day -12: amba.do wohoo
Daily stories from the ambadoo team, behind the scenes, dev-stats and other random stuff.
Two weeks to go. No more, no less. We’re getting to the point of finalizing a first releasable version, and now we’re working on all cylinders, while others gaze in the sun. It will be intense two weeks ahead with the very limited resources we have.
A Wohoo
It’s the small little everyday victories that cheer you up. Today Ester had one of those when she figured out a little problem she’d been struggling with. I know the feeling, and I’m one of those who jump around the room when I get something to work after hours of fight. It’s such an empowering feeling to succeed, no matter how little it is in the big picture. A little victory is still a victory.
Tags
We thought it’d be really cool to be able to tag others so that you then could create dynamic lists of friends from those tags. But quite recently we figured it’s even cooler to be able to tag yourself so that you can be added to a list, and everyone else who’s tagging themselves with that tag too will appear on that list. I can’t wait to see this feature in action. It might sound banal but it feels like quite powerful feature when we talk about it. Time will tell. It’s now being implemented so we can try it out.
iPad / Web
While we’re at it, we thought why stop making a mobile web version when it’s just a matter of a new style-sheet and some extra hours away from the sun to enable users to access their address book from their iPads or computers too. Maybe we’re grabbing for too much water, but it sure would be nice to close the circle.
amba.do
By now, many of you are probably familiar with short URLs like bit.ly, a way to compress long urls to fit into messages with limited characters like twitter. We’ll be using this short(er) url for your profiles. Unlike twitter is based on real names and not dependent on this short URL. So http://ambadoo.com/users/0/home also becomes http://amba.do/name. That’s the URL you can share to your friends, add as signature in e-mails, or as contact info on other sites.
day -16: widgets & worries
Daily stories from the ambadoo team, behind the scenes, dev-stats and other random stuff.
a:widget
Aside from the iPhone App, there’s a parallel track with web goodies. You’ll be able to access your own address book from any mobile browser with the web app, but we’re working on a cool little contact widget which you can attach to any of your sites as a dynamic business card. It’s a little JavaScript snippet, that you easily can embed in your html code.
Why? Well, contact info on websites tend to be out-of-date since they’re commonly hard-coded. Instead this widget will pull the public information from your ambadoo profile, so that it’s always updated for your visitors.
Public Profile
All users will by default have a public profile, like white pages. You can share the url of that to your friends and new contacts. From their mobile they’ll be able to contact you straight away without having to add you. The multi-line email-signatre can now be replaced with one single line with a link to all necessary contact info you can think of.
Tomorrow we’ll have this weeks the sprint review, and will talk about the remaining two weeks. Hard work await.