The Without Software Blog

Today, we pushed some new features out to Dough. There are four main features:

• Improved Quick Entry.. You can now easily enter new items on days that are not today. The “bubble” now includes some tabs at the top that let you select yesterday or the day before, or click on Select Date and choose a date from the calendar.

  Adding an item doesn’t change the date, so if you’ve got a bunch of items for yesterday, you don’t need to change tabs all the time. It looks like this:

  

  Somewhat nicer, I think! Check it out here.

  We really need to give some props to Freckle for the inspiration, they’ve really done a fantastic job.

• Mortgage Amount Calculator. This is really cool, and I don’t think I’ve seen anything quite like it before anywhere else. This lets you enter the amount of money you want to spend each month (or week, or two weeks, or whatever), and it tells you how big a loan you can afford, depending on the interest rate and duration of the loan. The cool thing is that it automatically shows you nearby interest rates, so you can get some idea of how much difference a half-percent can make. Check it out here.
• Mortgage Payments Calculator. This is the more standard “size of loan, interest rate, what do I pay every month?” calculator. It’s great when you’ve found your dream home and want to figure out how much it’s going to cost you. It also shows a range of interest rates and loan amounts, so you can figure out how much wiggle room you have to negotiate with. Check it out here.
• Mortgage Table Calculator. This mighty tool shows you every single payment you’ll have on your loan, and how much of that goes to the principal (you know — the size of the loan!) and how much goes to interest. This one could make your brain explode with fury when you see the interest amounts, but we all have to pay it! Check it out here.

The cool thing about the three tools is that you don’t need to be logged in to use them, you don’t need an account at all! So spread the word, and let people know about them, since they’re open to all.

And that’s what’s new! We’d love to hear what you think about the new features.

James and I have been working hard on an update to Dough that we should be pushing out in the next week or so. There are a bunch of cool improvements that we hope you’ll like. We’ll be writing about them in more detail on our new Dough blog when we release them, but here’s a taste.

Based on some really cool work we saw on Freckle, we’ve improved the quick entry to allow you to select a date. It’s a subtle change, but it makes entering in transactions a day or two later much, much easier. We also cleaned up and improved the look of the quick entry.

We’ve also added a number of tools for figuring out loan or mortgage rates. One of my favourites is unique to Dough. You can specify how much money you can afford monthly, and Dough will tell you how big a mortgage you can afford at various interest rates.

Our focus right now is on improving what we’ve already got, rather than adding a lot of new features. If there’s anything you’d like to see streamlined or improved, we’d love to hear from you! In the meantime, keep your eyes here, as the update is imminent.

It’s been busy here in the last week or so since we launched Dough! So many great comments from people, and many great suggestions. We’ve already implemented a few of them, so I figured I’d post here about some of the changes.

First, we’ve updated the main site. It looks much cleaner now, and includes a front-and-centre privacy policy. Privacy is very important to us, as it is to you, and we want everyone to know that we don’t intend to give or sell any data to anyone, ever. That just isn’t our business model.

We’ve also removed the Google ads that we originally displayed for much the same reason. The income generated from the ads would be minimal, and they just hurt the experience. However, we had all this space, so we filled it with a fantastic account balance display.

Why is it fantastic? Well, if you click on a balance, you can adjust it. Why might you do this? Well, at first it could be to set your current balance, so that Dough is in sync with your actual bank and credit card balances. However, you might lose a bunch of receipts or forget to put information into Dough for a few days. Not a problem! Just change your balance, and Dough will automatically create an adjustment for you and put it into an “uncategorized” category.

We’ve also been making a lot of little under-the-hood changes to improve speed, make things look nicer and basically polish what’s there.

In the meantime, keep those cards and letters coming!

We here at Without Software like to save money whenever we can! A big part of saving is knowing where you’re spending money. So, we’ve thrown together a little tool to help you track your expenses. Best of all, you can include your spouse, boy- or girl-friend, housemate, or anyone else you want to join you. This lets you track your expenses collectively, as a household!

You can check it out at http://yourdough.com. It’s free (except for some Google ads), so create an account and give it a go!

Spice now has a bunch of new features that you might like to check out!

1. Resumes are now viewed using iPaper. This is much better than the HTML conversion views we used to use. Generally, they’ll look just like they did in the original document.
2. Improved search. Doing a search now includes full-text searching of the resumes, and even highlights the keywords you were searching for when viewing a person.
3. Status is now changed in the header of people and positions rather than in the sidebar. This also reduces changing status to two clicks.
4. Resume import has improved in both accuracy and speed, especially via the email dropbox. In most cases, emailed resumes will be processed within 30 seconds of sending them!

Things have been quieter than I’d hoped here on the Without Software blog, but for good reason: we’re prepping our first big update! There are a lot of changes coming, and I thought I’d take a moment and share what’s coming!

• Voting. When someone has applied for a position, you can vote either yes or no. Everyone on your account has a vote, and you can use this to easily determine who you want to hire!
• Comments instead of notes. We’ve changed the notes system to a more collaborative commenting system. You can see what everyone has said about a person’s application.
• Improved notifications. Better message displays for things that happen, like imported resumes, editing, jobs not available on your site, that sort of thing.
• Lots of minor visual improvements. Things that are pretty are nicer to look at when you’re working!

All of this is coming in the Very Near Future. I’ll make an announcement here with some screenshots when we push out the changes!

Bob Walsh of 47 Hats recently posted a short blurb about Spice, describing it as a “killer app for startups and other agile companies who need better hiring results than either conventional recruiting shops or bloated “HR mission critical enterprise” whale apps can deliver.” You can read his entire posting here.

Bob helped us with the general tone and layout of the Spice website, and gave us tons of great advice while we were starting up.

Thanks, Bob!

It was a dreaded time, every time we hired someone. Our Outlook email boxes filled up with resumes of semi-qualified people, and we needed to view the resumes, save the ones we liked, print them up, talk about who we wanted to interview, scrawling notes on the back of the resume… it was a nightmare.

“Wouldn’t it be great,” someone wisely asked, “if we had a way to organize this all online?”

It would be great, as it turns out, and Spice is the result of our attempt to make this easier. Spice does a few things really, really well:

1. It gives you a place to store resumes. Any resumes you get by email can be forwarded to a Spice dropbox account, and the resume is automatically imported into the system. The resume is converted into a web-friendly format so you can view it without downloading it into Word or Acrobat. We call this feature no data entry.
2. It has an online application form, so that people can just apply, rather that sending a resume by email. The application process is ridiculously easy — they just need to upload their resume. Spice automatically pulls out all the relevant information so that they don’t need to type in their name and address and whatnot. We call this feature one-click apply.
3. It lets you track the status of people on positions. Easily see who has applied, who you’re considering, when you’re interviewing people and more. We call this feature awesome. We don’t actually have a name for it, it’s just great.

So, why not check Spice out? It’s free for one position and up to 100 applicants, and it’s pretty inexpensive if you need more.

What a difference a year makes. If someone had told me last summer that I’d be out on my own with a few friends selling a web-based product I’d have said they were crazy.

It all happened over lunch, and then, in a fit of irony, it ate up all our spare time. A fairly innocuous posting by Jeff Atwood titled Does Software Spoil turned into a one-two punch with Are Features the Enemy. As someone who made a living writing Big Software this was a lot to think about. Then I got blindsided by 37signals‘ book Getting Real, which I read over an afternoon, and the next day had lunch with a friend.

An idea we’d had for an Old School program quickly turned into an idea we were having for a website, one that would making hiring easier for small companies, and Without Software was born.

Our philosophy? Keep things simple, focus on what’s really needed, and you don’t need software to make life easier.