Documentation is great for moving your team forward faster.

But it's also great for your customers: you'll reduce support response time, and even the number of support queries.

Our doc sites development has been in the background for a while, but more and more companies need reasonably-priced documentation sites, and sometimes they need API docs and many technical features. 

We've been improving building docs sites with custom landing pages, custom CSS, custom Footers HTML, custom include headers and JS.

Some companies also need private-public documentation, this is why we had password protection and guest accounts. But guest accounts management is a hard job, so now JWT authentication is available to automate it, here's the documentation for it.

Our code editor needed some improvements in regards to UX and UI.

It's now faster, more integrated to the platform, and provides easier ways to add and edit code samples.

Our API docs also needed some 😍

Now it's much faster & intuitive, and it uses the same code editor for the code samples. And it nicely shows in the table of content.

Happy documenting from the Archbee team!

You now have the option to bulk export your content from our platform.

Go to https://app.archbee.io/settings/teams and click on the download button on your workspace (only admins can do this).

You (and all admins in your workspace) will receive an email with a link to a .zip file containing everything in your workspace (content + users).

Sunday 25th of October 10 AM PDT we're doing some backend infrastructure changes that will improve the system overall.

We anticipate 30-60 minutes of downtime.

UPDATE: no downtime was required.

We just released the beta of our Jira integration.

To activate it, go to https://app.archbee.io/settings/team-integrations, click Connect Jira and you'll be redirected to JIRA to approve our app. 

After it's approved, you can paste any JIRA URL into our editor, the issue will be embedded and will self-update as the JIRA issue is updated.

Our largest UI change to date is here!

Here are the details:

Three-column layout -> Two-column layout

The three-column layout was problematic:

• for teams with a medium to high number of docspaces it was cognitively overloading;
• for teams with a low number of docspaces, the first column was mostly empty;
• the colors made it look like the important thing was the first column, when in fact the organization of documents is secondary or even tertiary in importance;
• it moved the editor too far right on the screen, making it hard for people to focus on it when writing;
• it was hard to get right on smaller screens, even on 1366px; not enough screen real estate on most screens out there;
• it was too different from most other systems out there, so people didn't immediately recognize the pattern, introducing friction;

So we decided to combine the first 2 columns into 1, and pick different colors.

UI Improvements across the app

We made a huge number of small adjustments to colors, spacings, and the blocks are more tightly integrated. The cleanest design in Archbee to this date!

Of course, we couldn't resist and improve more than 20 interactions, as UX is the most important an app like ours can offer :)

Docspaces -> Collections

The concept of docspaces (document organization) was also alien to most people, and it was easy to confuse it with workspaces (company/people organization), so we decided to rename it to "Collections".

Favorite Collections

Lastly, we introduced the concept of Favorite Collections, as most people only interacted with 3-4 docspaces and they had to scroll and visually search for what they needed. Even if you could drag and drop to organize them to your needs, the overload was still there.

What are we working on next? (subject to change)

• API docs template similar to Stripe and Readme with the API docs and example side by side;
• Google Drive, Asana, JIRA, GitHub, Zapier: all authenticated integrations;
• Dark Mode;

Get in there, play with it and let us know in the chatbox how you feel about this important change in the app!

We moved our website to new technology, so now our app now lives at https://app.archbee.io

All existing links will automatically redirect to the new URL.

This is a breaking change for the native apps, which will not work until you upgrade to the latest version (should be automatic, prompting you to reload the app to apply the new version).

We don't predict any downtime, but if there is, please go use the new https://app.archbee.io for the app which should work without any change after logging in.

🔗

In the beginning of the year, we had an idea that realtime chat on documents would be a big deal. We launched it, but it didn't take off. We couldn't get users to actually use it.

Many users and customers told us they were missing traditional comments. We got proven wrong, so we built inline comments!

How to use? Select any text and add a comment.

What's next?

We're keeping focus on our core technology, and a UX redesign is coming for the left side of the app. Stay tuned!

✌

You can now set emojis as docspace icons.

You can also set emojis as docs icons.

But also in the doc editor by hitting Cmd (or Ctrl on Windows) + ^

Or shortcuts in the editor also convert.

macOS, Windows and Linux apps are here.

They auto-update. 

They're fast and are tuned out to not eat any more memory than the regular in-browser app.

They get you notifications right in front:

To download, go to the landing page and you'll see the download buttons, or download directly.

Try it out, we're confident we deserve a spot in your taskbar :)

As always, keep the feedback coming!