Fast Track Needs You! · Monday, July 31, 2006

Fast Track, an open source project status tracking tool written on top of TurboGears, needs your help! Here is the call to arms:

1. It has come to my attention that there are several commercial products out there with very similar names.
2. When I designed Fast Track, I was transitioning away from the 37 sigs project Backpack, and Fast Track’s UI is a little too similar to this app, which is sure to cause confusion.
3. Fast Track needs some branding in a bad bad way! We still have no logo, and I don’t have the skills to make this happen!

So, what am I asking for? When the TurboGears book comes out, the project’s exposure is going to absolutely skyrocket, and I want to set the project up for its best chance to succeed. In order to make this happen, I really believe that all three of these things need to be resolved.

How can you help?

1. Help give Fast Track a new name that will be unique and not conflict with any commercial products. Submit your ideas as comments here this week, and I will select a new name from the submissions on August 15th!
2. Get your creative juices flowing, and submit a new set of CSS stylesheets to give the Fast Track UI a more distinctive and unique flavor so that there won’t be any confusion. The best submission will be chosen along with the new name on August 15th! Try and keep the color-scheme the same, please.
3. Fire up Photoshop or The GIMP, and design the best darn logo that you can think of! I will make all the submissions public on the Fast Track website and will select a winner on August 15th!

My goal is to have all these issues resolved in the next two weeks so that I can release a 1.0 version of the code, and start work on the second major version of Fast Track, which will be the first major TurboGears open source application to move to SQLAlchemy.

Get involved! Be a part of an application featured in the upcoming TurboGears book! Open source fame awaits you! Are you up for the challenge?