The first trailer for the upcoming installment in the Grand Theft Auto series of games, Grand Theft Auto V, comes out in a week. I’m looking forward to this one.
This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.
While having to put address labels on packages for your customers is a good problem to have – after all, it means you’ve made some sales – it’s still a problem. Luckily, there’s an app called Address Labels to solve this problem. We talked to Travis Haynes, the developer of Address Labels, and we shared we he told us; just read on to find out more.
A quick aside before we talk about Address Labels: The Shopify Fund is a million-dollar fund that we set up to encourage developers to build apps on the Shopify platform to extend the capabilities of shops and make shopowners’ and customers’ experiences better. If you’re a developer with an app idea, take a look and see if we can fund your app!
Address Labels does one thing, but it does it well: it simplifies the tedious task of printing labels for your shop’s orders.
Address Labels:
There more features in the works that will be rolled out very soon,
including, but not limited to:
Any additional feature requests are more than welcome!
It can be very time consuming to copy and paste each individual order’s data into a word processor and format the text to make it look just the way you want. Address Labels makes this process as simple as selecting which orders you need to print the address labels for, tell it how many copies per order, and how many copies of return address labels you need, and then click "create labels". Your shop’s address is automatically used on the return address labels, so there’s no set up required to get going. Within about 15 seconds after signing up, you can print your first batch of labels.
I’m a freelance developer. If you asked me for a specific title, I would give you a look of frustration. I have no idea how I’m supposed to label the work I do other than "computer work," because of the enormous variety of jobs I’ve helped with over the years. I’ve done everything from setting up and
maintaining Linux servers and networks, to blogging, and SEO, and setting up eommerce solutions. All I can give you as far as a title goes is what I use on my tax forms, which states, quite vaugely: "IT Consultant."
Most of the work I do is behind the scenes, so I have very little web presence. I do have a Github account – github.com/travishaynes – and I suppose if you ever wanted to contact me, I would ask you to email me.
In my spare time I read Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, drink coffee, and compile Gentoo from scratch.
I got the idea from the Shopify forums. I saw it on the App Wishlist, and though to myself, "Hey, I could do that!" So I did.
I am actually building a whole suite of Shopify apps that will integrate seamlessly together as one big app. This was the one that took the least amount of time to finish. It’s been slow going, because I’ve been too busy with jobs that actually pay the bills, but this app took about two weeks to write, but I’ve been working on the other apps for about 6 months. So, stay tuned, because they are awesome apps!
You can find out more about Address Labels on its page in the Shopify App Store.
Found at My Modern Met. Click to see the picture at full size.
This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.
Here’s a clever, just-under-four-minutes animated history of all the things leading up to the iPhone created by CNET UK. It includes:
Found this floating about the internet. Usually, when someone tells me they’re a social media consultant, I have to fight the urge to say “Oh really? Which restaurant?”
I’ve already been asked if it’s a little weird running something like the Shopify Fund. Of course…and I’m cool with that. I’m keeping this little Venn diagram in mind:
This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.
If you haven’t heard the announcement yet, let me tell you: Shopify has secured a second round of funding – 15 million dollars’ worth.
We’ve been profitable for a while now, so landing this money wasn’t about survival; it’s about ambition. We’re aiming to be the number one ecommerce platform, so we’re using the money to fuel our growth: more staff, more stuff, and more services.
As we like to say, “When the train comes in, everybody rides!” And by everybody, I’m including developers who build on the Shopify platform.
That’s why I’m very pleased to announce the Shopify Fund!
The idea behind the Shopify Fund is very simple: we want to support developers who build apps for the Shopify platform by giving them money so that they can work full-time for a few weeks on those apps without having to worry about paying their bills.
And I’ve got a million dollars to make it happen! Say it with me: One. Meeeellion. Dollars.
Many of us at Shopify, myself included, have worked at small or one-person development shops, so we know what it’s like to have to pick and choose projects in order to stay afloat. We hope that the Shopify Fund will make that choice easier and make it possible for you to build apps for our great ecommerce platform and fill your wallet at the same time.
(This section’s for developers who aren’t familiar with Shopify. Feel free to jump ahead if this is old news to you.)
Those of you new to Shopify might not be aware that it’s not just a hosted ecommerce system, but also a platform that offers a RESTful API. This API gives you the capability to programmatically perform many of the actions that a shopowner can perform from his or her control panel. With the API, you can automate tasks to make shopowners’ and customers’ lives easier, provide shopowners with different views and insights into their shops’ data, integrate Shopify with a world of online services and generally expand that capabilities of Shopify shops.
(If you’d like to know more about Shopify’s API, check out our API documentation.)
Shopify also provides a place for developers to sell their Shopify apps: the Shopify App Store. It’s a one-stop shop that:
In 2010, almost half of our active shopowners had installed at least one app.
If you’re a developer with an idea for a Shopify app, we’d like to hear from you! Drop us a line at fund@shopify.com and we’ll evaluate your idea. If we think it’s worth funding, we’ll provide an advance in the neighbourhood of $5,000 to $10,000 (and hey, maybe more if we think it’s going to be big) on future sales in the App Store.
If this sounds like a literary advance, that’s because that’s the model we’re using – but a little bit nicer. Here’s a quick description of how it works:
If you have programming skills but can’t think of any Shopify app ideas, check out the App Wishlist in our wiki. It’s full of ideas, and one of them might be right up your alley.
If you still can’t think of any Shopify app ideas but have killer programming skills and would like to work on a Shopify app, we’d still like to hear from you. We might be able to assign you to a project of our choosing.
…be sure to check out the new Shopify Fund page and if you’re interested, drop us a line at fund@shopify.com to find out more or to propose an app that you’d like to have us fund!
Keep an eye on this blog as well: we’re going to be talking about building apps on the Shopify platform for the next little while.
This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.