Greetings from the Symphony Development team. We have had a lot of feedback from you on Symphony Beta 1, and we would like to welcome you to download Beta 2, and try it. You will see a number of things that we have talked about in the Symphony Buzz Page. A lot of the Beta 2 content is direct feedback to us from you. Please keep the feedback coming. With your help Symphony will become "better, smaller, faster." We will be using this blog to post design principles, designs themselves, and ideas for product features We want to work with you to evolve the UI design, the product capabilities, and other things that you tell us are important. The only way we know how to do this is to let you know what we are thinking about, evolve our proposals according to your feedback, put them into product betas, and then evolve the implementations of these proposals according to your feedback.
So why do we want to evolve a product in this way? We think that this is the most direct way to get the features in the product that are most important. Of course some things that you want are easy, and some are not. We have heard loud and clear that you want Mac support -- we understand, and we are working on it. Like all developers we have our own individual short list of things that we think are important, Here are a couple of examples from my personal list:
(1) I want an apply button on "Property" Dialogs, so that when you modify, say the border and fill color of a spreadsheet cell or a presentation box, you don't have to bring up the Properties Dialog twice.
(2) I think our toolbar navigation needs a lot of work. We want to make it faster and easier for you to find the toolbar icon that lets you do what you want.
Of course you have your list, I have mine, and so do each of my developers. We have to work together as a team to prioritize our work, and to make sure that we do not miss things.
We hope that this will let the product evolve fast: We want it to be simple (probably simpler than it is today), and we want it to be easier to use than it is today. You are going to meet the members of our development team on this page: technical leaders, designers, performance and product architects. We are going to talk about all sorts of different things with you: "how to do things using Symphony"; UI suggestions for a future beta or product release; and more esoteric things, like capabilities for software developers to add function to Symphony.
We are excited to talk to you, and we look forward to hearing from you.