I just wanted to post a quick progress report on the upcoming nvALT successor, nvUltra. It’s been a big week of bug fixes and planning!

First, we decided on an official name of “nvUltra.” We’re sticking with the working title. Here’s the story: when Fletcher first started working on this, before we even teamed up, he started calling it nvUltra as a play on nvALT. When he mentioned it during our first Skype chat, I thought “whoa, that’s perfect.” And it was… as a name for an nvALT successor. I’d like to think that there are potential customers outside of current nvALT users, though, and I think that “nvUltra” is just a weirdly spelled non-word to the uninitiated. So we started trying to find something we liked better.

We went through months of brainstorming, with an extensive mind map, detailed Slack discussions, input from friends (and some of you), and conversations with other outsiders. We found a bunch of “could be cool” names, but none that we both agreed had any “eureka!” to them. So we finally admitted that the only name we both loved was nvUltra. So we’re making it official. Now I just have to figure out the icon and branding for it.

Our first round of beta testing is going well, and we’ve slowly been adding one-off testers to the list. I would estimate another week before we officially expand the pool. Our current testers are really putting it through its paces and by the time the next invite goes out, it’s going to be a significantly better app. Things are moving quickly!

That’s the news for now. The mailing list is getting huge, so anyone joining now will likely only get a beta invite after it’s already public. If you want to get updates on beta and release progress, though, please do sign up!