Huddles for the Webapp

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

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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

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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

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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

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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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Following definite pros:

• The display doesn’t accumulate fingerprints anymore. Big plus. Wonder how they did that.
• The distance to the screen is lower, as the glass on the screen is not that thick anymore. This feels very good, as it feels more like touching the interface directly now.
• The antenna is definitely better than before. I can make the WiFi drop one bar if I use a death grip that makes my hands hurt, but even with that applied I can’t make the phone signal go down no matter what.
• The camera is just superb compared with my 3G or the half year old nokia of my girlfriend. The pictures now definitely look amazing (HDR also helps picture quality) and the video is just very nice.
• The device is very thin. it’s not any lighter, but thinner than the 3G and it feels much tougher.
• Everything just got faster due to the faster processor and the additional RAM.
• The free Belkin case I got for free is very fine and an iPhone stand was included with it. Nice!

This is what I would call “not so nice”:

• The price is still high
• The battery life seems a bit better, but it doesn’t hold longer than two days no matter what. Okay, I use the device pretty often, but somehow I would have imagined more. Update: when you use no geolocation stuff it holds up a little longer. The GPS sucks the battery dry in no time. Over the last night (10 hours), the iPhone lost only 5% battery. Nice.
• Apps still don’t get a chance to put something on the lockscreen. This now is the sole reason for me to install a jailbreak as soon as it’s released – I just want to see my upcoming calender items and my Appigo ToDo items there.
• Many apps still don’t get the multitasking right or their implementors just don’t publish the necessary updates. To put it straight, I even believe that there are only that many iPhone apps out there, because the possibilities were so limited. But I guess that this is a temporary problem and we’ll see more working updates soon.

Nice apps:

• Radio.de is my new favorite Internet radio app. Background music (that sometimes ends after some songs if in the background) is possible and there are 500+ radios available including the main popular German radios that often have their own (non-backgrounding) apps.
• ToDo is still my favorite todolist app.
• Meebo is the only true backgrounding IM client that’s available and working. The good side is that Meebo is really nice. It supports ICQ, Google chat (that also messages if you get a mail there), Facebook chat and a lot of other services that I don’t use. Meebo works in the background and keeps you logged in 48 hours. If you log out or are logged out due to inactivity, you get a push notification telling you so. For Windows they have a notifier that even recognizes that you’re on a computer now so you don’t get notified on your computer AND your iPhone. If you get pinged on windows, the notifier takes you to your conversation in the browser on the meedbo.com website.
• (There is still no latitude client that supports latitude friends. And I tried them all. Till then only the comparably slow Google mobile latitude page must suffice. I’ll update this post if I find something better.)
• This post was written entirely on the new iPhone using the WordPress app. It was only edited for making the lists and adding tags and a picture afterwards.

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• The Dev Show: About Java, Javascript, Ruby and Python mainly, webprogramming and other programming stuff in general.
• The Talk Show: Apple & Geek show with John Gruber. Better than having the feed of his blog spamming your feedreader. ;-)
• The Pipeline & The Conversation & The Big Web Show: Basically all shows with interviews with people from the web industry, programmers, designers, bookwriters, and all kinds of interesting people.

I can definitely recommend all of the above shows and also did so on iTunes (where you can also get them). All those shows feature either an audio only (which I prefer for my way to work) or a video feed if you like that better. On the 5by5 website you can also find podcasts about Ruby, Podcasting, Photopraphy, and some other themes you might like.

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