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PDF email reports!
Now that we ditched Flash, we can make our email reports a bit more exciting by making them look exactly like our web site. If you edit an existing report or go create a new one, there are now checkboxes to choose the format(s) you want, which can be any combination of plain text, HTML, and/or PDF.
A PDF report for any site is essentially an export of that site's dashboard. We chose to do this rather than the specific data types you selected for the report because the point here is to make the report look like our web site — including the new graphs. Your dashboard is meant to be your one stop customizable overview of your site's traffic, so it makes sense to use it for the PDF report. The data type options in the email report interface (which are still available, and still used in the text/html versions) are there because we used them to create a new display of your site's data designed for email. Now that we can just use a replica of our web site, that's what we're doing with the PDFs.
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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.