Suplify Public Beta Launch Party!

Hey guys,

last Tuesday (12th of July) we had a grand party at our office celebrating the launch of the new http://suplify.me website and the start of the public beta.

As I told you at the beginning we had a photographer who took a bunch of pictures:

You can view the full gallery here:
http://www.dropbox.com/gallery/5910/1/Suplify%20Beta%20Launch?h=bb4544

We really enjoyed it and hope that you liked it just as much!

Thank you,
The Komola Team!

Schnelles Verknüpfen von Aufgaben mit Kontakten und Tickets

Aufgaben sind ein zentraler Bestandteil in Suplify. Es ist uns wichtig, das Erstellen und Verwalten dieser Aufgaben so einfach und schnell wie möglich zu machen. Dazu können sie sowohl mit Tickets als auch Kontakten verknüpft sein.

Bisher war es möglich, Aufgaben einfach auf der entsprechenden Ticket- oder Kontaktübersicht einzutragen.

Das war schon sehr einfach, aber uns noch nicht praktisch genug. Man konnte, wenn man eine Aufgabe in der Aufgabenübersicht anlegen wollte, noch keine Verknüpfungen vornehmen.

Unsere Inspiration

Uns hat das System, wie man bei Facebook in den Status Nachrichten Freunde verknüpfen kann, sehr zugesagt. Dort tippt man einfach ein @ und dann den Namen des Freundes ein, um diesen zu verknüpfen.

Genau so eine Funktionalität wollten wir auch haben! Also habe ich mich mit Google mal umgeschaut, was es schon so für Plugins für jQuery gibt. Aber mehr als einem halbherzigen Ansatz leider nichts dementsprechendes! Die gefunden Lösungen waren entweder nicht flexibel genug oder hatten diverse Probleme wenn man den Cursor an andere Stellen bewegt hat.

Also haben wir das bereits bestehende Autocomplete aus suplify aufgebohrt, so dass dieses nur bei bestimmten Zeichen wie @ oder # ausgelöst wird. So kann man jetzt mit @ einen Kontakt und mit # ein Ticket verknüpfen.

Hier ist ein Video, welches dies als Beispiel zeigt:

Aufgabe anlegen und mit Kontakt sowie Ticket verknüpfen

Neugierig geworden?
Wir starten bald in die öffentliche Beta-Phase! Jetzt noch schnell anmelden: http://suplify.me.

Plugin auch auf github als jQuery Widget
Es ist geplant, dieses von uns so getaufte tokenAutocomplete später auch als jQuery UI plugin auf github zur Verfügung zu stellen. Dazu später aber mehr.

WordPress Multi-Site and custom domains

For our new website komola.de and the suplify.me homepage we are using the new WordPress 3.0 MU feature.

After some problems getting everything set up, we finally were able to get it working correctly.

We setup two “Blogs”:

• komola.de
• suplify.komola.de

But since we wanted the suplify page to be reached under suplify.me we had to install the WordPress MU Domain Mapping Plugin. And this is were I thought I was running into problems.

I was playing around with the DNS records of suplify.me before. Then I setup the plugin and added the suplify.me domain. When I wanted to test it with my browser all I got was a blank page. Great.

On my server I used curl to check the response. Here I got the correct web page. After testing for about an hour spent playing with various configuration options in the plugin and several DNS configurations I noticed that my browser cached the DNS settings from the beginning that I played with.

It was actually all working the last hour, I just forgot to delete my browser cache. Great. At least I learned that I will reset my browser cache every time when playing around with DNS entries.

Pictures of our current office

It’s been a while since we moved into our new office.

We always promised some better pictures, so here they are:

Us moving in

Current office pictures

Feel free to leave some comments. It has been a wild year for us. We have learned a lot and got to know a lot of very supportive and awesome people.

What I hate about my favorite phone

This is a personal post!

Sebastian and I had been searching for smartphones since the summer of 2009. Before that we had  iPod Touches because of a project we were working on and our regular cellphone. We looked into the iPhone, G1, HTC, etc… but just didn’t want to buy something from one of the big corporations. So what did we choose? After having fiddled around with WebOS SDK to get some minor development done we decided to grab a phone from the company that almost got forgotten – PALM a start up just like Komola .

You can say what you want about the Palm Pre, we thought it looked nice and the software was different. Having it the first 3 days was REALLY HARD I must say I hated it. It was slow, dropped calls, rebooted randomly and the battery died in the middle of the day. With the first three updates reboots and dropped calls disappeared and the speed of the phone constantly got better. Even the battery now lasts through the whole day (5% left at the end) but the things that really bother me have been details that have never been addressed, which are easier to fix than integrating a video recorder into the phone – although I will probably love this feature once I get my hands on WebOS 1.4.

So what are the details I am missing? I’ll go through by application

Clock

This is first because it was the reason I wrote this blog post after all. The clock app is great at showing what time it is:

but as soon as you want to get woken by your phone you might consider going back to a designated alarm clock, where you can specify on what days the alarm is supposed to wake you. The limited options don’t fit  my life… I have to wake up at different times every other day so I have to manually tap both buttons every night – so that I don’t get woken early or too late. If Mr. Rubinstein wouldn’t have been ignorant about the competition, they might have brought out a thought through Clock app – apple did this really well!

Photos

There is one reason I want to go to this application and that is to show pictures, which I toke – not show off album art! The application would probably load a lot faster if it would just show the Photo roll as default and if I want to check out all the other pictures let me swipe back.

Kamera

Please make it possible to take pictures by pressing volume up or the whole screen it’s to hard to touch the button when taking a picture of yourself.

Contacts

The contacts app is actually pretty cool especially that it collects all the user info.. even facebook.. but when searching for a contact there is no way of accessing that persons facebook profile. Instead I have to go to the mobile facebook page and search for the name I just typed into contacts. Implementing a “Go to Facebook Profile” would be great

Google Maps

When in another city the maps app is crucial and when you are driving there you need information like directions. Via GPS you know my exact location so why not show me decent directions? If I drive off the route you could automatically recalculate the route and hide information I don’t need anymore when I followed the instructions correctly. But the major question is why there is a Menu button in the bottom right if the menu drop down (the thing saying Google Maps in the upper left corner) is empty? The preloaded apps should in my opinion be built in some standard fashion.

Web

The browser is truely great on this device except their implementations of bookmarks. For my convinience instead of showing me a custom chosen favicon like the apple OS Mobile you have to select a part of the website you want to see… Why would you do that and then have special rules for preloaded sites?

Calendar

The calendar sucks in general.. I use calendar.google.com… Please fix the calendar! Give me list view… do something!

Messaging

Great idea to implement a native chat client and have text messaging in the same application I love that but I want to include returns in my messages Shift and Return should make a new line. The other question about the native chat client why is there no MSN or ICQ? (These are both the most popular in germany next to skype which isn’t implemented for obvious reasons)

Backup

I love that the phone backs itself up – even better it does this wirelessly! But why can’t I restrict it to only do backups when it’s connected to power between 2 and 4 am? And why are the connections between contacts not saved? I would like a more thorough backup.

General

I would love my phone to always be ready for me and the apps on it to be uptodate – also the reason why I use Google Chrome – why can’t everything be updates automatically for me? Or tell me when updates are available (without me having to go to Updates manually).

A long while I had my Pre with Preware and had patches installed so that the notification LED would start pulsing as soon as I got mail – best feature why hasn’t it been implemented for public?

Also please let me get out of USB Drive mode without unplugging the device..

I love this Phone…

but it’s got its problems, which I hope get adressed
-Thomas