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Stumble itA brief post to let you know that it is now possible to configure time formatting (i.e. 2:00 pm or 14:00) in the Options panel.
Comments (0)New feature: contacts filtering by first letter
June 19, 2010
Following a user request, you can now filter your contacts by their first letter using the filtering options on the left. Right now only the latin alphabet is available, but other character set (cyrillic, greek, etc.) could be offered provided someone can point me to enough informations to do so (list of letters to include, sorting order, preferred character set for specific languages)
Favorite option added to quick send
May 31, 2010
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.
Sending improved
May 25, 2010
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.
New feature: SMS messaging
April 23, 2010
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.
New site section: forums
April 19, 2010
To give better support and collect ideas and bug reports, I’ve added a forum section to the site. I welcome and encourage anyone with feature suggestions, bug reports or who just need help with something to post here.
Contact filtering by city and company
February 27, 2010
Contacts’ filtering by company and city (from either home or work address) has been added to the Contacts module. It is visible on the left bar along with other filters.
As with the tagging system, you can also change a contact’s city or company by dragging and dropping a selection of contacts onto the company or city name.
Comments (6)SyncML server is down again for maintenance
February 1, 2010
Sorry for the inconvenience: it should be back online in a few hours.
Edit: it’s online again.
SyncML maintenance
January 30, 2010
The SyncML server will be temporarily disabled this morning to allow for some maintenance and upgrades. Thanks for your understanding.
Edit: server is back online
Another SyncML story – broken by design
January 12, 2010
There used to be an issue synchronizing with SyncML a whole range of Nokia phones based on the S60 3rd Edition (including such models as E65, N70 or N80). I’m happy to say that after weeks of hunting down the source of the problem, which would prevent the phones from receiving and decoding updates sent from the server, a fix has been found and put into place. But I think this deserves a bit more explanation that the technically inclined might be interested in reading.
To exchange contacts or calendaring data, the SyncML specs requires the use of the well established standards that are vCard and vCalendar. While these standards are somewhat loose, they have the advantage of being widely supported and easy to read and write: they are just a bunch of lines with a key-value association (ie a line with “ORG:ACME Inc.” for the contact’s organization name). These standards require that each line is terminated MS-DOS style, with both a carriage-return and line-feed character to mark each end of line – this is however just an arbitrary choice as a simple line-feed would be enough (this is how lines are terminated on Unix systems).
Problem is, the SyncML specs is also built on XML, which treats spaces, carriage returns, tabs and lines feeds as special “white spaces” and allows XML tools to change them. As such most of these tools consider the carriage-return sign as unimportant, as it is redundant with the line-feed to mark the end of a line.
So what happens when you put a format that requires carriage-return such as vCard inside another format that doesn’t preserve them? Lots of hair pulling, because most XML programming tools will merrily remove any carriage returns they happen to find. Thankfully almost every SyncML application out there doesn’t mind reading vCard or vCalendar data with the wrong line ending as this is trivial to do and doesn’t any difference to the data. But a few will not.