We posted a summary of some improvements we've been working on here... https://www.buzztouch.com/membership/2013.php There are lots of other things coming but we're taking this one step at a time. Happy New Year. d.

Nice one, great stuff. 2013 is going to be the best yet! 'One step at a time'? Those steps are huge big awesome steps though.

Thanks for all you do, David (and BT Team!) Cheers! -- Smug

Awesome Team BT!!! Super stoked :) Congrats to the new staff, looking good!

Very nice! LA

Thanks David! Heres to a great 2013!

So how do we get an API key for BT Server if we are a member?

Who won the logo? Love it! LA

Great stuff Dave !!! Looks like you have a Cracker Jack team !!! Looking forward to 2013 !!!

What is the new logo?

How much will it be for a new yearly membership is the new question?

How will we become a member?

Great stuff! BT seems to always be moving forward. Way to go and thank you.

Awesome more tinkering to do.

David @buzztouch, I have a few questions. Do you plan on setting up more vids on the Learning Path? There just one type of membership? Plugin market ready for submissions? LA

:) Great job!!!! Thank you for all the hard work everyone has been doing in the background. Super stoked with the new changes. Great leadership indeed! Looking forward to sending you money ! Sheri

@LA I can't answer for David because I simply don't know. But the webinars to me are live learning paths. Its awesome to have and especially because they are available in youtube 24hrs or less! I'm sure all will be announced soon enough :)

@sheri feels like I haven't spoke to you for ages.

Amazing stuff! buzztouch continues to get better and better! Mark

Congratulations to the buzztouch team!! A happy, super creative and successfull 2013!! Love to see what 2013 is going to bring us all. Best Regards, Danny

Man, this is some exciting stuff - cool to see some of the buzztouch vets become a part of the team

To see buzztouch members as part of the team now... wow. That's simply unbelievable, were in amazing hands. Congratulations to you all! The changes BT is making sounds like everything is getting simplified, membership, guests, sounds easy - exactly what buzztouch revolves around. 2013 will be amazing, and looking forward to the ever growing community! Cheers all, David

Thanks David! Amazing Stuff! Raoul

Yes Sir!

Excited about the upcoming features!

@Jake Chasan: API key, self hosted software will be members only. Logo: Winner not announced yet. How...you'll visit the become a member screen. @LA: Plugin market should begin accepting things again very soon. @SusanMetoxen will be heading up this initiative. She's amazing and I can imagine she wants to move forward just fast as anyone. @App Master: We are not ready to announce the annual price but will be in a few days. However, I can assure you that you will be offered a significant discount because of your ongoing support for us and our vision. Our decisions to make these changes have nothing to do with asking long-time supporters to "pay us." It's a matter of us identifying who's been supporting us, allowing them to become a member with little or no pain, then moving forward with the plan. I can say the same for FREE users. We have zero plans to somehow punish people or take anything away from them. It's a matter of re-organizing our user base to help us all understand in a more meaningful how our offering works. Hint: Our decisions about what it will cost to become a member will have lots to do with participation. Everyone in this thread participates in a wonderful way and as such you'll be happy to see the "price" to become a member :-) d.

@David: Will every Buzztouch users be getting a message about the membership and if so, will it be by email or private message?

@LA: Forgot...the BTU leaning paths need significant improvement and we hope to begin updating the content there with more energy. One of our biggest challenges has been manpower - we have far more now than we've had so things on many fronts should move much faster. @MrDavid and a few others: Bringing some longtime community members aboard in an official capacity was the goal. We were successful in achieving that goal. We consider it a privilege to have them on our team and we look forward to helping them achieve their goals while helping us achieve ours. I realize this sounds cliche' but it's the only way I know how to explain it. There are countless other folks in our community (hint, lots of them are in this thread) that could also help us in a more meaningful way. We think we can help them too. We plan to reach out to these folks in the coming weeks. We're very serious when we use the word "community" and we need to begin doing a better job at allowing folks to "get involved" in a more meaningful way. This is step 1 towards that idea. Things should begin moving much faster when we get the user-base ironed out. Technical stuff. We should be able to begin rolling out new features related to the software very soon. The first two on the list will be Push Notifications and Live / Design Mode. Live / Design mode is super-useful and allows you to make changes in your control panel without affecting apps already installed on devices. This was an engineering challenge to say the least but it's working very very well. Push: We all know what this is. Our APN server is working and will be available for use by members soon. If you want to setup your control panel to use another APN server (like your own) you can do that too. The first phase of getting APN working is the basic implementation you'll see soon. BUT, we have some super-cool and innovative things coming that take APN to the next level. We've all know the difference between "simple" and "rich" notifications. We've been testing some super-cool ways to push info to end users that takes it up a notch. We hope to roll those innovations out after getting everyone used to the simple approach. Back to the code...it never ends :-)

@shak77: We are not 100% sure about the best way to communicate our offering to existing folks. It's a bit more complicated than it may appear. The easiest, and most efficient way for us is to post a message on your account home screen that explains clearly what your options are. This will be done for sure. As far as sending an email to everyone...dunno...it may be necessary. It will work out either way, just need to fight through the first few days of the big changes. SO many things needed updating on our end to accomodate for this stuff. Moving ahead.....

Thanks David @buzztouch! Learning paths helped me when I first joined. New users def. benefit from them. Cant wait to have more. LA

@David: Awesome! Looking forward to it! David

Great can't wait now!

Thank you David for everything! Can't wait to see all of the new stuff. Can't explain why but it's all very exciting! Sorry but I have a question too. I just submitted my app for an update to Apple. I added push notifications using parse.com. Going through your post I noticed that Buzztouch is adding push. Do you think I should withdraw my update? I would much rather use ZZ push. When will it come to us as paid members? Is it a plugin or integrated into the control panel somehow? MAN I CAN'T WAIT!!! Thanks Dave

push notifications and design mode sound amazing...all of this on top of the already ridiculously cool plugin market. Can't wait to see were 2013 takes us! edit: also really exciting news about the BTU updates...those learning paths are extremly helpful for thousands of people (i.e. me)

Nice announcement, updates sound amazing, cant wait for the whole rollout. Looks like a great team assembled so far, congrats to all.

With those changes, the new year is already looking good ! Teaching, learning and education is am important facet to growing and sustaining BuzzTouch as a platform. I am currently going through the JSON Webinar from Nov-2012 to document how to create a plugin that has a custom screen. The making of annotated screenshots helps me to comprehend things taught by David Book. The resulting document will be helpful as a reference item to me and perhaps others. Perhaps I should also create sample code at the same time! -- Niraj

So exciting!! Buzztouch rocks and I can't wait for what 2013 will bring!!

Very excited to see all the amazing changes! Cant wait

great news so bless to be part of this community thanks david and all the bt team

@Calypso Kid: No worries on the questions, doing my best to keep up :-) A few ideas about push notifications. Firstly, and most easy to understand, is the idea of "notifying app users to allow push notifications." This is the simple message we are all so used to seeing inside an app. The Core settings allow you to choose whether or not to "prompt for push notifications permissions." Next, the Core settings allow you to enter a URL to "register device with." This is usually a URL to the buzztouch backend, or a self hosted panel, but could also be something custom you create on your site. It's a URL the devices "calls" when the user allows push. Lastly, the pushes themselves...these come from your control panel in a Push Notifications screen. Messages are sent to all the registered devices. You'll notice here that this concept has zero to do with Plugins or screen types...it's a overall app concept...a Core concept. So, no plugins needed, it's just part of the Core settings. Same thing for Live / Design mode. General work flow. 1) You download your project. The JSON data in the config.txt file include a "currentMode":"Design" property. As long as this is in design mode, the app (the simulator or your own device you're using for testing) will notice any and all changes you make in the control panel. Exactly like it does now. No different. 2) Before you publish to the app store you change this to "currentMode":"Live" A bunch of devices now install your app, all of them are in live mode. When you make changes in the control panel they are NOT noticed by the app and the app does NOT prompt for updates like you're used to. You can make as many changes as you want without the apps running on end user devices noticing. This allows you to tinker, adjust, change without breaking anything. 3) So...you're tinkering, adjusting, changing on your own phone or simulator. You've got the BT_config.txt file set to "design" so it notices all your changes. At this point, end users are not noticing any changes, only your device is. 4) After making the changes, and testing them, and determining when you're ready, you "publish" the changes. It's when you click "publish" that the end user devices notice...the devices in Live mode. Like the Push Notifications logic...none of this has anything to do with a Plugin or a screen..it's a Core concept. So, no plugin necessary for Push or for Live / Design, it's built in. Hope this helps explain it. Roll Out: The LIve / Design mode will be rolled out first. We hope to begin rolling those changes out this coming weekend..Jan 4th, 5th, 6th. We hope to have all control panels updated with this feature by Monday Jan 7th. Push Notifications will come next. Expect to see that functionality in about 15 days. The exact dates will depend on how well it goes. LOL. All of the engineering is done for this stuff...just a matter of getting it implemented in tons and tons of control panels without breaking anything. Your current submission: I wouldn't alter anything there. I suspect that the code in your app ( (the objective c) that is handling the push notification alert, reception, etc. is nearly the same as the code you'll see in our implementation. After all, there's only a few methods to work with an Apple controls these. I'm referring to things like didRegisterForRemoteNotificationsWithDeviceToken and didReceiveRemoteNotification. These methods are pretty standard. What's not standard is the way the backend registers devices, sends messages, etc. It's my suspicion that it will take some folks a bit to understand some of roadblocks Apple throws up. Things like how to create a Push Notification Certificate, etc. The control panel asks you to upload this stuff before it will work. This means that you may end up doing a bit more tinkering and testing than you may realize in order to get it to work. Think App Ids, Certificates, Provisioning Profiles, etc. This stuff is notoriously difficult for non programmers. We've tried hard to explain it all but it's tough still. I'm thinking you'll be best off implementing what you have (assuming you get accepted in App Store), getting that going, then re-visiting our approach until it makes sense to you and you have it working. You could then push an update to the App Store if you think ours is better, easier, faster, whatever. By for now...

Great improvements... I guess BT is becoming the best community on mobile environment... No matter to contribute some or a few.... Thanks to the BT Team, Thanks David....

David @ Buzztouch thank you so much. Some stuff rolling out around jan. 7? Beautiful, what a great birthday present for me!! ;-) Now...... How do I get one of those nice "ZZ MEMBER" logos under my name? Can't wait to go from month to month to yearly MEMBER!!!!

Great news from the Buzztouch team!!! Really looking forward to the new changes and the new larger BT team :) I think 2013 will be awesome for all of the BT community. Thank you!

Right on. Thanks David, looks like it's been a crazy month or so for you planning out all these changes over the holidays, etc...appreciate it. Super excited to have some new official BT Team Members!! Way to go guys, congrats. Your contributions will surely enhance this whole BT experience. God knows David needs some help to make this all work and he's got some good folks now I know he enjoys working with! I remember when I first met Warren how much he wanted to help David. Super cool to see him take charge of the webinars and meetings and fially get them going. These things have really amped up my development skills and can't wait for more. That's worth the membership alone to be able to attend these. Hope to meetup and and hang out with the rest of the new BT crew down the road! Looking forward to 2013 and all this fun new stuff, can't wait to see the new features as they start to become active.

I just wanted to throw out there that this live/test design mode things is genius, I broke a few of my live apps adding new plugins for my home-screen when the actual new plugin files did not exist yet on live apps. My idea was that they simply would just need to stay broken until "if" apple approved the new version submitted, and pray that no-one would 1 star review your app before the new version fixed it! So I'm super excited to see that come out, amazing work! A fun idea came to mind too: it would be cool to have a third mode after "Live" and "Design", a "Testers or Developers" mode. Maybe if you set it to this mode, users could be prompted to become testers of the app, and they could update the config and send feedback on the changes, before they go "live" for everyone (if these changes don't break the app of course). How to only change the mode for a few people rather then all is beyond me through! Couldn't have said it better then @ATRAIN, I'm looking forward to meetups. I've been fortunate to meet a few members and talk to a few members via phone - exchanging thoughts/ideas are invaluable. The new friendships you get are a super bonus too ;) Were lucky to have Warren here with us. Cheers, David

Stoked for the BT community and the expected changes coming along.

This is all great news! what a great start to 2013! The push notifications comes just at the right time for me, i've done the research and understand the logic and have something working with parse but it would be great to do this all under buzztouch. It would be good if we could send push notifications via an API call to buzztouch if this is possible? I expect there will be a few plugins created on the back of the push notifications. If I had the time and a bit more Objective C knowledge I would certainly build one! What I have been looking into is a news/rss feed with push notifications to promote your app/business so you can send a push notification and when the user opens the message it loads the news feed within your app. Well done to the new Buzztouch staff and keep up the great work David and everyone! Now back to submitting my 2nd app.... wish me luck!