Snappy: Should I bother or is it dying?

I’m well aware that Ian sold Snappy, and perhaps doesn’t have a visibility into the current state of the project, but well, I’m signing up for Snappy and I’m puzzled.

There are a few issues I’m facing that tell me that there is not enough development efforts invested into Snappy.

For example:

Widget is lacking configuration options

More than a year ago I signed up for the first time. It did not work out for non-Snappy related reasons, but one particular issue I remember is that their widget did not support opening in a Contact mode. That looked strange to me – any new project would have their knowledge base empty, and to work out that very knowledge base I need to collect the questions from users, i.e. let them send me messages. Instead, the widget was opening into a blank white page (where KB supposed to be), and only a very attention-to-detail-oriented (i.e. extinct) user would notice a small link on the bottom that opens the Contact Us form.

OK, that was a long time ago, the project was new, nobody’s perfect.

Now for a different project I’m signing up for Snappy again, and I see the very same issue still persist. Still no way to open the widget in a Contact Us mode. Hmm… I would expect it fixed over that time… OK.

API is not CORS-compatible

Fine, I build my own form, attach a AJAX script to it that does the same thing that Snappy’s own does. Turns out that their API endpoint doesn’t support CORS – i.e. I cannot submit an API call (well, at least /contact; did not tried other) from any web page. Only widget can do that (it is loaded from *.besnappy.com domain, so the same origin applies). And it is not a security thing, because I can easily submit requests from command line, or SoapUI – it is just an incomplete API implementation (at least so I was told by folks who do public APIs in corps).

Again, I would have expected the API polished over so long time. Speaking of which, their API documentation is updated 2 years ago. Hmm…

Javascript Errors on main interface

And the last straw is the JS errors I’m getting in their interface. I do not remember them during the last time! Now almost every time I remove a test ticket, I’m getting JS errors:

So, is Snappy dying?

Should I spend time to continue integrating with it, or should I look elsewhere?

Any opinion or recent experience?

Hi! One of the Snappy developers here … so I’ll try to keep opinions out of it (yes, you should use Snappy! haha) and address your concerns.

We are actively working on Snappy. In the near future (weeks, not months) we’ll be setting up a beta site at beta.besnappy.com with all of our recent changes, looking for user feedback before we roll them out to everyone.

These changes include a massively cleaned-up JavaScript codebase (we spent a lot of time getting rid of CoffeeScript and going back to pure JS to make our lives easier, and your errors less frequent), a re-designed UI and the option for a WYSIWYG editor (Markdown will not be removed, it’ll be a user config option to choose).

We do realize the widget lacks options - we’ve been focusing on the main application UI recently, but extended functionality for the widget, mobile apps (iOS and Android) and more extensive triggers are all in our pipeline.

I can certainly understand how you could get the impression that we aren’t working much on it - but trust me, we are. We are hoping that the new UI and web app features coming soon will be a delight for everyone and remove a lot of nagging issues that eat up a lot of our time, so we can get back to focusing on adding features our users want as opposed to fire-fighting issues that cause our users pain.

We are also more than happy to take any feedback on features you’d like to see in the future - we build for our users, it’s easy to move things up the priority list if you ask for them! :slight_smile:

Thanks,
Team Snappy

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Thanks, that’s what I wanted to hear.

I’ll stick with Snappy then - there are no showstoppers for me now.

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