p/headway
Changelog for your product
Oskar Krawczyk
Headway — Easiest way to keep your customers in the loop
Featured
68

Replies
Brian Curliss
Would LOVE to be able to backdate logs!!!
Jack Smith
ok. this is solid. it should definitely exist. serves a use-case like readme.io
Oskar Krawczyk
Hello hunters! This is super exciting, after a few weeks of squashing bugs and finishing up features, we've decided to officially launch Headway on Product Hunt. Some background on why Headway came to be. Many months ago, it was a typical day at the startup I co-founded, was doing some analysis, and digging through some customer feedback. I could see there was a recurring question or even doubts in the head of our users "is your app was even worked on" – this was a pretty surprising thing to see since we've tweeted about changes added blog posts. And hell yes, we've worked on it, ALL THE TIME – how dare you think otherwise! It came to me that there has to be a better way to inform users about changes, every change, not only big features. Because as it turns out, every change counts, every piece of info that you can share with your user-base, you should. I figured a public changelog page would be a good idea, but that only solves half of the problem, what about the people who use your app but don't necessarily want to browse through some navigation to find the changelog page. That's when the idea of an embeddable widget came. There are so many companies, startups, even small apps that don't communicate about smaller changes (the ones that you add daily, or weekly), only focusing on a big blog post about the new amazing feature they've been working for the past year. And that's exactly where Headway comes in, it's your public changelog page, and it's your embeddable widget.
Anton Vynogradenko (Restuta)
@oskar Great product. One important thing that is missing is styling already read messages. A user now has no way to figure out which ones are being read and which ones are not. I see it uses `data-read` attribute, but it would be nice to have a way to style it with custom CSS or if at least by default read items had different style (e.g. grayed out)
Oskar Krawczyk
@restuta Thanks! Absolutely agree, adding an unread indicator is top ticket on our list. We won't provide a way to style it with custom CSS but there will be an indication.
Andrew Rogoff
@oskar That's great that you're planning to distinguish read messages from unread ones. Another thing that would be great is if you could mark all messages as read either as an option when opening the menu or by clicking a link that says "Mark all as read". If you look at the way Facebook or even Product Hunt works, that is probably the least clunky way - it clears the unread counter as soon as you've opened the menu. You don't have to click on each item to clear it. Anyway, great work! We're thinking of using it for Resource Guru :)
Anton Vynogradenko (Restuta)
@oskar Hi Oskar, it's been a while and I see other features landed, but not this one. Is it reasonable to expect this one sometime next month?
Oskar Krawczyk
@restuta It is reasonable, yes.
Joshua Pinter
Brilliant! I would love to replace Intercom's announcements with this. I haven't tested the widget yet but do you have (or plan on having) the ability to "announce" a change? Thanks.
Oskar Krawczyk
@joshuapinter Thanks man! Every time you publish a new changelog the widget gets updated, and the badge becomes red showing that there's something new under there, is this what you're looking for? If not can you elaborate a bit?
Joshua Pinter
@oskar Yeah, I guess that's decent enough. I was looking for something a bit more obvious - most of our users wouldn't notice (or care to notice) that badge. Intercom does a preview thing from the right side that is impossible to be ignored. It would be great to setup like a open-on-new-item option for the widget so if a user has a change that they haven't seen it would open up the widget on first landing. Then it could be ignored but and just leave the badge until it was actually viewed or something.
Oskar Krawczyk
@joshuapinter Hmm, interesting, while I do like the idea, I'm wondering if that wouldn't be too obtrusive – aren't you getting angry messages from your users about that Intercom sidebar popping up? Just curious. What we're planning is this thing we're calling Progressive Eyecatcher, which would animate the badge and progressively make the animation more eyecatching, all the way until it gets ... a bit too annoying not to click on it and read what it has to say.
Joshua Pinter
@oskar I agree with you that if it can get annoying. We haven't got any complaints yet with the Intercom approach but I imagine users generally like seeing new features being released. However, I like your "Progressive Eyecatcher" approach. That would solve the problem of it being missed.
Kyle Conarro
Looks great, was just exploring options for something like this to document our smaller updates (the ones that may not warrant a full blog post). Trying it out now. Just a note, looks like there might be a timezone bug with the changelog item timestamps (I'm in US Eastern): https://www.evernote.com/l/ACcXX...
Michał Laskowski
@conarro was your system time correct there? That time difference calculation is made in the browser, we could probably move it to the backend not to run into issues like this one. How is your experience so far, is headway already running on your website?
Kyle Conarro
@majkelcc yeah, my system time was correct. We haven't gone live with it, but I have played with it locally. My initial thoughts: Marking items as read: It'd be nice if the items were marked as read just by clicking the notification badge (to avoid having to individually click each item even if there is no additional content to see by doing so) Show full unread notification count (independent of limit in popup) Right now if I have 5 unread but the settings limit to 3, the badge shows 3. It might make sense to show 5 in the badge, 3 in the list, and then a "see all" link underneath to link to the full page. Customize page title / logo It'd be nice to be able to change the page title (we probably wouldn't call it a 'changelog'). Also adding a custom logo would be nice to improve the branding. Customize 'read the whole scoop' button So it better matches our branding/language. Link to full changelog page in popup (maybe the popup title?) It'd be nice to link to the full changelog page since people otherwise won't know it exists. Link(s) to external resources It'd be nice to be able to link to an external resource (help doc, blog announcement) for bigger changes. We currently have a feed pulled in from our blog for big feature releases. If headway had a "Title URL" or "External URL" field for a changelog item, we could just link to the announcement straight from the headway changelog and ditch our custom thing. Without this, we could add the link in the changelog description but that's not as ideal (requires a click on the badge, click on the item, click on the link inside item description). -- Extras RSS Any plans to allow users to subscribe to a changelog via RSS? That'd be very nice. Github integration Agree that Github integration would be useful. To me, associating a changelog with one or more GH projects would be nice. Then you could pull in recent pull requests as suggestions for what to include in a changelog item. API In lieu of a formal Github integration, a proper API would allow people to build their own integrations. I saw mention of "API" on the help docs but there was no actual content (yet?). I also came across this little UI bug in your changelog: https://www.evernote.com/l/ACfSm... Really like the simplicity of the product. Hope this helps, let me know if you have questions!
Michał Laskowski
@conarro many good ideas, I think most of them will end up in our roadmap, so thanks! As for the github integration I was thinking about the same - extracting suggestions from commit messages/pull requests. Stay tuned to our changelog :)
choonkeat
Getting SecurityError on Chrome, due to default "Block 3rd Party" setting :-(
Oskar Krawczyk
@choonkeat Can you elaborate? Where are you getting this, what's the context?
choonkeat
@oskar i signed up, created my changelog and i embedded it in my webapp. then i viewed it through Chrome browser but didn't see anything appear. So i opened up the developer console to find js error on http://headwayapp.co/assets/js/w... line 160 `Uncaught SecurityError: Failed to read the 'localStorage' property from 'Window': Access is denied for this document.` EDIT: works on Safari. if i uncheck `Block third-party cookies...` at chrome://settings/content then it works on Chrome
Oskar Krawczyk
@choonkeat Interesting, tested on many browsers in default setup, never had this issue. Will keep an eye on this. For now it's the first report of this behavior.
Gmelius
Just added Headway to Gmelius website https://gmelius.com. Really nice, especially the CNAME support! A few suggestions: + Implement simple ways to customize the look of the changelog pages, especially the header (e.g. logo of the company and link to the homepage). + Support multiple products. Say you have 2 different products but one company, would be great to have categories/tags/sections to differentiate between them.
Oskar Krawczyk
@gmeliustm Thanks a lot! For now you can change the color accent on the public changelog page to match your branding better. But, we absolutely want to give the ability to upload a company logo. This will be added really soon. Adding a +1 to the sub-accounts request. Gmelius looks like a great app!
Ben Sales
Great product, looking forward to using this. As a slight aside, I'm digging these products that do one thing well (see also storemapper.co)
Oskar Krawczyk
@bensales Well said, we always wanted to do just one thing, sure a WP instance can do as a changelog page, but then it's a whole cow of an app. Instead of creating something massive to align itself with a blogging platform, we want something super light, something that does one thing and does it really well.
Kamil Rejent
This is a great piece of software - we use it already at Survicate - if it wasn't for you, we would have to do it on our own.
Oskar Krawczyk
@kamilrejent Thanks for the kind words! I really felt like Headway can help a lot of people around, especially companies that don't want to waste time and resources on creating and maintaining their in-house changelog solution.
Michał Laskowski
@kamilrejent hey, Survicate is actually our first registered account! 🍾 Don't forget to CNAME your changelog subdomain to our domain (I see you set it in your account's settings).
James Brooks
This is really nice, awesome work guys! One thing I've seen others request, but was somewhat shunned is the ability to have multiple change-logs under one account. At Alt Three we run StyleCI and Cachet, so there would be multiple changes occurring. Just another vote.
Oskar Krawczyk
@jbrooksuk Thanks! I'm keeping a track of these requests, if more people require this we just might reconsider our decision on not having multiple sub-accounts.
Robert Hopman
@oskar Implemented this today for www.photographytalk.com, if you want feedback / a testimonial... feel free to reach out.
Yoav Anaki
I love your landing page! Wondering if you tested it against other layouts and if so, how did it perform?
Oskar Krawczyk
@yoavanaki Thanks, I love it too! We haven't tested any other variations, there was a very clear and specific vision of how it should work (the widget presentation), and this was the best way to present it + having a tagline and CTA on the left. I've spent quite some time getting the scrolling presentation to work – the main issue I wanted to work out is not to "steal" or alter the native scrolling inertia in any way, also even though the screen doesn't move, to show where the user is when they scroll. I'm quite happy with the results. I think this can be opensourced.
vinci
I thought I need multi-language and comments.
Rustem Mussabekov
Super awesome! Some feature requests: custom static message in widget (for example ad about pro subscription), custom tags for posts, links to Twitter/Facebook in widget.
Oskar Krawczyk
@exentrich Thanks man! So a static message would be a pinned one so it's always somewhere at the top? Custom labels are being worked on, definitely something we'll have. For now you can kind of work around it, and substitute text in labels (in the widget) with the provided one, more on this in the docs: https://headway.gitbooks.io/docs...
Rustem Mussabekov
@oskar I prefer this text in the bottom, so it must look different than change log posts. Btw I really like the idea of Headway, it's definitely what I am looking for.
Oskar Krawczyk
@exentrich Interesting, I'll put this on our list, this might get in handy for some users. Thanks for the idea Rustem!
Jeremy Zaborowski
This is great. I was writing a feature update email to our customers in another tab while browsing Product Hunt when I saw this. I just made 3 posts and now I'm installing the widget on our dashboard. I look forward to watching this product grow. Best of luck.
Oskar Krawczyk
@tattle_jz Wow, fantastic to hear that! 🍺
Jeremy Zaborowski
@oskar Great product. I just have one small design question - Is there a way to add a logo for display on the changelog page? There seems to be blank space for it. If not, it would be awesome if the padding on #body-cont was set to 90px instead of 185px, as right now it is just a very large gap between our title and the start of the content.
Oskar Krawczyk
@tattle_jz So that white space is a design decision we felt really good about at first, but now that you point this out it does look like it's a bit excessive, by at least by a few pixels. We might just reduce it a bit. The heading will eventually have a logo that you can upload, but at the moment it's not yet implemented. We'll do it soon.
Adi Goldstein

Amazing and simple UI, SSL for subdomains and many more, fast and easy posting & great support!

Pros:

Amazing and simple UI, SSL for subdomains and many more...

Cons:

I wish there where a way to costumers to subscribe

Angel Botto
super idea, #upvote
Johan
Useful ! It would be great if we could sync one ore more GitHub repos to help us add our latest changes.
Oskar Krawczyk
@bob6664569 This is something that we've been thinking about, but ... There's a lot of downsides about pushing tech-talk commits to the whole user-base – and if we don't want to show all changes/commits, do we create a whole panel where you can pick commit messages to publish? This would be a difficult thing to plan out, so it fits everybody. If you have ideas on how could such a feature work, let me know! In my opinion, a public changelog should be written so non-tech people can easily grasp it.
Johan
@oskar yeah for sure, that's why I mentioned it as a "helping" tool, where we could choose to add it and/or edit the changes in order to make them more public-friendly. I easily see the GitHub changelog used like a kind of todo-list with Headaway, where we could see if we reported everything side to side. Anyway, keep up the good work, it's a clean and useful project, wish you the best with it ! Cheers !
Adam Long
@bob6664569 @oskar Second this request — thinking of Github closed pull requests as a to-do list for this would be exactly how I'd want to use it.
Oskar Krawczyk
@adam_b_long That's the thing, we had now a few requests about "integration with GH", and literally everyone wanted this to work differently. Ones with tagging commits or with PR's, others will all commits, posted daily, or weekly, or per amount of commits, or not at all (just draft it). I don't really see any common grounds for now, on how could this work so everyone's happy. We'll think about it, that's for sure.
Juraj Ivan
Why does it have the same visual style as Slack? It's very confusing.
Oskar Krawczyk
@jurajivan I use Slack daily, and don't see similarities in the UI beyond the very commonly used font (Lato). I don't know, maybe I'm biased since I work with both all the time.
Ignácio R. Correia
Hi, can you please consider having multiple products? I am launching an free product and would be great to have it inside the same account :)
Oskar Krawczyk
@igcorreia Early on we've decided not to have sub-accounts as from our experiences this makes thing super difficult to maintain. We might re-visit this idea if there's demand for this. So far, three people asked for this – not that much considering how many people signed up for Headway.