Hi everyone,

For the better part of a year, we’ve been hard at work building the next version of Gimlet. Internally, the project has a lot of nicknames – “G2” or “#2” or “Version 2” or “the next Gimlet” – and it is pretty much all I work on outside of customer service and support these days.

Last spring at the Public Library Association conference and last summer on this blog we shared some demonstration screenshots of G2 and we were extremely excited about a design prototype we had created. Since that time we’ve worked to write the actual application code that will power our new design. We are quite a ways toward that goal now, with the hope we can begin testing an early-release of the application with a few select clients very soon (more below).

My ten favorite things Gimlet #2 actually can do today, that Gimlet #1 cannot:

1) Hide the free-hand, tag-entry form 2) Support bulk tag-editing 3) Edit text using Markdown 4) Perform faceted searches 5) Run a date comparison report 6) Download embedded charts as images 7) Perform a three-level, pivot-table report 8) Mobile interface 9) Separate time entry from date entry 10) Highlight search result text matches

SO! Our next steps for Gimlet #2 are to lock down a preview branch of the project and start collecting feedback from current clients. That step will happen later this month (April 2017).

We have already identified a few clients that are interested in helping with this next stage of the process, and we’re extremely grateful for their offer to help. If your library uses Gimlet #1 and you’d like to help us complete Gimlet #2 by previewing your data in the new interface, and providing us feedback, please contact us. We unfortunately don’t have the capacity to offer every current client a preview, but we’ll try hard to help the first handful of clients that reach out.

We’ll be back in touch with additional Gimlet v2 details each week this month. Stay tuned.

Cheers!

• Eric for the Gimlet Team