Google+ needs more Plus

Google+ is a huge success. Even everyday people ask for it, use it and are interested to move on from Facebook. To me, it still feels like a beta as I believe Google didn’t expect it to catch on that fast. Therefore I will list, what I think Google+ definitely needs to do better.

Huddles for the Webapp

While the mobile apps support “huddles”, which are nothing else but group chats, these cannot be seen in the website. That this is not just a GTalk group chat makes only sense because people might not have used GTalk or the GMail webview before, so it could be made a single “chatting”-website, but ultimately it should be a usual GTalk group chat, so that other GTalk clients can benefit from that.

Additionally, Huddles for the mobile app are extremely handy for shorthand-group chats has you’ll get a push-notification for each message, but for each of such communications it should be possible to silence the push-notifications or just send one on the first new message instead of one for everytime someone writes a message.

Hangouts for the mobile apps

Hangouts are about the same as Huddles, you just can talk live and chat and watch Youtube while you’re in the room. Why shouldn’t you be able to talk with the other people while you’re using your mobile phone? Especially if you’re in a WiFi network? Or at least see the chat? If Google treats group-posts, messages, group-chats in GTalk, Hangouts, Huddles, mail and just everything differently, how should users know which one to use?

Fix the mobile app’s bugs

The Android and iOS apps are buggy. Sometimes they crash without any reason, and oftentimes the notification count is not what I should be. This needs to be fixed.

Improve Circle’s posting

Cicles are a huge win, and everyone knows it. What I miss from here is operations you can do with there circles.

For example, it would be nice to define that “Friends” and “Coworkers” are automatically in “Contacts”, so you have lesser clicking if you know the implications of adding a coworker for example. Inheritance would be a nice feature, although not everyone might use it.

Being able to do set operations would be another huge advantage. My use case is to have cicles of people understanding English, and people understanding German. If I do a german post, I would like to make sure only people of the targeted circle (for example “contacts”) that are also in the circle “german” can read it, the intersection of those circles. In theory, this is a very simple operation, and I would love this. If you think adhead, having other set operations could be nice too. If you for example make a joke about how stupid programmers are, you might want to post if to all your contacts minus those that you’ve also added to “programmers”.

Make Spaks useful

Spraks seem to be an aggregation of Google news. I would love to be able to set the “metatags” of a certain Google+ post. For example, if you find out a nice feature about the new Macbook Air that just came out, you should be able to tag it with the appropriate words, so it appears in everyone’s sparks for “Macbook Air” for example.

Open up the API

Facebook and Twitter weren’t extremely useful without clients, and Google+ isn’t too. There’re unofficial APIs out there (and Abelssoft has already released a Windows client for Google+ here), but these unofficial APIs rely on HTML parsing and therefore are not very convenient to use, are not too fast and also don’t open up all the functionality that Google+ offers.

That’s what I think. Am I missing something?

photo credit: vernhart

ToDo for Mac – Review

As I’m just typing a small review for “ToDo” on Mac after it got some bad reviews on the mac appstore, I thought I might as well share it here on my blog. Here is the translation from my german post:

ToDo is not perfect. But I’ll begin with the nice little tidbits that make me keep on using this app, which is the best feature a ToDo app can have: continued usage.

There’s a keyboard shortcut to quick add tasks, that can be defined in the settings. After the shortcut, just type the task name and hit return or tab, which adds the task and lets you go on typing the next tasks name unless you hit return or tab again. Great feature for quickly adding tasks.

Clicking on the blue linked day in the calendar filters everything by tasks due today

CMD + N is the shortcut for a new task, or, if you’ve selected a project or a tasklist-task adds a new subtask. With the arrow keys you can navigate in the list, hitting right or left arrow folds or unfolds projects and tasklist-tasks.

If you’ve selected a context or tag, you don’t only get the whole list filtered by that tag / context, but also have new tasks get the context and tags automatically selected for the active values. Very nice thing if you’re seperating contexts as work and private and projects as tags.

I should mention that I only use “lists” for the default one “inbox” and “ideas”. I’m throwing everything into ideas that shouldn’t be deleted, but that I usually won’t want to clutter my list. And you can completely filter out lists from your views, what I did with “ideas”. Additionally, context and tags are kept, so I can scan for ideas very targeted, if I need to.

Via drag-and-drop you can drag your single or multiple selected tasks to tags, contexts, lists or on a due date (in the calender) to set those on the task(s). Very nice way to easily set stuff on tasks.

CRITICISM:

As I like this app, I want to make some point that could be improved, and if anyone reading this develops this app or knows someone who develops this app, please forward this.

automatic recognition of context by WIFI-SSID (or place on iPhone)
keywords for the quick-entry dialog (for example #tagname or @contextname), autocompleted if possible
more folding levels for tree-like tasks
tree-like contexts
more performance after CMD-N: sometimes half the typed name is missing because I didn’t wait for the new task to pop up in the tree

OVERALL:

The app fits my workflow most and keeps me using it – what no other ToDo-list-tool has ever achieved as I’m to much of a GTD freak. Have fun with this app.

photo credit: @superamit

The Driver’s License Way of Registration

There are many ways to make people register themselves, for example the Safe Route or the Doodle Way. But on many sites, you can just login using Google or Facebook or Twitter, beyond other means, nowadays. This is the Driver’s License approach, where you make users login into one of those services, and the service tells you who that is and that he’s logged in.

This way, you can more or less identify users. This has a positive result for you and the user, as you don’t have to store their password – and you don’t have to deal with password hackers that hack sites like Gawker and steal the users passwords. On the other hand, you can’t adress those customers directly as you also don’t know their e-mail adress necessarily – and this is why this method is often not used too much. Being dependant on the service is also a problem of course – what happens when Google is down, for example? :-)

For users, this way of registration is great. They can login easily, and don’t have to invent a new username or password for your site. You’ve just NOT complicated and cluttered the internet even more.

photo credit: gwen

The Doodle Way of Registration on the Web

In Doodle, you don’t need to login and can freely edit everything without loggin in or registering. No locked doors as in the Safe Route of Registration.

Someone who organizes an event (where people with limited time want to meet) sets up the title for the event and clicks together the points of time when the thing possibly could take place. He sends the link to the poll to everyone would should attend the event.Everyone can click the link, enter their name, and click on the times they have time. The page makes it easy to find out when to meet.

If in “Desperate Housewives” the girls would organize a meeting in their neighborhood using Doodle, this would never work. Someone would frame someone else, delete or change the other persons times or put someone else on the list who didn’t want to come. Nevertheless, the Doodle website is very successful to organize meetings for everyone else. How can that be?

Well, Doodle has an optimistic approach: They just think users won’t do this. And as no critical data is entered, it works for them. And if some Desperate Housewives use this to hurt each other, it’s 99% happy users and 1% unhappy users. Maybe this model should be used much more. Next: what about an OpenID, Facebook Connect, TwitterIDs and GoogleIDs? Should we use those?

photo credit: maistora

Stackoverflow Survey: What Phones Do Developers Prefer?

Over 3.000 people answered the stackoverflow survey and the following were the results interesting when you want to analyse phone-choice for developers. There are numbers from the “What technology products do you own” question:

iPhone	34.3%	(839)
Android	30.4%	(744)
Blackberry	6.9%	(168)
Other Smart Phone	15.0%	(366)
Regular Mobile Phone	25.5%	(624)

The people who answered this survey are pretty smart, they’re all developers who we can agree on being relatively smart. They also all would be able to use and understand complex technology, so features will trump usability in this audience more than in ordinary comsumers. The developers also have pretty good paychecks, so most likely they all can afford all types of smartphones. The list above is not mutually exclusive, so a developer might have an Android, an iPhone and a blackberry device, but added up all percentages are 112,1 … so most likely only ~10% would have two phones.

36.9% are from north america (just to include this AT&T miserablility factor). 7.5% are engaging in mobile development, while many many developers are into web development (from the comments on the stackoverflow post you can see that people were not so sure about this question). Sidenotes:16.1% also have an iPad, 14,4% have a kindle (only 1,6% Nook), 4,7% own an Apple TV. I can’t see any other values play into this, the Java vs. C language proficiency seems pretty equal (they didn’t ask for Objective-C so you can’t draw conclusions from that), well maybe the developers most used operating system is interesting:

Linux	18.2%	(472)
Mac OS X	15.6%	(405)
Windows 7	44.7%	(1,158)
Windows XP	18.3%	(473)
Windows Vista	3.2%	(82)

Is there an iTunes for Linux? From what a quick google search could tell me there isn’t … So are there 18.2% not willing to use an iPhone for that reason?

The only thing I want to add to these numbers is that I would have thought that among developers Android is more common than the iPhone, especially as developers often want to fiddle with the system more. I drew my own conclusions, but as I don’t want to sound like a fanboy again, I just will let you draw your own.

photo credit: Veronica Belmont

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