/Out that has been a big request among our current users.  We’re calling it the Weekly Activity report.  This report allows you to see every status update for a particular user across a week or two.  This is helpful for those that wish to have a printed report they can take with them.  It’s like the Weekly Timeline, but instead of charts (which don’t print with the same detail), you can get daily breakdowns of all the activity for a user over the week.  We think our admin users are going to love this new report.

With the Weekly Activity report, you can see a couple of new features we’ve implemented everywhere.  You can run the Weekly Activity report for 7 or 14 days.  We’ve expanded our other weekly report, the Weekly Timeline, to also allow for 14 days of data.  This is super-helpful if you’re running these reports for payroll, as many times payroll is a 2 week issue.

Finally, we’ve added another advanced feature for a bigger customers that exist across multiple time zones.  Under the Advanced link within all our reports is now a drop down for Time Zone.  It will always select the time zone you’re in by default, but if you wish to run your reports in a different time zone (say you’re traveling), you can now do that via this option.

We hope these report additions make it easier than ever to see your data with Simple In/Out!

In the early days of Simple In/Out, we knew we needed to build a product that allowed users to quickly see the board no matter where they were.  This meant building a fast, easy to use app right on your favorite phone.  Soon afterwards it became clear that Simple In/Out also needed a great way to display your board for the world to see.  For this, we’ve built many features like Public Links, Fullscreen Mode, FrontDesk, and Simple In/Out TV.

Simple In/Out TV is perhaps the easiest to use of the bunch. We built Simple In/Out TV to look great on your television, which you can set up in common areas for your users to see as they come and go.  We first built Simple In/Out TV for Android TV, and added AppleTV support with the release of tvOS.

The only downside to using Simple In/Out TV has been the cost to entry. Android TV devices are getting harder to find and even Google has killed its Nexus Player.  AppleTV is a neat platform with room to grow, but the lowest cost device that supports apps in $150.  For some businesses, this is a lot of money to spend for an in/out board.

Today, we’re happy to announce that Simple In/Out TV has come to Amazon’s Fire TV platform.  With this addition, businesses have a great low-cost option to get Simple In/Out on their televisions.  As of today, you can purchase a Fire TV Stick for only $39.  Now it’s significantly less expensive to place Simple In/Out TV in all sorts of places, right where your users are located.

Today is a dark day for internet here in the U.S., as there has been a massive internet DDoS attack underway most of the day.  Simple In/Out was affected this morning in some areas, but this afternoon the second attack seems to have hit us much harder.  This has affected many of the big sites on the internet today, like Amazon, Twitter, Netflix, Spotify, Github, etc.

In terms a non-geek can understand, Simple In/Out’s servers are still working great, but your phone/computer’s ability to connect with our servers may be not working.

We apologize for the intermittent problems connecting to Simple In/Out, and we hope that the DNS community can squash this soon.  We also hope that these culprits are found and prosecuted swiftly.

In the meantime, if you need access to Simple In/Out, this article lists a way at the bottom you can change your device’s DNS settings to another provider that we’ve had some luck with here at our offices.

Last month we moved into a new office. We were looking to have a bit more space for our expanding team. Our only requirement was staying in downtown Fargo, which is a developing technology hub that we wished to remain a part of for the foreseeable future.

Our new office is only a few blocks from our original spot, still on Broadway.  Our new space is in a historic building, over 100 years old, that originally was a factory. The history is soaked into every cement column here, giving it an industrial vibe. The moment we saw this space, we instantly knew this was our new home.

Below are some images of our new space. We can’t wait to build some great new software in this inspiring location.

We’re happy to announce the newest member of the Simply Made Apps team. Today, Brian Pattison is joining Simply Made Apps as a web developer.

In the Fargo technology scene, Brian is well known for his passion, his problem solving capabilities, and his eagerness to try new things.  His curiosity regarding new technology is something that really separates him from others in our field.

As a full-stack web developer, Brian can do everything from back-end database to user interface design.  With his help, we’re going to be able to create even more features that delight our Simple In/Out customers.

We’re thrilled to welcome Brian to the Simply Made Apps family.

We’re excited to announce a few changes to our most fundamental piece of Simple In/Out, the Simple In/Out board.  These changes are incremental updates that not only address feedback from our great customers, but also set the foundation for some exciting things we’re planning for the future.

More Space for More Information

The new Simple In/Out board uses a “fluid” layout.  This means the board will grow to take up more space.  This allows us to display more information, which allows Simple In/Out to provide a few more options.  For the first time, you can display user details right on the board.  For users that use details to display things like titles or shift information, this is a welcome update.

Fullscreen mode also takes advantage of this new space by allowing more information to be optionally displayed as well.  Users can add phone numbers, groups, and/or details to Fullscreen boards, allowing our users to tailor an experience that makes sense for specific use cases like common area displays.

Board Settings Improvements

For a while, our board options have been located under a small menu accessible by clicking the gear icon above the board.  While this worked, more and more studies show that menus can be a difficult thing for users to navigate.  We’ve replaced the settings menu with a panel that appears when you click the Settings icon (and disappears if you click it again).  This allows us to add more complicated settings to save the user time.  For example, font size can be set now by choosing a size instead of having to click over and over again to make the font larger.  All changes to board settings are reflected immediately so it is easy to see exactly how changes affect the board.

We’ve also added a multi-column sort option to the settings.  We’ve had multi-column sort since the beginning of Simple In/Out, but in order to use it users needed to hold down a key on their keyboard when clicking the column headers. This was a hidden power feature that is now much less hidden.

Public Link Parameters

With these changes, we’re updating all of Simple In/Out’s web boards, including our Public Links.  Public Links also get another upgrade:  more URL-based parameters.  Users can now specify options like sort order right in the URL they are sharing.

This is just the beginning of some great new things we plan to focus on for the end of 2016.  We hope all our customers enjoy these changes and keep that feedback coming our way.

Election Day is coming here in the U.S. and with that comes the recurring discussion about voting rights.  This isn’t a political post as we don’t take a political position as an organization. However, voting is hard for some and that is something we as a company can do something about.

According to Pew Research, the turnout in the last presidential election was a dismal 53.6%.  There are lots of reasons for this, but one reason is that many workers don’t have the time to get to the polls.  This is why many countries hold election day on either a weekend or make the day a national holiday, something we should absolutely do in the U.S.

Until this happens, we at Simply Made Apps are joining a number of organizations across the country that are giving our employees Election Day off as an official company vacation day.  Don’t report in, not at all, and bolt the office doors for the day (we still do email support, that’s how we operate).  This allows folks to vote without the worry of getting back to the office.  After voting, take the rest of the day to enjoy yourself.  Civic duty should be celebrated.

We think elections are important: they are a civic duty and a moral imperative.  Regardless of political leanings I think we can all agree, voting should be easy.  Democracy depends upon it.

We strongly encourage others here in Fargo and beyond to join this movement. Please support #TakeOffElectionDay. Here is a website listing many companies that have taken this pledge.

¡Hola!

It has been a couple of months since we’ve announced a big new feature for Simple In/Out.  Rest assured that we haven’t been taking the summer off, but rather we’ve been working on something big.

Today, we’re thrilled to announce Simple In/Out is available with full support for Spanish.

As anyone who has done internationalization can attest, it’s not the easiest thing in the world to accomplish.  For us, we only wanted to add other languages if we could do it everywhere.  That’s why we’re not only supporting Spanish on our website when signed in, but also all our phone apps, FrontDesk, TimeClock, Simple In/Out TV, and our desktop apps for Windows and Mac.  Many of these updates are already live and for the others they are in review and will be available shortly.

This is just the beginning.  We hope to add many additional languages in the future to the benefit of our customers across the globe.  In fact, if you have any languages you’d like to see please do drop us a note and let us know.

¡Adiós!

Push Notifications are among Simple In/Out’s most popular features.  Keeping tabs on your users can be a chore, but Push Notifications make this easy by getting your attention when things happen.  No need to constantly check your board, Simple In/Out will let you know when folks are checking in/out.

We’ve supported Push Notifications in our iOS and Android apps for a while.  We also support it on Mac desktop via Safari.  Today, we’re adding Windows Phone and our Windows desktop application to the list of apps supporting Push Notification.  Now, you can get those same great notifications on your Windows Phone or computer.  You can follow everyone in your organization, or pick and choose the users that you follow.  It’s entirely up to you.

We hope this feature really improves the experience for our Simple In/Out Windows users.