Freshview News Archives

What's lunch without a tag cloud?

Posted by David Greiner on March 4, 2009 12:14 PM

For the last year or so we've been providing free catered lunches for the Freshview team. We don't provide a certain type of meal in bulk, instead every team member can order whatever they feel like that day. As you can imagine, the logistics for this can get quite complex, so I wanted to share our latest innovations in lunch management.

As part of our annual internship program, an intern will often start working on an internal app to get familiar with our development environment, coding practices, etc. This year, star intern Andrew Canby was given the task of overhauling our current lunch ordering system. This is no easy task either, hell hath no fury like 12 hungry nerds so bugs or downtime are no an option!

Andrew came up with some great innovations. I'm fairly confident this is the sweetest lunch ordering system on the planet. Here's a screenshot of the finished product right after I just submitted my order for today.

Like the other internal apps we use, the lunch ordering system is only a click away from any page on our Intranet.

The ping pong application was the brainchild of our other intern Pete, and I'll be sharing the details of that one in an upcoming post.

Inspiring your stomach

The hardest part about lunch each day is deciding what you feel like eating. Sometimes you have the perfect meal in you head, but other days your stomach isn't dropping any hints. To give you some ideas, the app shows you exactly what everyone else in the team has ordered today. With a single click, you can copy their order, make any tweaks and order away. Here's Ben's latest order history. I chose him because he's probably the healthiest eater in the office.

As well as checking out what others are eating today, you can look at their entire order history. Maybe you liked the look of that lamb wrap Jason was eating on Friday. Two clicks and the same wrap will be ready for you by lunch time.

Brainstorm with the tag cloud

I was a little skeptical about this idea at first, but it's been extremely handy. There's a small tag cloud showing the most popular items ordered by the team to date. Here's a sample of what's been popular of late. Aren't we a healthy bunch!

By clicking on any of the words, we'll show a range of popular orders that item has been included in. Say you feel like something with chicken in it. Click on that word and the following suggestions are displayed.

Click on the meal that looks best, customize it any way you like and your order is done.

Suggest as you type

If you don't want to rely on others for inspiration, you can just start typing your order. Almost instantly, similar options around the items you've entered will be suggested. You might enter turkey and avocado and be presented with the most popular orders to date that have included both of these ingredients. Very cool.

Processing the orders

The daily order cut-off is 11am, and if you haven't submitted an order by 10am, you'll get a reminder email just in case. After the cut-off, the days orders are written to a static HTML page which is then automatically faxed to the local caterer.

The caterer prepares all the meals fresh and then hand delivers them individually wrapped with that team members name on it at 12.30 each day. The whole thing runs like clockwork, so a big thanks to Andrew for a job well done.

26 comments so far

Freshview company update

Posted by Mathew Patterson on September 15, 2008 11:14 AM

When you are a web based software company, your customers don't necessarily know a whole lot about you. Many people don't realise we are an Australian company, or that we are relatively small. There is advantages and disadvantages to that, but the Freshview blog is the place to come if you want to find out all about who we are, and what we get up to.

It has been a long time since we introduced you all to a new Freshview team member (in fact, my own introduction back in January 2007 was the last). So today I want to introduce you to all the guys and girls behind Campaign Monitor and MailBuild.

In chronological order, we have:

Dave Greiner, Founder

Dave is the design half of the founding partnership with his mate of many years, Ben. Dave is responsible for the UI of our products, and when he is not obsessing about form layouts obsesses about over-hit backhand slices instead.

Ben Richardson, Founder

As the founder and original developer for Freshview, Ben has a lot of knowledge in his head. Fortunately, frequent table tennis victories have expanded it slightly! Ben also surfs at every opportunity.

Jason Hickey, Developer

As Freshview's first actual employee and core developer, Jason has made huge contributions to both Campaign Monitor and MailBuild. His aggressive table tennis tactics have the rest of the team ducking for cover.

Mathew Patterson, Community Manager

I look after all of you guys through the support system, and do a lot of the blogging, speaking and other out reach activities. 'Creative' uses of the office whiteboards fills in my spare time.

Ken Nguyen, Developer

Arriving to take the load off Jason and Ben, Ken has been involved throughout our applications, and also been crucial in organising the weekly grocery shopping, thereby avoiding the Coke running out and development coming to a standstill.

Bob Carey, Quality Assurance Engineer

We brought Bob all the way from Canada, and when not expounding on incomprehensible details about hockey, he puts in a lot of effort to make sure that Campaign Monitor and MailBuild do the job they were designed for.

Toby Brain, Developer

After coming through our intern program in 2007, Toby has joined the team permanently and has already built some excellent features into our products. Toby claims to have already heard all the 'Pinky and the Brain' jokes theoretically possible, but we'll keep trying.

Phil Gilmore, Developer

Whether you want some .Net development work done, a mountain climbed, a road trip companion, or a law of nature explained, Phil is your man. His first big project was the crucial Lunch 1.0 release.

Diana Potter, Community support (USA)

As our very first US based team member, Diana has very quickly become known to a lot of you! Some say she answers emails so fast that sometimes people have received replies before they have sent in their question...or before they even knew they had a question to ask. Spooky!

Travis Bell, Community support

Our second Canadian import, Travis brings a lot of support, scripting and design experience to the team. Combined with that is an uncanny ability to comprehend Bob's hockey talk, and an abiding love for all things Apple.

Karen Clark, Office Manager

It's no use having sweet offices if they are filled with disorganised chaos. Karen's arrival to handle everything required in keeping things running smoothly has given us all, especially Dave and Ben, more time to focus on the things we do well. Never leave Karen!

Davida Fernandez, Community support (USA)

Our second USA based team member, Davida will soon be challenging Diana as "Queen of all Campaign Monitor and MailBuild Knowledge". It's not a catchy title, but the benefits are pretty good. When you need support during US business hours, you'll appreciate Davida and Diana as much as we do.

Scott Randall, System Administrator

The newest member of our team, Scott is that 'right person' we've been hunting down for a long time. Scott will be responsible for keeping everything running, and for setting our future technical direction to make sure we can handle all the emails you can send!

So now you've got an idea who we are, we'd love to meet you too. So if you are attending a conference like Web Directions or Web Design World that we attend, come up and say hi! We don't bite (well, except for Jason, and he's on special tablets ;)

6 comments so far

Mixing with our mentors in Boston

Posted by David Greiner on September 9, 2008 5:46 PM

Last week Ben and I were lucky enough to spend a few days in Boston at the annual Business of Software conference. It takes a special kind of event to get us to fly to the other side of the planet for only two days, but just like last year's event, it was well worth it. The conference is put on by Neil Davidson of Red Gate Software, easily the nicest guy in the business, and Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek Software (yep, that Joel). These are two guys I have enormous respect for. Over the years they have personally taught me a great deal about how to run a software company, and have fun doing it.

We managed to see some great talks from the likes of Seth Godin (of purple cow fame), Jason Fried (a customer, friend and all round nice guy) and Eric Sink (a big inspiration for starting Freshview in the first place). It was also great to see a live usability demo from Steve Krug, which is just the motivation I needed to start including guerilla usability testing in our design process. Just like last year's conference, most of the sessions were inspirational or informative, and gave us plenty to think about.

But, as is the case for most events like this, it's the conversations you have outside the presentations that are the most valuable. It's not every day you can take Jason Fried out for coffee in the morning and then Joel Spolsky out to dinner that night. The web's an amazing thing for learning and sharing, but nothing beats some face to face time with real people. Even if they do tell Boston jokes that fly right over my head.

We also finally got the chance to catch up with Ben Chestnut, founder of the very cool MailChimp. I've been a big fan of Ben's blog for a long time now, and we're both doing some interesting stuff in the email marketing space. We recommend all of our customers who aren't comfortable coding their own emails to check them out, so it was great to finally meet him in the flesh. We also came up with some interesting ways we can work together in the future. Amazing what kinds of ideas surface over a few beers!

Judging by the feedback from other attendees, it looks like the conference will be on again next year, so if you're interested in smart, practical advice on running a software company, it's not one to miss.

4 comments so far

Applications open for Summer 2008/2009 Internships

Posted by David Greiner on July 30, 2008 3:03 PM

Wow, has it been a year already? Hot on the heels of our successful inaugural program last year, we've just opened the doors for students interested in doing an 8-12 week internship at Freshview from December to March.

Why should I bother applying?

We do things differently at Freshview, and I'm not just talking about the $800/week salary, free catered lunches and private offices. Our internships expose you to every facet of working in a software company. From writing real, shippable code for our applications to helping out with marketing, design and even talking to customers.

What happened last year?

After a ton of applications from some great students, phone interviews and a group interview process at the Freshview office, we selected Toby and Daniel as our inaugural interns. They didn't disappoint. Here are just some of the features developed by the guys based on customer requests and their own input.

• A component allowing customers to compare multiple campaign results in a single Flash and AJAX powered report.
• An application that automatically converts externally referenced style sheets in a HTML file to inline CSS as per W3C specifications. Our customers loved this.
• A significant new feature that relied on heavily optimized queries across database tables with hundreds of millions of rows. It was very popular.

While the guys got loads of great stuff done, there was still plenty of time for them to make us all look bad when we had surfing lessons and played laser skirmish. At least us old guys got some revenge when we took them on at lawn bowls! Here's what one of the guys had to say about last years program...

"Working as a Freshview intern was an awesome opportunity! The environment was supportive, friendly and most of all lots of fun. The best part was, I had the opportunity to work on actual application features used by thousands of people worldwide and learned more about software development than I could ever learn at Uni. Plus, my ping pong game has never been better!"

- Daniel Bowden, Wollongong University, Summer 2007

At the end of the program, we offered a full-time position to one of the interns, who is currently working with us part-time while he finishes his degree. For a full write-up on what the guys accomplished, check out this post.

OK, I'm interested. What now?

We've put together a page outlining the program, what we're looking for and how you can apply. Head on over to get started. Applications close on Tuesday September 30, 2008 but we review them as they come in, so all available openings may be taken well before that date. If you're interested, apply now.

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Freshview interns produce the goods!

Posted by David Greiner on March 28, 2008 10:17 AM

When we launched our intern program last year, we had high hopes for success, but no real idea of how it was going to work out. Now that the first program has been run, we wanted to let you all know how it was arranged, what the experience was like and what the outcomes were.

Choosing the right people

We had quite a few promising applications from prospective interns, so the first step was to find the best candidates. We used a process of phone screening adapted from the one Joel Spolsky has spoken about to pick the people who seemed to be the most suitable, the best fit and who were available when we needed them to be.

That got us down to 5 really strong possibilities, and we invited them all to come into our offices in Sutherland for a few hours. At that time we were mid-build on the fancy new offices so the day was held partially in the old office, and partially in the new one.

We ran it on a Saturday, which worked better for the potential interns who had varying University schedules, and most of the Freshview team was involved in meeting the applicants. After an introductory chat we split into groups, and the interview process was started.

Each applicant did a short written programming task, met with the Ben and Jason our developers and also chatted with the Dave and I, on the design, marketing and support side. The idea was to get a good idea of both technical and communication skills, and of that nebulous concept of 'fit'.

Finally, we retired downstairs for a catered lunch over the ping pong table, where we all chatted and we had a chance to see how everyone interacted. It was a tough decision, but a few days later we offered internships to Dan and Toby.

We know what the interns did last summer

In December Toby and Dan joined us to start their 8 week program. As promised, they were involved pretty much right away in working on actual features for Campaign Monitor and MailBuild. We always have plenty of ideas and plans for our products, and having two smart developers suddenly available meant we could release some cool new stuff.

Here are just some of the features coded up almost totally by Toby and Dan, based on customer requests, internal priorities and their own input. They worked to flexible specs that left them plenty of room to show their skills.

• Subscriber snapshots - a great new way to see how an individual recipient has opened, clicked or otherwise acted on all the emails you have sent to them.
• Exporting segments - this was a very popular request and makes it easy for people to pull out different groups of people, like RSVPs or inactive subscribers.
• Automatic plain text version - Kick start your plain text emails by pulling all the text out of your HTML version instantly
• Generate inline styles - another huge time saver, this one lets you design with styles in the head of your page, and have them automagically made inline when importing. Great for Gmail recipients.
• Campaign comparison - A super slick way to take reports from two or more of your campaigns, and compare opens, clicks, bounces and more, in a new Flash chart format.

Those boys sure earned their money! There was still plenty of time for fun though, and Toby and Dan more than held their own during the Freshview surfing lessons and Christmas party laser tag.

At the end of their time with us, all agreed that it had been well worthwhile, both for the interns themselves to experience working in a software company, and for us at Freshview who got a lot more work done, and a chance to see some young developers in action. In fact, we've since employed one of our interns who will be working with us part time while finishing his degree up, and hopefully beyond.

2008 intern program - are you interested?

We're going to be running the intern program again this year, and we'll be looking for another 2 or 3 undergraduate computer science students to join us for 8 to 12 weeks. It's a paid program run over the summer, and as you can see there is plenty of scope to do cool things, learn a lot and have some fun.

Head over to the Annual Internship Program page, where you can add your email address to get notified when applications open. We're looking forward to meeting some of you!

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Looking for an interface design guru

Posted by David Greiner on February 27, 2008 6:59 PM

We've been lucky enough to fill many of the positions we mentioned a couple of months back, and today we're announcing a brand new position for a web interface designer to join the Freshview team.

I won't go into the details because the position page says it all. If you're interested in the job, we'd love to hear from you. Likewise, if you know anyone who might be a good match, please pass this on to them.

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New office, new table

Posted by David Greiner on January 11, 2008 3:39 PM

A few weeks back the Freshview team made our much anticipated move to our new office fitout a few floors above our old space. The entire project took about 4 months to complete, and we'll be posting a full write up about how we created our dream developer setup soon, but first the important stuff...

We've ranted about our love for ping pong before. Once we moved upstairs, the old fold-up table was looking a little tired, and just didn't seem to match the rest of the decor. Something had to be done. Not knowing where to start, we called the part-time Freshview table tennis coach and former Aussie gold medalist Paul Pinkewich to find the best table he could get his hands on. After some serious research, Paul tracked down the Double Fish Volant 2, a work of table tennis art and one of the best tables in the world. How could you say no to this:

Once the package arrived from China, we had the complex task of putting it all together. Luckily the provided instructions had an English translation, but unfortunately for us we got the impression that English wasn't the translator's first language, or their second. Here's one of my favorite quotes from the opening page:

In the material of undercarriage, transparent organic glass have an crystal effect and do not baffle peoples eyesight. Generally speaking, if players shows active beauty by the gesture, technology, rhythm to audience, tables shows static beauty by its material, technics, color, style. The combination of active and static satisfied every spectators.

Solid gold. We eventually got the table together and have been loving it ever since. You can check out a few photos of the process here. Thanks again to Paul for all his research and for the post construction sessions.

5 comments so far

Want to work for Freshview?

Posted by David Greiner on December 5, 2007 6:38 PM

After just completing a mammoth office fitout and a big move into more space, we're looking for a number of new people to join the Freshview team. This is a pretty cool opportunity for anyone interested in shaping the future of 2 award winning (and much-loved) web applications used by tens of thousands of fellow designers.

I like to think we offer a pretty awesome work environment - free catered lunches, near the beach, private offices, and lots of other fun stuff. We've been holding out on making this announcement until the move into our shiny new premises was complete, but now we're all settled and really need some more hands on deck. Here are the new positions we've opened up:

• Designer and customer support legend
• System Administrator
• Senior Developer
• Mid-level tester
• Office Manager/Bookkeeper

If you're interested, we've written a little about what it's like working at Freshview. If you're not a good match but know someone who is, please help us out by passing the position on to them.

All of these positions are for our Sydney office, but if you're the right match and interested in moving to sunny Sydney, we'd be happy to sponsor you. It's actually a pretty easy process these days - just ask Bob, our new QA Engineer who we moved here from Canada.

8 comments so far

Future of Web Design report

Posted by Mathew Patterson on November 15, 2007 3:00 PM

Last week I spoke at the Future of Web Design conference in New York City, on the topic of email design. It was my first visit to the States, which is a mere 20 hour flight away from Sydney.

The conference itself had a great line-up of speakers, and though it was unfortunately hit by a few technical issues it went off well in the end. As always, hallway and after party conversations yielded as much or more value as the talks did.

My segment took place in the afternoon and I discussed the general state of HTML email since 1998, and it's potential for the future. Below are my slides, which don't make as much sense without the audio, but I've also included a recap of the major points.

[UPDATE]: The audio of my talk is now available from the conference website. Here is the direct link: The future of email design - 22mb MP3 file.

The future of email design: an outline

The cool kids don't like HTML email

Standards based web designers have taken a 'Just Say No' approach to HTML emails typically. During the talk I asked "how many people hate HTML email?" and it was about 50% of attendees.

It doesn't matter

We don't get to decide how people use technologies - the end users have already voted, and they like using HTML emails. There is good reasons for it too, including Jakob Nielsen's findings that return on investment for email newsletters beats almost anything else.

HTML email can be a better experience

If you signup for an email from Threadless, you probably want to know what new t-shirts are available each week. Having a photo of the new designs is a much faster way than trying to describe it in text. HTML can make a message clearer and easier to understand.

Back to the future

The Web Standards Project stepped into the Browser Wars in 1998, and applied pressure that led to much better standards support in web browsers and from web designers. Unfortunately, HTML email was left behind.

Clients live in an alternate reality

Your clients and bosses think everyone will be so thrilled to receive and pore through your emails, but the reality is that people are very busy and have very little attention to give their email. Web designers need to help move their clients from magical fairy land to an understanding of reality.

Understanding email

An inbox is a very noisy place, and you may only have the tiny subject line or preview pane to make your case in. It's a different context than a web browser, and you need to design accordingly.

Permission + relevance = attention

It's no longer enough just to have technical permission to send to people. The content you send them needs to be relevant too, as opposed to the 'Sims Credit Card' invitations I get from Electronic Arts! Your clients want attention for their message, so they need to have permission and offer relevance.

Love your text

Being able to control typography with proper headings, line spacing and emphasis is the key benefit of moving to HTML. You don't need to rely on *hacky* punctuation ______ to make your point. You should spend most of your time making the text readable and clear.

Slot in the permission reminder, unsubscribe and contact details

Those are elements that should be in every email, and you need to design with that in mind.

Be creative

Once you have the core of well formatted text and mandatory elements you can build out your design. Check out our design gallery for some great ideas.

Design like it's 1999

You might need to go back to using tables for consistency, and design knowing your images and css might not be applied. Check out the CSS support chart and testing tool for some help.

Email is dead?

Email isn't dead, it's just a bit fat. Designing HTML emails is hard and painful, which is why we have started the Email Standards Project to improve the situation. The future of email is in better, faster, smarter tools to handle the increasing volume. In addition, it is businesses sending smarter, more targeted emails that offer more value and less time wasting.

Web applications will become better integrated with email, so we don't have to double handle information anymore.

HTML email is not going away

HTML emails will be sent out, and somebody will design them. It should be web designers.

Thanks to all the Campaign Monitor and MailBuild customers who came up to say hello, and thanks to everyone who attended the talk. If you have any questions or feedback for me, just leave a comment or get in touch.

14 comments so far

BarCamp Sydney - better late than never

Posted by David Greiner on August 24, 2007 6:17 PM

I meant to get this post up earlier today, but Friday got the better of me. BarCamp Sydney is back on again tomorrow and looks to be another cracker of a day. I had a ball at the inaugural day in March, and can totally recommend it. Unfortunately the Freshview team have a few commitments they can't break and won't be able to make it. We're certainly not going to be missed though. Last time I checked almost 150 people were already attending.

It's one of the best events on the calendar to meet others in the industry and have a good chat on just about anything technology and web related. Also, kudos to the unorganisers for putting in the hard yards to get days like this going. Just like last year, Freshview is sponsoring the event.

When: 25th August 2007 (that's tomorrow people) from 9am to 5.30pm
Where: University of Technology, Sydney (Jones St entrance)

If you're going, make sure you check out Ben Duncan's "Going Garage to Global" talk. Ben's Atmail product is a great Aussie success story and he's a top guy to boot.

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The Pinkewich sessions

Posted by David Greiner on August 2, 2007 12:23 PM

As part of our mission to make working at Freshview as enjoyable as possible, we set aside the first Friday of each month for a bit of fun. This normally involves knocking off after lunch for a quick team meeting to review all the figures from last month (customers, sales, etc) and discuss where we're heading over the next month or two. Once that's out of the way, we normally get out of the office altogether.

In the past, this might be a pool comp down the pub, some ten pin bowling or maybe the latest movie that satisfies the nerd in us all (how cool was Transformers *cough*). This week we were lucky enough to have some sporting royalty pay us a visit. Yep, the most capped sportsman in Australian history dropped by to teach the Freshviewers some big lessons.

Who is this mysterious athelete you might ask? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Paul Pinkewich...

I've harped on before about how much we love ping pong (err, table tennis, sorry Paul). Mr Pinkewich is table tennis royalty, so we decided to get him in for some private lessons for the team. What followed was a hilarious afternoon where we learnt how bad we are, and how good Paul is. They don't call him the master chopper for nothing! We've put up a few photos from the afternoon if you're interested in seeing us get a serious serving from one of the best. A big thanks to Lesley, the Freshview office manager for lining it all up.

3 comments so far

Announcing the Freshview Internship Program

Posted by David Greiner on July 26, 2007 5:15 PM

Before Ben and I graduated back in 2000, we were required to do two sessions of at least 2-3 months work experience in "the real world" as part of our degree. I always thought this was a fantastic idea. It gave you an opportunity to meet potential employers, and also get a taste for what the next stage in your life would probably be like.

It was up to the students to approach the company they wanted to work for. Some students landed spots in reasonable companies, but many ended up doing horribly boring work like data entry or fixing someone else's bugs. Even if you landed a spot in a "good company" (usually a big bank or consulting firm back then), the work wasn't much more interesting and you never really got a chance to get your hands dirty with an actual project. Not only that, but most of the time they didn't pay you a cent for stealing 10 weeks of your life.

From an employer's perspective, internships can be a fantastic way to attract great talent early and keep it. As experience shows, there's so many ways of doing it wrong, and only a few ways to do it right. With that in mind, we stepped back into our student shoes to put together our dream internship program. If I was a 2nd year computer science student again, what would I want out of my time in the workforce?

A well defined, real world project

I want to be working on something real. Something tangible that people are actually going to use. Under the guidance of our development team, our interns will be given the task of developing a significant new feature for one of our products. This will be a shippable feature used by tens of thousands of people in more than 100 countries. They won't be bored.

Exposure

When I was studying, most of my fellow students were thrown into a small department within a much larger company. They were never really given an opportunity to see the entire process of developing and selling software. We're a small company. You can fit our design, marketing, support and admin team in a mini van with room to move. As well as developing real software, our interns will be exposed to marketing our software, testing, writing documentation and even talking to customers.

All the trimmings

I still remember horror stories from those doing long and incredibly boring hours for little to no money. Although unpaid internships are quite common, we'll be paying $800/week. On top of this, you'll have a fridge full of free food and soft drink, be invited to our monthly company outings and will need to be available for a ping pong challenge at a moments notice.

What's the catch?

There's only one. You need to be awesome. We're very fussy about who we hire and will be just as picky for our interns. Does this sound like you?

• Top grades (at least a distinction average).
• Some experience with software development, the more the better. Perhaps you've already written your own apps or contributed to another project.
• In your second or third year of a computer science or related degree.

We've written more about the program, including how you can apply on the official Intern Program page. We'll post an update here when the 2-3 spots have been filled.

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Mat Patterson joins the Freshview team

Posted by David Greiner on January 2, 2007 11:35 AM

We're wrapped to announce that after an amazing response to our recent position opening, Mat Patterson has joined the Freshview team.

A Cronulla local (like founders Dave and Ben), Mat brings loads of design experience to the team. As well as his experience managing some of the biggest corporate sites in the country, Mat's also the brains behind Designers Inhouse, a popular email discussion list for the silent masses of designers working for non-design companies. As a long time Campaign Monitor customer and recent MailBuild evangelist, we think Mat's the perfect person to help our customers get the most out of our software and continue blowing their clients away.

If you're a Campaign Monitor or MailBuild customer you'll be hearing plenty from Mat, whether it's answering a support question you might have, a helpful post on one of our blogs or some of the cool initiatives we've got planned for the coming months.

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