Like any startup, we find ourselves in a furious race as we develop new features, make ANOW mobile, and respond to feature requests. Yet the reality of rapid innovation in the software industry is we are often straining existing code and at some point, you have to go back to the basics. Refresh older code to avoid bit rot and pay the price of technical debt. In May we turned inward and have done just that and we wanted to share a few areas of focus to improve our app.

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Application Speed

We know you are busy, so we gave the team a task focused on speed. The first job was migrating our backend (all those virtual servers and the database) to a larger and faster system. Everyone should notice a speed boost and it will only get quicker as we optimize the environment.

File Storage

It’s awesome that so many of our customers are now storing all your associated appraisal files in ANOW, (over 1.7GB a day!) and all those files were slowing down loading of appraisals. So we moved files off of the server to their own home, so that performance will not be affected.  Plus this improves backup and security on files.

File Links

File links for sharing uploaded files has now been updated and made more secure and quicker.

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We hate bugs! Our standard procedure is to kill them as soon as someone finds and reports a bug. However, sometimes, bugs are like cockroaches, almost impossible to kill. So we went after the most annoying and persistent bugs with a vengeance in May.

Time Zone

Yes, we are finally able to declare victory over that time zone bug in analytics. We know this has annoyed some of us for way too long but it looks like we have all analytics records synced to the time zone where you live.

Calendar View & Appraisals Details

We squashed the view bug from Calendar 2.0. The appraisal details from inside the calendar now shows both Notes and Files from that view.

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Flash is dead

Well, Adobe Flash might not be dead yet, but it is dead to us at ANOW. It makes a huge difference in the speed and performance of ANOW and we are happy we took the time to remove Flash. If you’re interested in knowing more check out our Blog Post on “Flash is dead”.

Order Desk is reborn

We have big plans for Order Desk as it is becomes a key productivity tool in ANOW. But first, we had to open it up to more features than just a staging location for the Web Order Form. Order Desk is going to become huge new productivity tool for anyone typing orders into ANOW.​

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Data sync between the web & iPhone

We completely rewrote the sync technology to make it way faster. You should find that even very large companies with huge databases update quickly.  We also added background sync to the application updates. Finally, we added a force sync button when you need the latest updates now.

Universal iOS App

We also added code so the ANOW Mobile app works on and utilizes the screen space on an iPad. This opens up a whole new world of iPad views and screen real estate we can build on.  We are really excited about where we can now take this app.