HappyTC: Info

Minor touch-ups… added reminder to emails that the non-Flash version of the HappyTC team dashboard works just fine on the iPhone, for all you cool kids out there. (At suggestion of ToGu and FaNa.)

Belated Happy 2010 to all our happy users.

It’s been a quiet month or two in terms of new development — we added national flags on the Testimonials page; that’s about it.

However, growth continues apace — year over year, HappyTC continues to track 100% growth. Thanks to all our users: loyal long-time ones, but also new users willing to try out something new. We trust that many of you will turn into long-timers yourselves!

FFindr is the preeminent one-stop solution for organizing and managing Ultimate Frisbee tournaments and events worldwide.

Today’s announcement brings a FFindr-branded HappyTC for loyal FFindr users, so that they’re never more than a click away from FFindr’s resources when using HappyTC.

Christian Jennewein, founder of FFindr, announced this partnership with HappyTC on the FFindr blog. This builds on earlier collaboration mentioned here, whereby custom FFindr tournament schedules can be imported into HappyTC, and with links to FFindr included at the bottom of HappyTC emails to Ultimate-playing teams.

Welcome to visitors from the FFindr community! We hope you’ll find HappyTC a helpful addition to your arsenal of online tools for managing your ultimate life.

Released a tiny tweak, handling fancy accented characters properly in iCalendar feeds. (That’s for characters like “á” that are UTF-8 encoded.) Such characters were always handled fine in non-UTF-8 encoded feeds, but more calendar feeds coming on line (such as FFindr.com’s) do use UTF-8 — necessitating a check… so to avoid garbling, it now checks. Blah blah.

And voilà!

Released a new feature that captains will find useful: players whose emails bounce are now flagged as such, so that the captain will know when someone’s email needs correcting. (This only applies to “hard bounces”, such as when an email address is incorrect and doesn’t exist… and not to things like “out of office” autoreplies.)

A couple other minor tweaks:

• Doubled the size available to the team chalkboards (at suggestion of PiPr)
• Now show a link to the team’s Twitter account in emails and on “non-Flash” pages
• On the in-progress French sign-in page, added a link back to the English

Released a handy new feature for captains of the draconian school: the option to prevent “maybe” responses.

This option is up-front-and-centre when creating a new team. To prevent maybes for an existing team, hit Team Options / Game Options tab, and un-tick the “allow maybes” checkbox.

Props to MiGa for the idea (and no comment as to which captain school he attended ).

Another minor feature just released is that of “premium service“: loyal/contributing users get a dashboard free of ads or logos — which gives an extra inch and a half of screen space height to view the team dashboard (handy on today’s vertically challenged laptop and netbook monitors).

Support HappyTC today and go premium!

Added a new feature: whenever a player posts a team bulletin, there’s now the option to email a notification to the rest of the team.

The notification contains the bulletin’s text, as well as the player’s schedule link so they can get in and view all the bulletins and the rest of the team conversation.

As well, we re-worded and tightened up several HappyTC emails to ensure optimum brevity and clarity.

Props to FaNa for the suggestions, and the continued prodding to keep HappyTC evolving and progressing!

Released a few touch-ups:

• Tightened up certain font sizes
• Added snazzy new icons courtesy of FamFamFam.com

A handy new HappyTC feature has just been rolled out — you can now use SMS messages to contact your team mates!

It works like this:

1. Set up a Twitter account for your team on twitter.com. (You don’t need to enable a mobile device for the team account.)
2. Sign in to HappyTC, click the Twitter button and provide the Twitter account’s user ID and password.
3. Tell your team mates to use their own personal Twitter accounts to follow the new team Twitter account.
4. Tell them to enable “updates to mobile” when following the team account (and they obviously need to add their own mobile device to Twitter).

Now, whenever anyone contacts the team from within HappyTC there’s the option to “tweet” the message as well — which sends an SMS to all following players!

More info is here.

(This assumes you live in a country where Twitter supports sending tweets via SMS… currently that appears to be the USA, the UK, Canada, and New Zealand.)

A few under-the-hood changes were just released:

1. Imports of tournament calendars from FFindr.com, the definitive directory of ultimate frisbee tournaments on the web, will now be handled in a custom way. The change on HappyTC goes hand in hand with work at FFindr by Christian Jennewein, creator of FFindr — and the idea to collaborate with HappyTC was his, so props to him! (More on this collaboration to follow…)
2. Minor maintenance on the HappyTC database, which caused a few minute unavailability this evening.