Hello Muhanad,

If you are interested to test this, pm me on Skype and I will hook you up with them so that they could give you a trial run

hi mark,

thanks for the offer appreciate it.

I don't have a live website at this moment and that's why i was asking the community member about their experience with it. But my question are you guys involved in this project or not? i would like to know what to expect from it

Hello Muhanad,

Sorry for the delay of this reply, got very occupied with the development of EasySocial. Hm, we are actually not involved in this project but we are only providing the API's on EasySocial

No worries Mark,

That's too bad, we were excited to know that you are involved in the project.. sighhh.. when are we going to see an App for joomla seeing life

@Muhanad, you can download JUnite, or their EasySocial app, or Blog app, or others from their site and use it with their demo site. With that you can perform any rudimentary testing for UI/UX and/or features you're looking for. A short and well-written critique with support will get their attention and maybe influence their future rev's but it does appear reactive rather the proactive. On the other hand, this is in some respects new territory (app with multi-platform front-end support with a REST API to Joomla back-end) so it's maybe not too odd that the first incarnations are driven more internally than from a large customer pool.

I can tell you they responded to all of my requests in a timely and professional manner (i.e. such as testing compatibility with the EB5 Alpha). We haven't yet shipped because our own development of a companion and necessary product for our customers is still ongoing.

You can look at their App and compare features etc. on your own, but beyond that from my experience (albeit limited) I'll briefly share I see these positives:

1. they are using ES API's so the foundation is strong
   
2. they have created a site and resources dedicated to mobile products, you can see here
   
3. they do respond to bug reports timely via tickets
   
4. they do take into account customer requests/requirements into the roadmap
   
5. they consistently move forward with agile dev methods in trying to meet requirements
   
6. a large number of their "desktop" products integrate with ES so you can see the company has placed a bet on ES/EB
   

and these negatives:

1. their community forum is not as robust as this one (I haven't seen any that compare to the bar set by Stack)
   
2. due to #1 above, it appears to me that they derive most of their feature-set from customer ticket requests, then blog post comments, followed by any community forum activity
   
3. like we have seen with Stack, they have a rich portfolio of products that sometimes is a bite more than they can chew within the time originally committed
   
4. unless you have an established revenue stream or paying client, it could be prohibitively expensive
   

Hello Eileen,

Thank you for the heads up on this

@Eileen and @Muhanad, one of the biggest issues I see is as Eileen point out they are biting off more than they can chew.

For example I helped a friend of mine find many issues with InviteX Extension, most of which prohibit the system from functioning at all with their last 2.9.6 release. Now, at least a month later they have still not released a patched 2.9.7 release to resolve the issues globally. This is going through their ticket system.

As for JUnite, my problem is that their release cycles are slow and not symmetric between iphone and android. In addition, they not only have JUnite but also the EasySocial and EasyBlog dedicated apps. I can nearly guarantee you that these dedicated apps have not been update as well. These products would be a great addition to any of our sites even when not immediately generating revenue but they lack some basic functions. For example, if I bought JUnite I would have to immediately have them disable ALL JGive codes in the app as I do not use it, all naming would have to be changed because I don't want my community members knowing I am using EasySocial or EasyBlog (security). These should be settings in the backend. Other functionality is lacking as well. I tried the latest release for Android and stupid things happen like when I view the stream and click on a username it took me to Google Chrome and launched that users profile in the browser rather than in the app. I don't know... just not seeing the development strides I would like to see.

This has become a rant... lol!

James

FYI, it's possible to purchase a "Customized" version of JUnite. I'd negotiate any menu changes you'd need with that version, or even just "right-size" the price since JGive isn't used and not part of the value you're receiving. The Customized plan also gets you a copy of the source code and updates for the period of your subscription and that brings along many more opportunities for those who maybe just need a jump-start and can extend/customize from there.

Their latest JUnite release includes the capability to open un-handled links in the device's default browser. I think that's a valuable feature (lets us ensure our own capabilities exposed via links are accessible to users) but of course the scenario you described is a poor UX at best or a bug

Hey guys,

I appreciate all the input that you guys have been providing here and I will pass this on to the team members from Techjoomla. To be frank, mobile related apps is something that we want to explore in the near future but we don't want to re-invent the wheel and neither do we want to end up with the same statement as James mentioned earlier, "biting off too much they can chew".

I will be discussing this with the guys over at techjoomla and get their insights on this

Great comments guys. i have myself good and bad experience in general with techjoomla and recently i believe they have improved in general specially when it comes to code stability.

The thing about junite or appcarvers in general is that we dont know what is happening and what is going to happen. They might publish a roadmap soon but the issue is bigger than a roadmap, who sets the features? who suggested the app to be built this way. The app relies on easysocial and i believe easysocial features were planned in most because we have requested them.

Techjoomla introduced groups before registration or profile types or before hashtags and mentions. who said groups should come first?
maybe their subscribers, maybe not. We are blind

I was and still excited but im not so optimistic since now stackideas pulled their hand from the project which is for a reason we don't know.
the design is outdated, and some essentials are still to be built.

of course i give them credit for providing an app in the first place and I hope they know that these topics are for us to show that we are interested but confused.

I left two comments on their blog two weeks ago but no one answered. many topics about the app went without proper follow up from them.


Hmmmm

Hello Muhanad,

Thanks for the heads up on this. I have forwarded this to them

Hi Everyone.

James & Muhanad - Sorry you felt if the comments were being ignored. We're definitely listening in. The suggestion to add in a forum was useful, and we added in a forum to better manage feedback. Here's the link
http://appcarvers.com/support/discussions/index

I hope the feature selection should become more transparent and democratic now! Previously the selection was based purely on the needs of the paid subscribers, however I understand that may not be the best way forward always.

I'd request you to add in the feature requests in there so that we can have people vote up and all the requests will be maintained together in the forum than scattered in the comments

Hi Ashwin,

May you reply to our comments on the blog. Great you have added the forum for suggestions and we will definitely use it, but those comments were general questions that i would not wanna confuse users with

Hi Everyone

As promised, we're now soliciting feedback on the features that should be added into v4. We've added all that we could find in forums, comments etc as proposed features. Request everyone to visit the forum and upvote their favourites, or add something you feel is a must have.

Based on the feedback, we're planning to finalise the list of features for v4 by this week. Hoping to have some great feedback and features coming in. Here's the list of features submitted so far - Feature Requests

@Muhanad - I've replied to you, let me know if there's anything specific I might have left out.

The roadmap for v4 is out, would be great if you guys can review it and share feedback -
http://appcarvers.com/blogs/entry/road-map-v4

Thanks for sharing

also subscribed !

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