Happy New Year to the Permanent.org community! The Permanent team is ready to get to work on a number of exciting projects this year. Don’t forget to check out our Member Improvement List for smaller bugs and improvements, but read on for the major projects we’re working on this quarter.

What We’re Working On

Share with others without a Permanent account (beta): We’ve heard your feedback, and we’re excited to share that we are working on a way for members to share materials with loved ones who might not want to sign up for a Permanent account. This quarter, we will be working on adding basic functionality to create an unlisted share link that members can send to loved ones without a Permanent account. While this will initially come out as a beta, we hope that our members will be able to test out this new feature in the first half of this year.

Third-party application setup guide: Our engineering team is working on creating a setup guide that will help our partners build tools that utilize and improve upon the Permanent experience. This guide will be an immediate benefit to both our engineers and our partners’ engineers to make integration simpler. It will also allow us to form more partnerships with other organizations that will help our members accomplish their preservation goals on Permanent.org.

New UI experience on mobile: The mobile app team will continue their diligent work on implementing a new user interface for the Permanent platform on our Android and iOS app. This project goes hand in hand with the Permanent tablet app we are creating. This quarter, you may see new designs and ways of interacting with the menus, file navigation, and security in the mobile app.

To learn more about our development plans, please check out our updated Product Roadmap.

Recent Releases, Improvements, and Fixes

Update to setting up new accounts: We’re excited to announce that we have released our new user interface for new members creating their first archives. While existing members may not encounter the change, this project helped us to establish new workflows for implementing our new designs for the Permanent.org web application that we will use this quarter for developing a new sharing experience.

Bug Fixes: We are always fixing bugs (that is, small problems) that you report to us. For high priority bugs, our turnaround time is one to two weeks. Recently, we fixed: 1) a bug where members could not open shared files from a notification email on iOS, and 2) a bug in the web app that was preventing search results from showing when searching in a public archive.

We want to hear from you! If you find a bug or wish to tell us about a feature or improvement you’d like to see, contact us at support@permanent.org and we’ll add it to the list. We’re looking forward to hearing from you.

If you have reported a bug or product improvement and wish to see its status, you can view the Member Improvements List here. We try to work on these bug fixes and improvements in order, so check back to see when your reported issue is resolved.

User Testing Opportunities

Interested in future user testing opportunities? You can sign up to be notified about future user testing opportunities at this link.