We are thrilled to give you all a first HELLO from our freshly founded company called Lively Apps! From now on, whenever you see a tricolored V you will know that this is us: the team that has crafted a fair range of amazing Atlassian apps like PocketQuery, Lively Blogs, Lively Theme, HideElements, Task Reminder, Page Branching, and many more.
There is in fact a story behind our icon. For the most obvious reason, it is the letter V in our brand new logo:
But there is some more exciting reasoning behind the tricolored V. You see that although we now consider ourselves an international company, we have our roots at Scandio in Munich, Germany. In fact, former Scandio employees that worked on Scandio’s Atlassian Marketplace apps are now in Lively Apps–so it’s the same team with the same many years of expertise within the Atlassian ecosystem. We can therefore predict very confidently that we will continue to provide the same quality of new features, maintenance, and support as we have done for many years.
Now back to the letter V: one short story is that one of our lead engineers has moved to Vancouver, Canada (where he is also teaching software engineering courses at the University of British Columbia). So we can now proudly claim to be a truly international company! It is very evident that Vancouver starts with a V.
All that said, here comes the true V reasoning: as native German speakers, there was a shout-out after a first design draft of our logo that this is a “PFAU”. Translated to English, “Pfau” means Peafowl or Peacock. The funny part about “Pfau” is that the letter V is pronounced “fau” in German (so just like “Pfau” but without “P”). Of course, I could now try to assemble a phonetic encoding, but I think it should already be quite clear: since this icon was totally a peafowl and a peafowl in German also sounds 95% like the letter V, the icon was an immediate must-have! (Since then we have asked a few people what the icon first reminded them of and we have received mixed answers of butterflies, other birds, etc., but this is some material for a future blog post.)
What remains important is the last characteristic that we think the icon and its colors embody: it is absolutely LIVELY! It is in fact just as lively as our apps and our team! In a lively fashion, we will keep innovating our apps and ensuring the highest degree of robustness. In our terms, lively implies both innovation (i.e. adding new amazing features) and stabilizing (i.e. making sure our apps run robustly on a variety of platforms).
There will be more!
More is to come! We are currently working on a Cloud version of PocketQuery for Confluence. The same is true for Task Reminder for Confluence. We have a new major release of HideElements for Confluence almost ready to be shipped. And we have a range of new features that we want to implement for Lively Blogs, Lively Theme, and Diary for Confluence very soon. Server and Data Center users of PocketQuery fear not: a new major release of our popular SQL & REST integration app for Confluence and Jira is also in the making.
Please stay tuned for all these changes on our brand new website livelyapps.com! And once you’re there, please don’t forget to build a first impression of our V. Just forget about what we told you. Seriously.
Sincerely yours,
The Lively Apps Team