There has been rapid progress over the last few weeks for Busy.org.

Alpha release updates

Monday 5th December we started our closed Alpha release (invitation-only).
150 steemians were invited to test our under-construction platform. We’re getting a lot of valuable feedbacks and many words of encouragement and support. Thank you so much! It gives the Busy team force and motivation to achieve our goals.

For the past two weeks, our developers worked full time and had made more than 300 commits on Github for the incoming Beta release.
We decided to deploy several fixes and new features directly on the Alpha so selected testers could directly try these enhancements.
https://github.com/adcpm/busy/commits/master

We are adding new users on a weekly basis. If you want to join the Alpha and the Beta test release, please register with your email on https://busy.org, join #busy on steemit.chat and PM @ekitcho. The platform will open for everyone to test from 1st February 2017.

New features & bug fixes

Several features were implemented the last few days.

Donor badge

Last week we announced an introduction to our Donation Terms and had a nice response from the community. We decided to implement the Busy Donor badge on Profile, and Donor list.

Improved Markdown rendering and post style display

We did some improvement on content style display and markdown rendering, image, text style, bold, italic, table, links, mentions, etc.

Bookmarks

You can now add, and quick access your favorite posts in Bookmark

Favorite Tags (category) and Users

Star tags and users to have quick access to your favorite ones

New Editor

We added a new Editor. Medium-style with direct style options on text selection and in-post direct image upload

New Wallet design with Transfers

We added some design and layout to display wallet and transfers.

Others

• Like (upvote) everywhere possible
• Dislike on Post
• Comment on nested comments
• Fix on SoundClound, Periscope, Twitch embed

---

Road to the Beta

With almost 40 days until our public Beta release, the Busy team will work hard to achieve our first goal and do our best to prove the ability to deliver high quality and concrete product meeting announced deadlines.

Our roadmap for the 1st February 2017 includes:

• Draft with autosave post and draft manager
• Improved Editor
• Different post display Layouts: now we only have Feed Layout, but are working on List (like steemit) and Grid (pinterest masonry grid style) for improved UI and user experience
• Improved global UI/UX (User profile infobulle on mouse over username, etc.)
• Improved navigation between articles
• Notifications
• Private messaging + Tags/Categories channel chat
• Internationalization

---

What’s next?

This is only the first step of the Busy project.
Our goal is to prove that we have the appropriate, qualified resources and vision to bring new value-adding, with the strength and responsiveness that our ecosystem needs to succeed.
Busy is still discussing different possibilities to get the required funding. It will allow us to work on our 2017 Roadmap and complete platform.

After the Beta release (assuming that adequate funding will be available at next stage), our plan is to work on

• Busy Marketplace for product and services as a platform
• Design enhancements
• Playful Onboarding process of new users / Improved Sign up
• Busy marketing strategy to bring new users on the Steem blockchain (make Steem more user-friendly, easy to understand and adopt via Busy, aim mainstream adoption, friend invitation, work on user retention, etc.)
• Make SteemJS and SteemConnect official with the help of the community and Steemit inc, Steem core team

---

All rewards from the @busy.org account and donations will be used to fund our projects

---

They are our heroes : thank you for your support !
@steemit, @smooth, @cass, @bhuz, @liondani, @donkeypong, @furion, @steemship, @pfunk, @deanliu, @theprophet0, @teamsteem, @fulltimegeek, @shortcut, @hql2016, @hanshotfirst, @exyle, @anotherjoe, @tanemahuta, @flyingmind, @sweetsssj

---

Merry Christmas