Status update: progress and roadmap

We’ve been working through the summer to take on board all your feedback and make Typecast a better product.  You’ve told us that it has the potential to be an awesome, useful tool and we’re doing everything we can to live up to that.

Lessons learned

We’ve gathered a huge amount of insight into the problems that designers face when working with web fonts and have been testing and refining our ideas on where Typecast fits into the design process. 

We think the web is fundamentally a typographic medium.  We see Typecast as a tool that allows designers to bridge the gap between messy experimentation in drawing tools (Fireworks, Photoshop) and prototyping (in the browser) by designing with web fonts and real content.

As an aside, we owe a big shout out to the guys at Intercom.  Their customer feedback tool has been great at helping us to listen and respond — definitely worth checking out.

Moving forward

One of the main lessons we learned from your feedback is that to design by eye, the controls need to be both precise and smooth.  Performance matters.  We quickly realised that in our haste to produce a prototype we could learn from, our early code wasn’t good enough to build on long-term.  We’ve re-written Typecast from the ground up to create a very responsive, browser-based app.

We won’t be able to build everything our beta testers have asked for immediately, but our roadmap is bursting to the seams with good ideas.

Our next major goal is to release a public beta in November.  Between now and then, we’ll be sharing a sneak preview of progress with the beta list every couple of weeks.  To show what we’ve been working on in a bit more depth (and get your feedback), we’re hoping to hold a live screencast of our internal build in the next couple of weeks

We’ll also write more about the principles behind Typecast and the ideas on our roadmap over the coming months.  You can keep up to date by following Typecast on Twitter or registering for the beta.