Good news – the beta of Affixa is going superbly! Thanks again to those who enrolled, and if you enrolled but have heard nothing from me, check your junk mail!
Upcoming Updates
An idea came to me whilst sending a range of family history-related files to a long lost cousin via Yahoo! Mail. The various files were scattered all over my hard disk, so I created a folder, created copies of all the files I wanted to send in this new folder, re-sized the image files, used Affixa to send them by email, then deleted the folder. It seemed harder work than it needed to be, so that got me thinking about a better solution: attachment baskets.
The idea is that you can create multiple baskets into which you can drop your files. Once you've collected all the various files from around your hard disk, you can attach the contents of a basket to an email in one click.
There are several side-benefits of this:
- You can save the contents of a basket and send the same range of files over and over again, for example:
- your Christmas list - so your relatives get you something you really want this year;
- the directions and map to your office building;
- the Project Initiation, Requirements and Design documents for your customer's project;
- your CV / resume.
- You can build up the collection of attachments for an email over time and send them when the collection's complete;
- Re-size photos or zip together files by applying the action to your basket as a whole, rather than to smaller groups of files that are scattered all over your hard disk;
- There's no copying involved; all files are referenced from their original locations. So nothing out of date will ever get sent.
Of course, this will all work with Drop.io too! If you haven't had the chance to look into Drop.io yet, make sure you set some time aside to have a play. It's an ideal way to share your files with friends, colleagues and collaborators. (http://drop.io/)
Another new feature will be the ability to automatically include standard "to", "cc" or "bcc" recipients on any email. This is especially handy for those of us that blind copy emails to CRMs on a regular basis (e.g. Highrise from 37signals). This will be an account-level setting.
The Roadmap
The current target for go-live is January 19. The Affixa web site is almost finished and will appear at affixa.com at some point over the holiday period.
Wishing you all a wonderful Christmas and a very happy, prosperous New Year,
Chris
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