Last time I told you we were announcing the private beta so thanks to all of you who have been putting Pailz through its paces. So it is probably inevitable that this month we have been playing catch up a little – removing the cobwebs from the dark corners of the app and taking out the rubbish – and yet we still have some exciting developments to report too. So without further delay let me who you around the latest update to the beta.

Pailz is first and foremost about working together, being able to capture things that need to be done and to get them to the person most able to do them at the time they are needed.  This release allows you to:

• Login with your existing Google (Gmail) address at http://my.pailz.com. Note that you will need to grant Pailz access to your account (only to authenticate you we won’t have access to any of your data) ;
• Read and agree the Pailz terms of service ;
• View your (satisfyingly empty!) TODO list ;
• Add a task for yourself ;
• Create a Pail to share tasks with friends and colleagues ;
• Add shared tasks to the pail ;
• Invite a colleague to join you as a Pailz user ;
• Invite that colleague to subscribing to your new pail ;
• Complete tasks in your personal pail or a shared one ;
• Approve tasks you created but done by your colleagues.

Hold on a sec! I have to invite a friend to work with Pailz, create my Pail then again invite my friend to collaborate on that Pail? Yes, that is a personal bugbear of ours too, we’re working on it, but we figured you’d give us a little leeway as we work through the beta. Why not try it out now? And tell us what bugs you at our feedback center.

All well and good but tasks are like London buses, they always come along in groups of 3 or 4! We’d noticed that and next time we’ll be explaining how you can capture related tasks such as minute actions.

The Pail Team

So what have we been up to in this release? First and foremost we have been working on fixing bugs, especially the things that you’ve been telling us make it hard to use Pailz. Love the way all those games like Farmville help you know what to do next? Watch out for the built-in training we’ll be bringing you soon.

Behind the scenes we’ve also been making sure the right work appears at the top of your TODO list. There are lots of signals and sources that we use to get this right and plenty more we are yet to add but something you should see right now is the automatic management of priorities and due dates on your tasks. Together with the votes from your colleagues and aging of tasks you should start to see the important stuff rise to the top.

Of course we’re not done and in particular we know things are not as fast as they should be yet. Let us know what else is bugging you over here.

The Pailz Team

We are very pleased to announce that our twice a month release schedule continues apace.

Highlights from the mid-July release are a major overhaul to the page for managing a single task including ability to add comments as you work on it and a much improved look.

Thanks for all of you who have kindly provided usability testing and other feedback, we are hard at work crunching those improvements. Please keep the suggestions coming in at: pailz feedback or drop one of us a mail if you’d like to participate too.

And so on to the 1 August release

Tim and Toby

The Pailz team is working hard this month to get the Friends and Family alpha version ready to try. We hope to show you how you can track meeting actions created with MinuteNow.com and create a priority task list using Pailz.com

Sign up to join the beta at http://www.pailz.com

In the meantime, have a great month

Tim and Toby