From today on all users are able to start a private stream. After hitting the “Start your stream” button in the mobile app, you’ll see the above screen. In the top left corner you’ll see the option to set the stream to private by pressing the “lock” icon. After doing this, you see a list of your followers and you are able to select the followers with whom you want to share your private stream. When starting the private stream they’ll receive a push notification and they’ll see the stream in their timeline.
Do you want to use this exciting new feature? Update your mobile app to version 2.0.0 in the App Store or Play Store.
At Chesscademy, we strive to help our users improve at chess. To accomplish this, we put a lot of effort into the core experience on the site. That said, the learning experience has sometimes been overwhelming — it can be confusing to choose which courses to take or when to solve tactics or play games.
But we think we can do much, much better.
We're solving this with Paths, an evolution of our courses. Paths simplify the learning experience with a guided sequence of lessons, tactic sets, and game sets. This way, you're learning new material, applying it in tactical scenarios, and finally, testing your knowledge in game.
Every chess player is unique. We play at different levels, have our unique strengths and weaknesses, and learn at our own pace. We don't want our users to do the guesswork about what they should be learning. That's why we've also created a new diagnostic system that determines your level and assigns you the best Path for your needs. More advanced Paths are locked, but you can get access by "testing out" of your current Path.
Along with the Paths update comes a ton of improvements throughout the site.
We recognize there's much more we can do to improve the Chesscademy experience, so we always appreciate your feedback. Please send any comments or questions you may have to [email protected].
Yesterday we launched article [concepts](http://www.scicombinator.com/concepts) on SciCombinator. Concepts are tags on our articles automatically extracted from an article's title and abstract, giving an indication of the subject(s) being talked about within the article. This gives us a nice, loose form of categorisation that we were seriously lacking before. So, if you find a paper that seems interesting, you can follow the concept links to see other papers on the same subjects. We've got a few more ideas to aid content categorisation and discovery a bit more in the future, (there are some other things we need to sort out first though), but we hope you agree with us that this is a great start. Finally, we'd like to say a big thank you to the folks over at [AlchemyAPI](http://www.alchemyapi.com/). The automated concept tagging is done using one of their natural language processing services, and they have kindly given us free use of their API - thanks!
Concept of Constant Iteration - New Features for PastFuturePresent
A core principle of lean startup philosophy is the concept of constant iteration. At PastFuturePresent.me, the team are strong believers of the idea. We released our app out to the public early, and have gotten feedback since day one utilizing a friend and family round.
Most people refer to the term as a funding round but we actually used our friends and family for our initial UX research and understandings. They might not be our ideal customer segment but most of them had wedding registries before. Although we focused on having easiest on-boarding process, there are still improvements to be made. We went to our drawing board and product roadmap to focus on making the process easier.
Gifts Inspiration Library
We realized that there are always going to be certain gifts that people add to their registry.To make this process easier, we created a pinterest like listing of inspirations. Check it out as we have prepared listings for wedding, baby shower, holiday, housewarming..etc...
We also allow for a one-click add option with all the necessary required details already filled out. Hopefully our customers can have a more enjoyable time add gifts to their list and more time focusing on getting the gifts :)
Easier Photo Upload
The other important feature we released was the integration with FilePicker (which I previously blogged about here) which allows our customers to have an optimal experience finding images either on their computers or across the web. We have gotten feedback that the process of uploading images took too long, and we are pretty confident this world class plugin will be the solution.
We have many product iterations to go in our journey but hopefully every week we get closer to delivering an outstanding experience for our customers.