Today, we're releasing Robomo, a web application for tracking feature requests. Robomo is simple to use, fast, and fun. We've developed Robomo internally at PatientsLikeMe and have been using it ourselves for over a year. It's become an indispensable part of our workflow here, and now it's available to anyone who wants to use it.

Robomo is named after our awesome former product manager, Maureen "Mo" Oakes. It was originally written by Jeffrey Chupp, Michael Berkowitz, Adam Darowski, and Winfield Peterson. Since then, Thomas Mayfield and Shivani Bhargava have also contributed to it. For this open source release, Joe Rodriguez and I worked on cleaning things up a bit.

Here's the first thing you'll see when you get to Robomo:

Clicking the big yellow button will take you to a Google login screen:

And once you log in with your Google account, you'll be looking at a list of feature requests. Here's a sample of that:

You can filter this list by tags, by the status of the feature request, or by keyword search. You can also sort the list by any column or submit a new idea. Let's submit a new idea. I'm feeling hungry, so let's request cookies in the kitchen:

And hit "Save idea." That's it, now the idea has been filed for posterity, and the product management team has been notified by email. When they log in to look at it, they might see this screen:

Shivani thinks we should be eating healthier, though:

I get an email about that and reluctantly agree that baby carrots would be okay too. So we schedule it and begin work on it, and now it shows up on Robomo's "in progress" list:

And now our healthy snack is on its way.

We hope you'll find Robomo as useful as we do. It's available under the MIT license on our Github repository, and is easy to set up and deploy. It will run on Heroku or any other Ruby on Rails-capable web host, and I'm running a copy of it on my personal Heroku account where you can feel free to play with it. Have fun!