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No more Flash!
We have converted to a native graphing library (Highcharts) that works on almost every platform, including iPhone and iPad. It loads faster and it looks good. The graphs look and feel the same as the old ones, so other than the fact that they will now work on your non-Flash devices, you can barely tell the difference:
Bonus: this will finally allow us to send PDF email reports. In fact, those have been under development for about a week now, alongside this. They're almost done… we were planning to release them at the same time but a few last minute issues dashed those hopes. Tomorrow, perhaps.
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Big screen mode + faster page loads
We're testing a new feature we're calling "Big screen", which is a self-updating, single page report highlighting your key metrics, designed for that giant plasma hanging on your office wall. It looks radically different from the rest of Clicky, because we felt a dark theme made more sense for this type of feature.
It grows and shrinks with your browser window, up to 1080P. Our developer also made sure it looks awesome on the iPad and iPhone — yes, including the graphs.
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Clicky is a launch partner for CloudFlare Apps
We met the CloudFlare team while we were at TechCrunch Disrupt last September, and we think their product as well as their co-founders, Matthew and Michelle, are awesome! CloudFlare was runner up for best startup at the conference, and they've been growing leaps and bounds since then.
CloudFlare sits between your web site and the internet, making it faster by acting like a CDN for your entire site, and more secure by blocking evil bots and the like. The original article on TechCrunch summarizes what they do quite well. CloudFlare is completely free to sign up for. They have paid upgrades with additional features, but there aren't any limits on free accounts for things like how much traffic you have. So if you think your site is slow, we wholeheartedly recommend trying them out.
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The user experience and psychology of color [FIXED]
One of my most favorite articles ever written about Clicky is this one, which might seem entertaining at first glance, because it's basically ripping us a new one for a design decision I made almost 7 years ago (pre-Clicky) and that I have stuck with ever since. What decision is that? That whenever I want my software to give you any kind of feedback, whether good or bad, that it will be displayed in SKULL-MELTING BOLD RED.
Now of course, I know that people associate red with bad. For example, "You totally forgot to fill out a field! Nice going!". But I make web sites for a living, and while I consider my attention to detail to be off the charts, I have caught myself missing "messages" all the time that random web site X is trying to share with me, because the message doesn't BURN MY RETINA.
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HTTPS support for all of Clicky
Clicky has always had HTTPS support on the login and credit card pages (and of course for the tracking code on your site), but otherwise we weren't allowing it. You may be thinking we were trying to save on performance, but that's not the case — our load balancers have hardware HTTPS decoding so the penalty is negligible. No, the one major reason was because of Google.
The Google Maps javascript API that we were using (version 2) did not allow HTTPS without an enterprise account for the low low price of just $10,000/year. Including insecure items on a secure page isn't a big deal of course… unless you're an IE user, and 13% of our users are on IE. So it is in fact a big deal. We could always just exclude that feature for them, or only include it on the pages that require it, but those felt like cheap hacks. I wanted proper support for it.