I signed up for an account with Beanstalk a while ago back when I was looking for a place to host my code, and haven’t really visited or used it much due to having switched to Git (you’ll notice that after trying Beanstalk and rolling my own SVN/WebSVN, I’ve ended up at Github with all the cool Rails kids). They recently sent me an email asking how they can make their service better, but instead of replying like a civil person, I’ll rip on it here.
I actually like the Beanstalk quite a bit – had I not fallen in love with Git, I would have probably used this app quite a bit right about now: the free account allows up to 3 users, and that’s exactly what I need. However, the developers realized far too quickly that it is also the perfect app to ride 37signals jock with – it has a very limited feature set by definition, so it lends itself nicely to a nice clean, simple interface. The team ended up taking that mantra a little too seriously: they have foregone a “login” feature. I recently tried to log into my account to see what code I had there before closing it (I had completely forgotten about Beanstalk until they sent me that email), but alas I could not. Maybe I’m fucking crazy, but here are the screenshots. You tell me where the login button is. I tried clicking a few of the main navigation buttons to see if maybe it was tucked away somewhere, but I did not see it. Help me find it!
um, you’re so right… they sent me that survey stuff too, but I just ignored it Maybe it has something to do with their failed migration this morning? (see http://twitter.com/wildbit )
I figured it all out. I have http://cowsandmilk.beanstalkapp.com . I can log in there. And they do allow you to cancel your account on the accounts page. I’ll leave it as a mental exercise to the reader to decide whether allowing each app user to essentially have their own user base is a good idea (I vote no, I want to be an individual user who can access the repositories I administer and be a user on other people’s repositories). I do think we can all agree that it’s a bad idea to provide no direction to people on how to find their long abandoned repositories.
Thanks for helping me find the way, Dhall! I would agree with you that the complete lack of a centralized account page is still pretty serious fail.
Mike, DHall, you’re missing the point.
They give you your own subdomain so that they can DNS load-balance. Otherwise, Rails clusters fall over.