We’ve recently made a few big upgrades to the service. While there are various user interface and design changes, the majority of it went on under the hood.

What we’ve launched is a solid foundation for a lot of cool things we’re looking to add and launch in the next few months. In the coming weeks we’ll release more indepth blog post that will go into detail of various changes and new features.

You can get more feature details on our help site: https://sites.google.com:443/a/sugarstats.com/help/

Change Overview

Here is an overview:

• New, cleaner design throughout the site
• Overall performance and stability improvements as well as bug fixes.
• A new “Dashboard” page to give a quick overview of things
• Completely new and more interactive graphing system based on Adobe Flash 8
• We’re now graphing ALL entries as opposed to just the averages per day
• We’ve added a few new graphs, namely bar charts for tags and carb charting. More to come.
• We’ve replaced the “events” for each entry with a more generic tagging system. You can now customize and have multiple tags for each entry
• For premium users, food and activity input has been changed. You now simply type the name in and if you’ve added it before it’ll auto complete it for you.
• For premium users who track food intake you can now specify how many services of a food you had
• “Day Notes” has now become the “Journal” feature allowing you to have a personalize diabetes blog. You can mark blogs private if you like, all existing day notes have been migrated into the blogs feature and marked private by default.
• We’ve added a “Store” tab for those who want quick access to buying diabetes supplies online
• We’ve added Gravatar.com icon/avatar support

These are some of the big things and again this is only the beginning of a lot more to come. We’ve set a solid foundation to build off of and taken all the wonderful feedback you all have given us over the last year to great a overall better system for everyone.

Sharing, Privacy and the Friends System

A few notes about the changes in TrustedVue and new sharing features/friend system:

• “TrustedVue” has been expanded into a more standardize friend and sharing system. The biggest request to us was the ability to allow you to connect with others and share your stats easier. Now you can add others as friends and now non-diabetes can create accounts easier. You now only need 1 account and can see the stats/accounts of those who accept you as a friend.
• We’ve also added a new friends tab at the top which lets you find others like you.
• When a friend views your account, they can see your stats, graphs, journals (that aren’t marked private)
• We’ve added sharing/privacy settings so you can set who and who can’t see your account. You can set it to Public, Members Only, Friends Only or Private.
• All existing users by default have their sharing settings set to “Friends Only”.
• All new users by default have their sharing settings set to “Members Only”.
• You can switch your sharing/privacy settings easily in your settings at any time.
• You now have a profile page your friends will see when going to http://manage.sugarstats.com/yourusername.
• You can now also include your bio info about yourself, similar to Facebook/MySpace, on your profile page.
• Friends can also add comments to your profile as well as journal entries.

As noted above we made a lot of changes regarding TrustedVue and sharing your stats with others. While the topic of privacy in a hot one in the Health 2.0 field, we feel in the context of diabetes the community and our diabetic support networks (friends, family and doctors etc) greatly benefit from collaborating with the patient and viewing their progress.

We highly encourage sharing your stats in order to get positive encouragement, motivation and support from others and we’ll be building more and more social networking features into SugarStats over the next few months to help facilitate this.

But we do know to some they may want to keep their account private or share with a select few and we want to respect this. For those people they can easily select from a few different privacy/sharing settings to find the one that best suites them.

Potential Issues

Though it looks similar on the surface, a lot has changed in this new release and while we did our best to test everything some bugs are bound to pop up.

A few issues that might come up for you and what to do:

1. All emails for accounts need to be unique, so if you have multiple accounts please delete the inactive accounts to ensure email notifications go to you
2. Icon’s/Avatars might have disappeared, this was due to the migration to a new image storage system and we unfortunately couldn’t migrate images. If you notice this bug simply re-upload your icon/avatar. Alternatively you can use the gravatar.com service. Please check your settings: http://manage.sugarstats.com/account/settings
3. Printing Graphs – Because of our move to Flash based graphing you can’t print the graphs like you used to, nothing will show up. We’re working in the meantime to make the graphs exportable to images which you can then print.

If you notice any issues/errors, see something that looks off or in general have questions please let us know: support@sugarstats.com

Let us know what you think!

We want to know your thoughts and get your feedback. The good, the bad and the ugly. Shoot us an email at support@sugarstats.com

Updates and Help

Keep an eye out on the blog, our Twitter stream and your email for more detailed updates from us.

You can check out more of these features in details on our help site: https://sites.google.com:443/a/sugarstats.com/help/