Well, we’re closing in on the final stretch of the initial programming. We’ve dropped Google Cloud in favour of local hosting (we were having so much trouble with Google’s poor documentation and customer service) and we’ve built the entire core service, so we decided you deserved an update.

Since we are so close to completing it, we’ve decided to change the homepage of the website into a countdown clock. It’s counting down to 11:00am Pacific on the sixth of July, which is when we plan to (and will) finally release the first version of the website, in the form of a public beta. Feel free to watch the countdown, it’s quite mesmerizing; I watch it quite a lot myself!

What’s a Public Beta?

Good question! It’s pretty much like a normal website, except it’s likely to be more buggy. We’ve put the beta tag there sort of just as a warning that things could go wrong, even though they probably won’t.

But since there’s the possibility of bizarre unsightliness, we’ve added a little button to the bottom-right of the interface, titled “Send Feedback,” so that we can hear about the problem and fix it right away.

Why not just release it now?

There are still quite a few things to do, from mopping up the user-interface bugs to making sure you can contact people who have seen your pet and want to be contacted about it. It’s important stuff, but not important to the core service and all stuff that we can finish within a couple days. So, we put up the countdown to ensure that we put it out at a particular time, instead of putting it off because we want to make it “just perfect.” Sometimes it’s a good idea to give yourself a time limit.

We’re looking forward to the release and hoping you will be too. Check it out when it comes out, it’s going to be good!