Feb / March 2017 Recap

New Products & Benefits

• Wireframes – Pre-built responsive website layouts that can be quickly customized. Big hit with members! We will aggressively pursue this product and build up our library quickly for members.
  
  
• Audio Essentials – 2-pack of audio widgets, including a simple slim audio player, as well as a full-featured showcase style Pro version complete with playlists and images.
  
  
• Bells Theme – Theme designed with a wedding planning service in mind, although this classic design is a great fit for a broad range of businesses.
  
  
• Quickstart Tutorial Series – Learn Muse on your lunch break! Designed for users who want to get started quickly (or decide if Muse is right for their project), this new 10-part video series covers only the most essential elements and tools in Adobe Muse.
  
  
• Social Icons 2.0 – A pack of over 500 social icons to use in Muse sites, available in multiple formats.

• 6 new and updated product tutorial videos.

Upcoming Projects & Priorities

(please note priorities and projects are subject to change)

 
New Projects:

• Table Connect – Based on our "Connect" series of CSV managed widgets, Table Connect enables you to build complex data tables using online spreadsheets. This widget perfectly showcases the true power of using Connect and Google Sheets to power widgets, and I'm really excited for you to see it.
  
  
• Social Sharing Widget – A complete rebuild and update of our existing social sharing widget, enabling users to share content via email and through popular social networks.
  
  
• Tax / Accountant Theme – A beautiful corporate design suitable for accountants or any professional service business.
  
  
• WireFrames / Stacks – We're working on another pack of Stacks, along with an update to our recently released wireframe pack.
  
  
• Year Change Widget – A very small and simple widget that automatically updates the year or date of a text element on your website (great for footers!).

Final Thoughts

Development Update

Our development team has grown tremendously over the last year, and I'm really excited about some of the new products and technology we're leveraging to build better products. Here are a few (techy) updates that I thought our members may appreciate knowing about the MuseThemes dev group:

• New Hire – We've hired a new full-time developer (starting late March), bringing our total devs up to 3. This gives us serious development horsepower in-house, and we can tackle more ambitious projects. Our recent hire will initially focus on improving older widgets and squashing bugs.
  
  
• Build / Automation System - built in house, our new file (.mucow) build and automation system is magic. In a nutshell, this system allows us to develop and code our widgets in modular components, and then an automated system compiles all of the modules into a finished widget. It's complex, but I can easily sum up the advantages to our members in the following points:
  
  
• Better Quality Widgets - the build system checks for errors, and makes sure everything is working together as intended.
  
  
• More Powerful Features - we can use modern frameworks like VueJS and React, which are then transpiled by the build system into widget-friendly JS.
  
  
• Smaller / Faster / More Secure Widgets - the build system has built in obfuscation and minification, which makes our widgets leaner and harder for other sites to rip off.
  
  
The build system is complex, but it's something very special to MuseThemes and you won't find anything like this with other Muse resources. We do a ton of behind the scenes work you'll probably never see to ensure our products are built to the highest quality standards, and light years ahead of the competition. 

• Muse Matter - Muse Matter is our internal working name for a unified set of scripts that power widgets. These scripts can be updated in one location and automatically update all live widgets instantaneously. We're going to host the scripts for you (on our Content Delivery Network) and many of our widgets will reference them. The amazing benefit to this is that if we need to update a widget due a bug or Muse update, we'll simply update our hosted version, and any instance of that widget live on the web will instantly update as well. More to come on this...

To Sum Things Up...

It feels like we've really hit our stride this year. Our product release calendar was planned back in December – which included some ambitious product ideas – and so far it's been smooth sailing. Releases such as our Search Essentials and WireFrames have received huge positive feedback from members. New developments such as the widget build system above have dropped our widget bug rate down significantly, and the quality of our new products is at an all time high. I'm proud of the whole team, and really excited for the year ahead!