^IfMine - Now with ^Notes

Disclaimer: The contents of this post are the thoughts and opinions of a lowly Software Developer working at Agile Oasis Technologies on IfMine.com.  They are not representative of the official viewpoints of Agile Oasis Technologies nor of ^IfMine.

We finally pushed the newest version of ^IfMine out today.  With the newest feature: ^Notes.

I've been working on the ^IfMine project for about a year now; slowly building it up, improving and expanding features.  The original idea was to have some sort of input on your projects.  Pose a question or two and people could answer "If it was my project, I would do this..." and provide users the ability to "Evolve" their project to the next state - clean the comment and file history and focus specifically on what the new state of the project was.

Being obsessed with the valley and startups, I always thought that this was a really cool idea at its most basic instinct.  It seemed to me that ^IfMine was really focused on that area between "I've got an idea!" and "I'm making my idea a reality!"  It really focused on Idea Refinement and gathering input.

Now with ^Notes, it takes it to a new level.  Create a new ^Note for every little thought you have about your project and you can get input on each individual thought.  Quickly allowing you to pivot your project in the direction you think is best for it - and evolve it into a clean slate where you can post new ideas once you've already established some (With an entire history of those ideas still kept).

But most importantly: ^Notes feels like it was my idea.  The content of attaching notes to a project has been in the roadmap for a long time, but when the team stepped back and we started talking about how to best leverage our infrastructure for people with ideas and projects, something clicked and I immediately began drawing out the design on the whiteboard.  I know it's not just my idea - it's the idea my team and I had and refined together - but for once I really took charge with it.  I wanted to make sure that every aspect of it was perfect, and even though it probably isn't, it feels great.  It feels like my personal contribution to the project.

If you haven't checked out ^IfMine yet, please do - especially with this new ^Notes feature.  It finally feels useful.  You can see an example of ^Notes in action where a member is using them to keep track of different aspects of his project.

I'd love to see what you do with ^Notes, and where ^IfMine will go from here with this fantastic new functionality.  If you use them in any neat or interesting ways, please write a comment and link to your project - I'm sure the team would love to see what people are doing with our product!