We have just released an other update of Mobisle Notes for Android. In addition to bug fixes and optimization we added these features:
Indentation - You are now able to make sub categories within a checklist. This is done by swiping with your finger from one side to an other. This feature needs to be turned on in the settings menu.
Restore deleted notes – If you would like to recover a deleted list there is now a settings option to do that. “Settings -> Backup -> Restore deleted note”. A deleted note will be kept in the trash for 2 weeks.
Backup preview – For users with Android 2.2 (Froyo) there is now a new backup system witch allow you to preview the different backups inorder to avoid choosing an old backup.
URL and phone number links – There is now an option to make phone numbers and links clickable in a note. This feature needs to be turned on in the settings menu.
Improved language support – We have improved some of the translations in the app and added support for Dutch, Polish, Italian, Russian. This is all thanks to the wonderful support from dedicated users.
Special thanks to:
Suzanne (Dutch)
Kirill Shamilin (Russian)
Igor Paraskeva (Russian)
Hannes Klauser (German)
Dominik Eder (German)
Daniel R. (Portugese)
Luca Minardi (Italian)
Daniele Arrighi (Italian)
Przemysław Załęski (Polish)
If you’ve been following us for a while you know that we are frustrated, to say the least, about not being able to survive as a company on just making great apps and releasing them on the Android Market. Why is this? Well, being in Sweden, Google won’t allow us to sell our apps on the official market for Android apps that they control. The Android Market is now almost two years old, so we ask ourselves, how can this be? Google, wake up!
If worse comes to worse and Google can’t see this as a problem and do something about it, we have to move on to another platform where we can make great apps and get something back for it. If you want to help us out, and you think that this is an outrage too, we’d love nothing more than for you to sign the petition we’ve started to try and get Google to acknowledge this problem and fix it. Please visit the petition and sign it now and get the word out to all your friends and followers so we can keep on making the Android Market a better place for everyone.
(And to the happy users of our current Android apps we just want to assure you that signing this petition will not risk you having to pay for the free apps you’re already using today. These will always stay free. But we’ve had many users asking for premium features that we just can’t put time into developing if we can’t get paid for our effort.)
We have just released a big update of our popular notes/to-do app MobisleNotes for Android with a lot of new exciting features. We’ve tried to satisfy most of our users by adding a bunch of frequently requested features:
Password protection – Your notes can now have passwords for extra security. This is done by setting a master password and then pressing the meny-button inside a note, then “Lock”. The password is restricted to numbers.
Reminders - An alarm function is now available for every note. The alarm will show up in the notification bar and can be set individually on every note.
Language support – As a BETA feature we are now trying out the possibility to have different language supports in Mobisle Notes. We will kindly receive improvement suggestions from users since we do not master all supported languages and have to rely on internet translators. At the moment we support : English, German, French, Spanish, Chinese (simplified), Japanese and Swedish.
Preformance and stability - We are constantly working to improve overall stability and performance of our apps and have made major work in this latest patch to insure an even smother “ride”.
GUI enhancements – You can now sort your notes by using “drag and drop”. This is done by pressing the “Edit” button and then dragging the symbol to the left. In checklist mode the checked items will now slide to the bottom and reverse if you uncheck them.
We are currently in the process of converting our award wining app MobileNotes – Todo on to the iPhone. Look out for more exiting apps for the iPhone in the future.
Here’s the video from the presentation of our Rebtel app in action at the DEMO Conference in Desert Springs. The Rebtel guys did a great job. Thanks guys!
We are very proud to have been given the trust to work with Rebtel to create their first Android app. Rebtel is a revolutionary telephony service that eliminates the high fees of international calling by routing the calls over the Internet. The result of our collaboration is truly remarkable. We think that this app may have great impact on the way people make international phone calls and really shake up the concept of international roaming.
Thanks to the openness of the Android platform we have been able to make an app that can make use of Rebtel’s calling service without altering their existing calling behavior in any way. This will give anyone with an Android phone a way to save big money on international calls just by installing the Android app and singing up for Rebtel. And to top it all off: if both ends of the call use the Rebtel Android app, the international part of your call will be completely free!
MobisleApps and Rebtel are really proud of this accomplishment and hope you will like it as much as we do. Please make sure to check out the Beta release, just now presented at the DEMO Conference and very soon available on the Android Market. Search for “Rebtel” or scan the barcode below.
Due to the latest problems with corrupted databases we have made some change to how data is stored in MobisleNotes. In order to avoid any similar situations in the future we have made sure that the app automatically makes a copy of the database on to the SD-card (if there is no SD-card you will get a warning). Everything is done automatically after installation and no special settings are required. If there is an older copy of the MobisleApps database on the SD-card the first time you start the app after installation you will get a prompt asking you if you what to import that database.
You also have the option to move the database to another phone. This is easiest done with the “manual backup” feature available under the settings menu. There you can request the app to save your database to a manual file which you then can import into the new phone. Please remember that the database on the new phone will be overwritten.
This feature is available in the new update, 1.35 in the Android Market.
First off we would like to apologizefor the latest problems that occurred since our last update.
Many people have requested that we should remove the copy protection of the app and since it’s free we didn’t see a problem with this. In the last update we made some minor changes to Mobisle Notes but nothing that would harm the apps database structure. What we did do was to remove the copy protection which is done in the developer console in Android market. We did this at the same time as we released the update.
What we have come to learn is that when we removed the copy protection some of the databases got corrupted. Unfortunately, despite all our efforts, we are not able to make any updates that fixes this problem. We are not in the habit of blaming some else but this problem has occured for other developers, Link1, Link2, Link3, and nothing has been done to deal with it. It extremely unfortunate that this happens to our valuable users and it makes us very sad. Only with your help can we put pressure on Google to avoid this in the future. We have narrowed it down to being only Android 1.5 (IRIS, Hero etc).
As a fellow developer puts it:
“In fact, that’s the worst part about this whole thing – devs get totally blindsided by this bug, because they can’t actually try and install their own paid apps, therefore can never see that the Market DRM changed the app’s UID. By the time we figure out what happened, dozens or hundreds of users have downloaded the changed app and seen buggy prefs or instant force closes, and they blame us, not the Market.”
Now to the worst part. To fix this problem you will need to reinstall the application which will cause all data within the app to be lost. I can once again assure you that we have tried our hardest to come up with a solution which will not erase all data but there is no way.
We are currently working hard to extend Mobisle Notes with an automatic backup of the database on the SD-card which will remove the danger of something similar happening again.
We are very grateful for your understanding and hope that you will keep using Mobisle Notes.
As a developer I try out a lot of different phones all the time for different reasons. Mostly to test our apps and make sure they work properly across all available phones (which is not always the case even though they have the same version of Android). I’m currently trying out the Motorola Droid (or Milestone) which runs a basic version of Android 2.0. Normally (or side by side) I use the HTC Hero which has HTC’s own skinned UI, Sense UI, which I have become quite accustomed to. Using these phones at the same time I have come to realize a few cool features in Sense that it’s hard to live without once you have become used to them.
Of course I know there are a lot of patent issues that might come in the way of this actually happening, but I still want to point out what’s really good:
1. First off is the “Smart dial” feature. This awesome way to find your way through your contacts beats the standard Android way by miles. If you would like to dial someone in the standard UI you will have to go through 3 different screens and numerous of touch-clicks before you can start looking for your contacts.
Smart Dial HTC-Sense
On the Sense you simply start typing the contacts name, if you are in the dialer, and it looks through your contacts right away (see image).
2. The way information is sorted in Sense under each contact is very good and logical in my opinion. You can even get your exchange mail sorted in “conversations” which is very handy if your like that. I would anticipate that Google will not incorporate social media with the OS and rather let independent developers do that but the way it’s done in Sense UI is really good and works seamlessly.
3. A small but convenient thing is that the call history has been flipped around. In my opinion you are more likely to want to call someone right away when clicking on their name than looking into more details about the call or getting their contact details. In the Sense UI you will call someone right away when clicking the name and need to press to the right in order to get info about them. On Google’s standard UI it’s the other way around.
4. The way HTC has been able to get allot of new language (witch are not supported in vanilla Android) in to the different devices is impressive as well.*Update – Got a Nexus One yesterday* Now when i’m using the Nexus One trying to write in Swedish it makes it almost impossible to text in an efficient way. Especially when compared to the almost “Swype“-like qwerty on the Sense. I can just hit keys “as precise as possible” and it figures out what word I meant.
This is a few of the smart features HTC has implemented in their version of Android and surely one of the reasons for their popularity. All in all it feels like HTC has had a bit longer time to perfect their UI since the Sense has been developed long back on the Windows Mobile devices. Hopefully some of that experience will spill over on the standard version of the Android OS.
As we’ve said in an earlier post, we think Google’s Nexus One is a great device. We tried it out, we loved it, and we begged our oversees friends to get a couple of them shipped to Sweden. While we’re waiting for them to arrive we though we would give our thoughts as to why we think the Nexus One is such a big deal.
Every time a new premium phone is launched with the latest and greatest tech specs, of course people are going to want it. It was the case with the first Android phone, the HTC Hero, the Droid, and now the Nexus One. But it’s different this time. Some might argue that it’s because an Android phone is finally catching up with the iPhone (for real this time), but we think it’s different this time because of Google finally showing it’s true commitment to the platform they launched over 2 years ago.
The Nexus One shows that Google got tired of all the inferior phones created on a whim by hardware pushing companies using their platform and decided they needed to show them how it’s done. To show how good an Android phone can actually be. Having done this, we think this is just the beginning of an era of Google trying to take control of the mobile market and pushing it’s Android platform. We think they’ve already succeeded in making a groundbreaking device, now they need to work on the other parts of the platform where they still lag behind Apple, which is mainly the AndroidMarket, but also content distribution (ie. music, audiobooks, magazines) where we think interesting things will happen. We (wishingly) think that this is what’s next for Google. Just as Apple released the iPhone a year and a half before the AppStore, we think Google needed an Android phone they were really proud of before they could focus on the Android Market and the developer community. I mean, what better way to persuade developers and content producers than to create a really cool device for their stuff? And add to that the increasing Android market share that the Nexus One hopefully will spur. More Android devices, bigger market, more money.
Another point of interest is the potentially big advantage that Google now has over Apple and other competitors, being in control of so many of the web services that mobile users already are dependent on, and ending 2009 with a slew of groundbreaking new services that will take competitors a long time to catch up on. Google are offering these as open source with their Android releases but as we saw with the Nexus One, we suspect they will keep releasing these ahead of the competition coincident with new Google phone releases.
To sum up, we think Google are on right on the track with their mobile strategy. Now they just have to keep pushing and working hard to create great products and services and perfecting the complete Android experience, and we’re confident that Google has the right people to get the job done. The biggest strategic question they have to handle right now is how they are going to tip-toe around the fact that they now are competitors to other Android handset makers. But the move has been made, and we think it’s the right one.
Recent Comments