The year of 2019 was the second year for NewReleases providing services publicly. We continued improving the service just as we did in 2018, but there were almost no advertizing efforts. All newly acquired users are by organic sources and we are happy about that fact as the growth was mostly stable. We would certainly try to get better at user acquizition, but our main goal it still to provide the service to existing users at the best quality that we are able to.
Looking back at the past year, the most significant changes are related to web pages design, API and new notification channels.
We’ve released a new visual appearance and presented a new logo. More modern and cleaner design should improve user experience, and new logo should reassemble a relation with software development.
A huge effort was made to improve the frontend application itself and we are looking forward to see what Vue 3, a JavaScript framework that we are using, will bring. But the most significant change is the switch to the most awesome Tailwind CSS. It is a breath of fresh air to the web design and we cannot recommend it highly enough.
We are not done yet. There is a lot that needs to be done on the landing page, and we will focus on it when marketing is in focus.
API was a very frequently requested feature by our users, so we made it. It took us a while as we wanted to design it as best as possible. Have a look at what is exposed at API v1 documentation page.
Soon after the API v1 is published, the first official client library for the Go programming language is released.
Sending notifications is NewReleases’ core feature, and we wanted to extend possibilities. We are glad that all of these services are used, even though Slack is still the most popular.
New notification channels:
The same way as you get notifications from us on Slack, now it is possible on Google Hangouts Chat and Microsoft Teams.
As it seems, a quite large developer community is using Telegram for communication, so we added a support for it, too.
And gaming community can now receive notifications in their favourite chat, Discord.
Another package provider is added, Rust’s Cargo. It makes the list of 11 supported providers.
Some of our users requested a feature to be able to filter in, not just filter out versions with regular expressions. We have released an option to inverse the exclusion regular expression to achieve this functionality. It is just one simple button, but provides a rather valuable functionality.
This is not a specific function, but we have dedicated to make NewReleases a stable and reliable service from the start. This was true during the whole 2019. We did not have any outage, missing email or chat notification. We will continue to make sure that high standards are kept in the future as well.
Check out progress in year 2018. And follow us on Twitter where we announce new features and changes.