Great news. Our private beta users can now get access to our new version of the android client and start using the website. Here we describe what is in this release, what isn’t, and what is coming soon.
The new android release brings many improvements. First of all, you will notice the new look and feel. We have been working on this for some time. It is much lighter than our previous version, and we think you will find that it is much more appropriate for something you are using day-in-day-out. We have created a new icon for “me” that reflects your availability to each of your worlds, and even glows to show you are connected to the real-time servers (XMPP for the technically minded). We have re-introduced the landscape view for sorting contacts among worlds, allowing you to drag-and-drop. You can now connect to Twitter and Facebook, see status updates from your contacts, and even choose to post your status directly from any number of your worlds. In addition, we have improved the management of your contact points behind the “me” button, allowing you to choose in one place which contacts can see which of your contact points.
In more detail…
A new look and feel.
The new look and feel is much lighter. White areas are always scrollable, while the shaded areas stay fixed. Buttons have been moved down to the bottom of the screen, so are easier to access with your thumb. The display has been tightened up to allow you to see more of your contacts at once.
A new “me”
In my circle and my world, we have changed the avatar for “me”. It is now a sphere that radiates and gives an indication of what availabilities you have set for each of your worlds. Look carefully, and you will see that when you are connected to the real-time network, the button radiates slightly. When disconnected, it flattens out and goes slightly transparent. We may make this more obvious in future releases.
Words home screen now works better with more than 4 worlds, so you can create as many as you want… And as before, all you need to do is “stroke” each world from top to bottom to quickly change your availability.
Clicking on the “me” button at the centre gives direct access to the settings you may wish to apply to all worlds.
Here you can access your presets… a convenient way for instance of saying that your current “set up” is for “meetings”, and being able to switch back to it in one go.
You can manage all elements of your status (availability, activity, location and soon, avatar) from here. We had some issues with the avatar real-time sharing, so this will be pushed back to our January release.
And of course, at last, you can manage all your contact points from this one place. Contact points are your phone numbers, email addresses, etc you wish to share with your contacts of a given world. Once you have “validated” these contact points, you can also be “discovered” by other users who have you in their address book.
Landscape view for sorting your contacts
The landscape view automatically ranks your contacts in terms of how frequently you talk to them…. So those you are in touch with the most appear on the left, and you can then scroll down, clicking on a contact, and dragging them into one or more of your worlds.
You can use the search box at the bottom of the screen to quickly find a contact, or you can click on the world buttons at the top, and the display will filter to all the contacts from that world.
Facebook and Twitter
You can now set Facebook and Twitter contact points. So far, you need to do this on the web. The reason is that choosing which contacts you wish to import and merging them on the mobile device is too much hassle. So go to the website, select preferences and “add my social networks”. ON will help you link up your facebook and twitter contacts to the contacts already in your addresscbook. For twitter, you will recover avatars, names and of course your contact’s feeds. For Facebook, you will recover additional emails, phone numbers, but not yet photos (coming soon). The merge experience is still buggy, but we are improving it rapidly.
In the January release, we will add the “feed filter” function to each of the worlds, allowing you, for instance to say: I want twitter feeds from my friends, but not from all the twitter contacts I have left in “everyone else”.
Website
Today you get the website with the old look and feel. We were hoping to get the new one today with a whole bunch of improved screens, but such is life. You can, however, use it to activate your twitter feeds, and within the next few days, your facebook feeds. You can try out the “merge contacts” function that does its best to help you clear out all those people who appear 5 times in your address book. Unfortunately, this version is slow as soon as you have more than 300 contacts, but we are already working on the release for 21 December which should be much snappier – and of course, in between now and then, we will release the website with the new look and feel.
Alpha version of voicemail
Some of you may have already found the “send apologies” function in each of the “worlds” preferences. This allows you to automatically send an sms if you hit the “red” key during an incoming call. The service works out the callers name, and sends them an sms saying what you are doing that may explain why you can’t take the call.
We have gone a step further, and introduced an outstanding text-to-speech function that simply works. So, for instance, you can get a call from one of your friends, and he will hear “You have reached John’s voicemail. John is at the movies with kids. Back at 5pm”, while your business partners will just hear “John is not available this afternoon. Send an sms if urgent”. The voicemail is in alpha. We can only bring a small number of you onto it, and it works with a French number (so expensive if you are based in the UK). If you are interested, please let us know.
Known limitations of 0.18.S2
Here are the things we had expected to fix by now… but haven’t. We are still working on them. See below on “next releases” for more detail.
- Scroll speed still too slow on A-Z and latest views. We had achieved great improvements, but unfortunately the inclusion of the social network feeds slowed it all down again. We are reworking all of this to get back to both functionality and speed.
- Manage worlds button for sorting worlds when you have more than 4 is not activated. Will come soon
- Avatars not shared. Again, planned for January.
- Cannot share contact points until they are validated.
- Gender a bit of a mess (for some strange reason, we wanted people to be able to choose this on a world by world basis, so I could be male to some, female to others and unknown to others still… nice idea, but causes too much confusion)
- Cannot access HTC Hero proprietary widgets… we know. We are trying to work out how to do this. In the meantime, we are upgrading our widget framework to accept a much wider variety of ‘standard’ widgets. We will also reinstall automatically all you previously selected short cuts and widgets (possibly by end of December, definitely by end of January).
Next releases
Given your feedback, we are focusing the whole of our next sprint on improving the speed and reliability of this build. So instead of diving into our release 0.19, we are extending this one and creating 0.18S (with ‘S’ hopefully standing for ‘Speed’). There will be three releases, with 0.18S.2 is today.
On 17 December (0.18S.3) will bring a number of bug fixes to the web, and speed improvements to Android. We will also release this version as a stand-alone application for lower end Android devices.
On 23 December (0.18S.4) will bring further speed improvements (better scrolling, and at last a useable scroll tab for accessing specific letters directly) and automatic prediction of contact’s gender based on first names (this will allow us to make messages more “normal”, eg “she tried calling twice” rather than “they tried calling”.
Over the Christmas break, instead of trying to coordinate developments with a whole bunch of people away, we are going to focus on researching some of the things that we will be building early 2010. These include: memory and speed optimization, reduction of GPS usage, XMPP optimization. Let us know what you think the list should be.
On 21 January, (0.19) our current plan is to implement IM chat with third party IMs (MSN as priority 1), and group messaging and feed filters for each world + automatic re-install of all your pre-existing widgets and short cuts.
We are sort of hoping that by the time we get to that release, you will tell us that we are ready to go public, and at last be able to number our version 1.0 …
Stay tuned and keep the feedback coming.
