Announcing JumpRope Labs

Here at JumpRope, we strive to be on the cutting edge.  One of our founding values (it's in our mission statement!) is agility, and as product manager I am determined to remain agile even as we grow and mature.  To us, this means always providing the best possible tools for teachers and staff.  It means that we will work to remain responsive to feature requests that come from our users.  It means that we will seek and integrate new technologies that can help you do your jobs.

Alas, new features and changes must be very carefully considered and tested before they ready for "prime time."  (If you've ever worked with or around a software development team, you may understand how products grow in complexity over time).  Rather than delay updates and changes for months, JumpRope is introducing a new companion as you use our tool: labs. (and yes, we've shamelessly taken the idea from Google and most probably others - it's too good to pass up, and as far as we can tell it hasn't been trademarked).

When you see the Labs label in JumpRope, it means that you're looking at an experimental feature that may break, change, or disappear.  If you are of the sort the gets deeply, eternally frustrated with broken software, I advise you to avoid these features and stick to our fully-supported features.  However, if you're someone who loves to try new things and give feedback on them, keep an eye out for these new features as they emerge in the product and try them out for us!

The features with labs are, of course, not designed to break.  Rather, they're probably a brand new idea that simply hasn't had a lot of time to mature.  If it doesn't work, we'd like to hear about it... but unfortunately we cannot promise that the feature will be fixed immediately, remain the same, or even remain in the product!

You may notice that certain existing features in our product have been re-labeled as Labs features.  Out of full-disclosure, this has been done for features that we have "rushed to market" to meet demand.  Though it may appear to be a step backwards, we're adding this label out of desire to be more honest with out customers about the current state of the feature!

Thanks for your understanding and willingness to work with us as we continue to innovate our product!  As always, feel free to let us know below if you have any questions or comments - or take a look at our current list of feature requests if you want to weigh in on upcoming features to enter the Labs!

Best,

Jesse