Looking back at the previous month, we did and launched some exciting updates to the Anthology community! We continued our publication efforts, publishing Issue #006 of our digital magazine, This Month's Anthology. That release was really cool for us here as it was the first time we had a guest submitted article published, from Kalliat "KT" Valsaraj - highlighting his experiences on his travels to India and documenting the effects of human and climate change on the wild avian population there. Definitely going to want to check that one out if you missed it.
Also during the month, as part of our photo contest series This Month's Challenge, Kyle Barden was awarded the grand prize of $500 for his Aquatic Photo submission. We've been absolutely blown away by the quality of the submissions and the winners of these past several contests. It's been an amazing display of creativity - and I'm personally excited to continue growing this project of the Anthology community. Now that we have several months of experience under our belt, and a great sense of where we'd like this to grow in the future, we're setting our sights on forming and creating high quality partnerships to grow the reach of the contests, increase the competition, but most importantly, increase the Grand Prizes for you all.
Finally, in the month of July we were able to launch the rebuilt version of Anthology on both iOS and Android! After months of consistent hard work and dedication from our engineering team, this was really something that I've been looking forward to publishing about for a long time. This journey has been anything but easy at times, and even during this launch we hit some bumps along the way, but we've gotten our footing now. v4.1.0 is about to release this weekend and we've gotten to a place in the build where we're stable and ready for user growth and onboarding new members.
If you missed the app launch, check out some of the things that we've brought to the mobile app here in July:
• Completely rebuilt and relaunched Portfolios, Explore, Social, and Search on better systems that provide speed and reliability for the user experience
• Launched Flash Challenges - our daily themed photo challenges in the app
• Launched the foundation for User Verification - making sure that we don't ever seek to charge our users to prove they are who they say they are. Being verified on Anthology means that your Profile and your Portfolios will appear at the top of the Search/Discovery page, and you'll see a green check mark on your profile and on profiles of other verified users.
With the past in the past, I'm looking forward at what is yet to come for the community. This month we have Issue #007 about to release this coming Monday, August 7. For the 'zine, we're hoping to bring in more guest post submissions about topics that you care about most - so if there is something you'd like to write about and get published, please don't hesitate to reach out to me. We would also like to begin partnering with organizations, products, and services that can help you best succeed in your goals as creators.
The contest will continue through the remainder of the year as it stands. We are setting our sights on 2024 and beyond, exploring opportunities with brands and partners to make the contest even bigger next year, so be on the lookout for more information regarding that.
On the website, I still owe our community members a dedicated screen that I promised back in the beginning of July... that one's on me - I'll get to that here in August.
Then as for the app, there are several areas which we can venture into next:
• First, v4.1.0 will release soon, bringing more bug fixes to Search, improved Image Quality on Social and Flash Challenges, new features on the Search/Discovery feeds, and a resolution to the annoying "Network Error" message that has been hitting some user accounts after a brief period of inactivity.
• We can continue to build on the features within the app, however, we're getting closer to the point on mobile in which I'd like to hold. And from there, the focus will shift towards continuing to grow the user base, improving our user experience and support systems, and resolving matters quickly.
• That isn't to say that engineering will stop, but instead I am leaning a little more towards relaunching the web application as a powerful dashboard to upload High Quality images from PCs and Macs since that is where we artists store most of them. There is also 1-2 more features that I think might be beneficial to the overall value proposition of the Anthology app that we're exploring currently. I'll have a broader announcement on that in the coming weeks.
Will