We’re getting close to releasing our new update to Calcapp. When that happens, we will also publish a slew of new blog posts describing all the new features we’ve been hard at work on for the past six months.
We’re excited that you’ll soon be able to view detailed usage statistics for your apps and require that your users sign in before getting access. You’ll also be able to start paying for your usage of Calcapp by subscribing to a plan. (We described our forthcoming paid plans in January.) We’ve already described many of these features on social media (we try to publish news once a week on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn), but we’ll soon write detailed blog posts describing all the new features.
Usage of Calcapp has doubled in the past six months and tripled in the past year. (Over the past seven days, our server delivered apps 20,000 times.) As such, we have also had to devote significant resources to scaling Calcapp, ensuring that we can continue to deliver a smooth experience as we grow. While outages are still rare (and apps for the most part continue to work even if we’re offline), traffic surges have caused Calcapp to be knocked offline twice in the past week, with the longest outage lasting almost an hour.
(Currently, we don’t have a dedicated status page detailing outages. However, we do publish updates on social media tracking our progress in restoring service.)
We apologize for these service interruptions and we’re taking steps to ensure that they become even rarer in the future. We have spent a lot of time significantly improving performance, which means that we’ll be able to deliver apps an order of magnitude faster in the near future. That not only means that large apps will start faster (immediately, in most cases), but that we’ll be in a much better position to withstand sudden traffic surges. The end result will be better stability and better performance.
These stability improvements will only be fully enabled once we release our next version. In the interim, we’re closely monitoring our stability to ensure that we stay up and running until our next version is released.
So what’s the status regarding that new version? We’re currently wrapping up the feature development phase and we’ll soon begin really putting the new version through its paces by doing lots of testing. Many things have changed under the hood and we want to make sure that we don’t break any existing functionality and that our new features work as intended.
Once that work is complete and we’re confident in the quality of our next release, we’ll start writing up blog posts on all the new features.
We expect the new release to happen next month.