Friday, November 23, 2012

1.16, Best Score Estimator Ever and Header improvements, and the Killer Feature

Kaya 1.16 Beta brought some delicious features.

Although we've been assigning resources to the Killer Feature (yet to be disclosed) we were able to pull through some changes.

The most important one is the final version of the Score Estimator, that user aleski did, and we merged into Gospeed, our Go Board technology.

This final version is fully editable. You can not only select living/dead groups, you can also single out single points of territory and mark them as you wish, for the most accurate and comfortable Score Estimator out there.

We also improved the header to show more information, mainly how many games you need to rank up and how far from it are you.

As the server matures, more and more tasks that are (almost) invisible to the users show up, improving performance, reliability. 

Currently the Killer Feature is VERY advanced. We may be able to release the first version of it next week. It is really a neat and important feature and we have advanced on its own subfeatures a lot. 

We are excited and it will make Kaya a more lively place :).

Enjoy 1.16!

Sunday, November 18, 2012

Updates, Facebook and a Live video commentary.

Many new features have been implemented on Kaya.

This week we made a visual change on the main page, displaying a new header : smaller and more compact, giving more space to the whole site.
And it came with a vast improvement to the inbox: it works more like Facebook now. Its fancy and practical.

Lately both DP and I have been working a lot on some new and exciting changes. Because they are so big, they wont get into the server until they are more or less complete, and we have devoting a lot of resources to them.

I must say that these 2 changes are huge and will change a lot how Kaya is experienced. One of them is what is known on the server as "The killer feature". Hopefully we will be able to deploy it by december, and it will change everything :).

Speaking of Facebook, we also added a very cool feature: Facebook sharing. Its cool because not only you can share a game, but as you do it a snapshot is taken and the board is shared right as you see it on that moment.

Non Kaya users can still see the game after its over, as the whole archiving system does not require an account, and other kaya users can just click and join the game and start chatting!

Also, today i will be making a broadcast from my home commenting the most important match of the Argentinian 2012 Championship.
The event is going to be broadcasted on Kaya and observers will not only be able to see the game, but participate in the discussion. The scribe will check variations and send them back to me and i will respond on them on the mural board.

The whole event will be recorded and used as an example on the power of Broadcasts. Interactive Video can only happen at Kaya :).

You can check the site's countdown(or the servers) to see when its going to start.
site's.


See you on Kaya!