A calmer workplace with new.space

New years plans? Na, that’s like 4 months away. It is in 3 weeks, you say? Excuse me, I have some phone calls to make.

Every year at this time, it feels like everyone is saying “wow, this year flew by”. And in many ways, I guess it did. This year, instead of just saying: “wow, (‘wow’…again?) we shipped a lot of stuff, let’s look at it all”—I would like to do something slightly different. I’d like to show what we’ve built this year and then talk about how all of these updates relate to our vision of creating the best tool to use for any project.

What did we build this year?

A lot, actually. On January 4th this year we released the new.space for iOS beta to subscribers of this newsletter. After that, we shipped a flood of updates. I’ve debated on how best to present the information, and after some reflection, I think I will use an emoji-powered-bulleted-list (I’ve noticed this is how I best absorb information):

📊 Accounts on the web - Keep track of all your Spaces in one place

⏰ The Today Space - Plan your day with the Today Space which starts fresh each day

✍️ Renaming items - Gotta be able to give your files, notes, and links a good name

👥 Avatars - I am a shrimp

🔀 Sorting - We added a way to organize the Items in your Space in various ways

📝 Notes - Keeping a journal is one of the main ways our team uses new.space

🔍 Details view - From notes, to threads, Brainstorms and info—you can find it here

🎨 Moodboard layout - See your visual content without any of the info at the grid level

💻 PWA installation - Did you know you can install new.space on Android?

📇 Names showing up in shared Space - Now you can know who is adding what

💨 Sharing sheet in iOS quick access - Get to sharing as soon as possible

⚠️ Notifications - Now you can know when something happens in a Space

🔄 Improved the webapp layout - We tuned the layout to be even better

📆 Group by day in Spaces - A way to turn any Space into a sort of Today Space

📨 Direct sharing - We added the ability to easily share with people you know

🗂️ Space management - See which Spaces are taking the most storage

⌨️ Keyboard shortcuts - The ‘a’ in Ctrl + a doesn’t mean awesome

📱 iOS app launch - You should download new.space for iOS

🌮 Alternate icons - They look great

🔥 Space+ - Get more storage, customization, and more special features soon

👏 Github, Figma & Slack integrations - See your content in the best form

💡Brainstorms with ChatGPT and Claude - Collaborative documents powered by AI

📚 Markdown in Notes - You asked for it, we shipped it. Formatting in notes!

I’m skipping many small tweaks and fixes here to pull together this already sizable list of things we built this year. It is a nice pile of stuff, I’m proud of it. So how does this all tie back to the Shareup team? How are we using all these things to make new.space?

The loop

When you look at projects in the modern workplace, a pattern emerges. Work begins with planning, transitions to execution, shared to the team for feedback, and planning begins again. This loop continues until completion. Various methodologies, processes, and best practices exist for project management, though I’ve found most of them to be overly complex; burdened by rules, ceremony, and structure. When we design and build features for new.space, we are always thinking about this loop and how to make sharing, planning, and feedback as easy and smooth for teams as possible.

This isn’t a football play

Finding the calm

Going back to the title of this post, “Finding a calmer workplace with new.space”—what does that mean? The Shareup team use new.space for everything. Even stuff it isn’t particularly good at (yet), we find it fun to push the boundaries of what it can do and how it works. We feel like we’ve built something that reduces workplace stress, unnecessary noise, and increases our productivity & focus. We are super proud of that, but the journey isn’t complete yet. We’ve got a lot in the works like: annotations, comment threads, themes, an activity center, better notifications, and a lot of exciting capabilities that we want to add to items and Spaces that we just aren’t ready to share yet. We would love to hear how you are using new.space in your projects, what you would like to see in the next year, and hear about your process in your projects.