Well it’s finally here! The velvet ropes are coming down! The long awaited first official release of Spinscape is here!

As of July 1st, you will no longer need an invite to get into Spinscape. We appreciate the patience of everyone in the Spinscape trial community while we sorted out the features that were most important to our customers. If you’ve been one of our private beta testers, you no doubt have seen quite the evolution…

At this point, maybe a little journey down memory lane would be appropriate…

We started with little more than an idea….

…but we came in with the committment that we were going to use Scrum and agile software development to continue evolving Spinscape.

So we started with some rough prototypes…

And we quickly learned what worked and what didn’t work.

It turns out it is difficult to make sense of information when it looks all tangled!

So then we decided to go with more of a radial approach. Which made info much easier to see.

Issue here is that when maps get big, or there is a lot of text in the nodes, everything gets thrown out of whack!

We went away from the circle nodes. This was some of our early Zoom prototype work…

Now we started working on making the nodes prettier…

From here we made a giant leap and made everything look good. We used the accordion on the right to house information. It was an improvement, but we really wanted to treat nodes as more abstract containers and the accordion wasn’t going to let us do that.

Now we mocked up the container idea where you basically zoom into the information. Here was my super crude depiction of the inside of a node. Warning: For the squeamish, you may want to look away…you are about to see the early innards of a node.

Note there is the beginning of the dock over on the right. Sure it ain’t pretty yet, but we were evolving!

Now the elite members of our closed beta should be familiar with the image below. It was what we were calling the Cartman release. (long story…actually, not long just boring. )

There were some really good nuggets in here! I was going to insert an image from a map I created, but our dear friend Aliza Sherman from www.webworkerdaily.com made this killer map so I thought I would paste it in here.

We couldn’t leave it there, after all, Spinscape is always Evolving! So, this brings us to where we are now. Another stop in the evolutionary ladder of an application that set out to make life easier for the masses. Behold…Spinscape has arrived!

Again much thanks to those brave souls that have been helping us test this bugger, and for those of you that have offered insights as to how you are using Spinscape, we are eternally grateful! Please continue to participate in the Spinscape community. We have a lot of ideas for the future and we will be bringing them to you one month at a time!