We announced Tact and our private beta about a month ago. How has it gone?

In two words, very well. We started to gather our private beta community and got a few engineers to join. This is exactly what we wanted to accomplish by this point.

Priidu and myself announced Tact only on our private Twitter feeds, and directly to selected friends in various channels. This got us enough beta members to start a nice community chat on Tact. Our beta members have already submitted useful bug reports and other thoughts and insights.

After a few weeks, I also put our engineer job post to iOS Dev Jobs. This brought us enough interest that I was able to shake hands with two engineers who now work on Tact part-time, in addition to myself.

It was interesting to note that I got two kinds of applications in response to the job post. The better ones had clearly gone through our site, had thought about it, and wrote an interesting e-mail telling me not only about themselves, but also what they thought of Tact, our principles and the whole project, based on the limited info that we have shared publicly. These are the people I really want to speak with. The others left me with an impression that they submit the same application to all job posts. There was no evidence that they even looked at our site, let alone had any thoughts on it. I’m not really interested in this kind of applications at this time, no matter the credentials.

What’s next?

We continue to work on Tact, now with more engineering power, and to hunt down the bugs and exchange ideas with the private beta group. The invites to join the private beta and join as an engineer remain open. I’m always interested to hear from curious people who believe in what we are doing.

We’ll be thoughtful and targeted in where we seek publicity next. We have enough work ahead of us that we don’t need publicity just for publicity’s sake, but we continue to engage with interested parties to spread the word and engage them in various roles.