As an added convenience you can now add custom recipients in the Send widget, under the Favorites sections. Once you have added a recipient, sending a note or a task is as easy as dragging and dropping them directly on his or her name!

To edit or delete a favorite, just click once on it.

Finally! It took a little longer than expected but sending items (appointments, contact infos, tasks, etc.) has been improved and better integrated with the messaging module.

You’ll now notice a “Send” panel on each module (tasks, calendar, contacts and notes) that displays groups you are a member of and their members. Sending something is as easy as dragging and dropping it over the person’s name! The message will show up directly in their picoBeat’s inbox and can be added to their own data with a single click. You can also send a regular email to anyone by dragging and dropping your items on “email”. (in this case they’ll be sent as attachment in a standard format: iCalendar, vCard, etc.)

There are a number of improvements planned for this feature, most notably a shortcut list of favorite contacts and emails for improved usability.

picoBeat now has a whole new messaging module for sending SMS! Because we have to pay for sending these, we also have to charge for it, but you’ll find our pricing is quite competitive and also very transparent: the messaging interface will give you a real-time information on how many SMS are going to be needed for your message, and with a press of a button will compute the exact cost.

As a SMS is cheap, payment works by pre-purchasing credits for your user account. Unlike many other SMS services those credits can be purchased in small increments (from 5 €) and will be usable for 2 years, so you don’t have to worry about purchasing more than you can use. To get you started, every account gets 0.10 free credits, enough to send 1 or 2 SMS to most destinations!

You might notice that some part of the messaging module seems useless or “over architectured”: this is because it was built to also work as a fully-featured email client, ready to handle multiple external mailboxes, and these features are disabled right now. Since managing email requires important investments in servers and storage (we are serious about having proper backup, speed and availability), these functionalities will be activated once a proper way of financing the service is found.

If you have any question or issues related to this messaging module a dedicated forum section has been opened.