Deleting multiple contacts or notes in your web account

We have added a multiple deleting functionality in the web versions of Business and Personal Contacts, as well as Workspaces and Notebooks, which allows you to delete several contacts or posts/notes in a single click. Items previously had to be deleted one by one.

This is specially useful with the Import functionality in Contacts, if the import went wrong and you want to start over again. 

Import and Export functionality in Upvise web applications

We have added Import and Export functions in your web account.

You can now export as a CSV file:

• your business contacts, related tasks and opportunities,
• your project tasks, issues and milestones
• your workspaces and posts,
• your personal contacts or groups of contacts,
• your personal notes and notebooks

Exporting allows you to re-import into another application, to re-import into another Upvise application, e.g. you can export contacts from the Personal Contacts app, and re-import into the Business Contacts, or simply to backup your data.

Importing is also available for all the above applications. You can import CSV files, exported from Microsoft Outlook/Outlook Express, Gmail, Yahoo or Mac Address Book. You can also import CSV files from Upvise.

It can be useful to create a group to import your contacts, or create a special notebook or workspace to import your notes/posts, so that you can classify the imported items separately.

Updated Upvise RSS News Reader

We just updated the RSS News Reader application, based on your requests and feedback

• the list of feeds is now displayed on the first home page of the RSS news app. It means that you have to do 2 clicks to read your news only, instead of 4 previously : you select the RSS News app in the Upvise home page and then you select your feed : and you see all the latest articles. This was a top request and got numerous beta testers asking why it took so many clicks to just star reading. Well, we did it.
• we also changed the article view : the article title is now displayed in the page content, not on the top caption. Often titles were too long to fit and were truncated, you can now see the complete title in the page. We also added the publication date of the end of the article view.
• The starred articles link is also displayed on the home page, after the feed list, just like a custom feed in fact, makes sense, doesn’t it?
• the Add New Feed link is now in the left menu bar on the home page too. If there is no feed in the home page, you also get a nice Add New Feed in the list.

How to install the Upvise News Reader application:

• You need to have Upvise client application installed on your mobile phone.
• The install of the latest News Reader application should be automatic on your phone, simply start Upvise and select the News Reader application, it will download automatically the latest version. 

Developer insider’s view on Google Android

Here are some interesting points on the development work for this port.

Positive Points:

• porting was easy because we already have our source code base for Upvise in java, and Android is java based
• we already separated the core cross-platform java code from the device specific code, because we do this for Java J2ME, our desktop simulator and for Blackberry. We only had to implement the device specific parts, mainly the low level graphic librairies, storage and the phone application integration like Maps, Browser, Dialer…
• we found that the SDK and the emulator are stable and work well. Note we were using SDK  M5 RC14 (released early March) and not the initial release, which was more buggy.
• Integration with native apps is very simple, and clean.
• I like the option to simulate a GPRS low bandwith network with the Emulator

Negative points:

• Eclipse only, not Netbeans (yet): we use NetBeans 6.0 for all of our mobile Java development and we like it a lot, it is fast, simple, intuitive and we can test it with all different mbile emulator : Sun, Nokia, Motorola, and even Blackberry have simulator plugins. For Android, you have to use Eclipse. Not a big deal, it took us about 2 hours to have everyting set up, but we found Eclipse is slower (at least when debugging using the Android  Simulator)
• The UI layer, with all the Intents, Views, Activity is overkill. Just look at all the packages and the classes. It is also frustating that is not simply a super set of J2ME with backward compatibility.
• There is no Gmail client app yet to integrate with. I would have expected Google to have it from the very beginning. We had to implement our own send mail function!
• Because there is no actual device yet, it is hard to figure out the best way to integration with the keyboard. This is a very important usability test in mobile developement.

 Conclusion:

Once you workaround the little annoyances of the Google Android Platform (it is only 5 months old…..), it is very straightforward and easy to make a port to Android and even take full advantages of this new platform, like maps, dialer, full browser,….

Overall, it took us about 1 week to get a first working prototpye and an additional 3 weeks to fully polish the app.

Updated Mobile Business Contacts Application

We’ve just updated the Mobile Business Contacts application:

The main feature is that you can now associate Tasks and Opportunities not only to a Company, but also to a Contact.

When you view a Contact on your mobile phone, you now have 2 additional links : Open Tasks and Opportunities for this contact. When you click on one of these items, you see the list of tasks or opportunities for the given contact. At the top of the list, there is a new Tasks or Opportunity item you can use to quickly add a new task or a new opportunity for this contact. 

The same feature is available on your Web account too. 2 new tabs, Tasks and Opportunities now appear in the Contact view, (just like the ones in the Company view).

We also upgraded the display when browsing all tasks and opportunities: We added a link just next to the task or opportunity name, corresponding to the associated contact or company. This way you can quickly navigate between contacts, companies, opportunities and tasks. 

Also  some other minor updates:

• there is a new website field to associate a webpage URL with a contact. You can also now put rich HTML editing in the note field of a contact.
• in the company list view, the website field is now displayed as a link. There is also an Edit link at the right to directly edit the company, (instead of going to the company view by clicking on the record). Phone and fax are now grouped together in the same column and you can click on them to initiate a Skype phone call.
• in the contact view, mobile and phone numbers are also grouped in one column and you can click on them to start a Skype phone call too.
• Opportunities and tasks list views also have the Edit link at the right of each item.
• the Back link displayed on most pages works now much better.

New Web User Interface for User Account and secure Login

We just improved the AJAX web interface for the user account in Upvise:

1. the application links are now easily accessible from the top left of the page. You can switch quickly between any of them.
2. we have a new dashboard with nice grid layout and icons and descriptions for each application
3. may be the major but subtle enhancement is the relocation of the search box from the right of the page to the top left, but below the application list. It is much more visible and accessible and let you search in the current application.
4. the login page is now secure with HTTPS
5. Finally, the blue navigation toolbar is now bigger

 

New Upvise user account dashboard 

New application links and search box

 

 

Upvise Mobile Wikipedia available in more languages

We got a lot of user requests to support multiple languages for Upvise Mobile Wikipedia. We just did it: we have added the latest versions of Wikipedia in German, French, Italian and Spanish. You can now search, read, bookmark and sync your bookmarks with your free Upvise account in all these languages plsu Enlgish of course.

For your info, the uncompressed Wikipedia database (dated April 08) for English is about 15GB, German is 4GB, Spanish is 2GB, French is 3.5GB and Italian 2GB. But of course, because we are using smart compression, a full article is only 30KB on the average, it takes just few seconds to download to your mobile using a GPRS/EDGE connection. With 3G or Wifi, it is allmost instantaneous.

To get the latest update on your mobile:

1. Start Upvise on your mobile (if you do not have it yet, install Upvise on your mobile first.)
2. Refresh the home page, i.e. press the star key * (or select Refresh meu item on Windows Mbile and Blackberry).
3. Select Wikipedia : you should be seeing options to search in each language in the Search menu.

 

 

Updated Shopping List Wiki Application

Based on numerous feedbacks and suggestions from our beta users, we just launched an enhanced version of our popular shopping list app.

Here are the new features:

1) Categories. You can now define categories (such as Fruits, Vegetables,…. ) and assign an item to a category. It allows to group items in a given shopping list by category. This was the top request we received.

2) You can also now move an item from one list to another.

3) Enhanced Item Detail page. On the phone, we simplified and streamlined the “Item Detail” page, to be more consistent with other apps, like Contacts and Notebooks. There is now a ”View Item” page and an “Edit Item” page. In the “View Item” page, you see a read only summary of all the information related to one item. You can only change the “To Buy” flag for this item. To edit the item, click on the Edit soft menu button.

4) Quick Navigation between items from an Item View page. Using the left and right joystick button, you can now quickly navigate to the next / previous item in a list.

5) The Unit values for an item have been changed to reflect a more practical usage of the app : it now includes pieces, cans, bottle and packs.

How to install the new Shopping List app:

For existing users :

1) Install should be automatic and transparent the next time you start the shopping List app on your phone or on your web account.

2) If you do not see the new version on your phone go to : Home > Personal Wikis and then press the * key or the Refresh menu item (for Windows Mobile and Blackberry) , then select the Shopping List app.

For new users:

1) Install the Unyverse client application from http://www.unyverse.com/download and follow the instructions. It is available for Java, Symbian, Windows Mobile and Blackberry phones.

2) Create a free Unyverse Account to synchronize your data between your mobile phone and your web account

3) Add the Shopping List wiki app to your Unyverse account from here: http://www.unyverse.com/catalog/details.aspx?id=uny.shoppinglist

I want to thank all of our beta users for their useful feedback on the Shopping List app. I hope you will like this upgraded version. All your comments are welcome!

How to Backup an important SMS text message from your mobile to your PC

Text messages are used today by everybody on their mobile and in wide range of situations. It may sometimes happen that someone sends you a text message with some important information, that you need to recover on a PC in order to store it or input the data into a desktop application. With Unyverse, you can save the text message to your PC quite easily.

Simple select the text of the SMS using the Copy menu function of your phone’s messaging application [*]. Then goto the Unyverse app and open your Notebooks wiki, click on New Note and select Paste from the Options menu. Click on OK, and you’re done: the note is synced to your PC, and you can access the important text by logging on to your Unyverse account on your computer.

[*] The copy/paste functionality is available on recent Nokia, Motorola and Sony Ericsson phones, as well as some Samsung phones.

Pretty good response

After one week of operation, Unyverse WORKS! We are not in orbit yet, but we definitely left Earth and we did not explode on the launch pad!

We got our first 1,000 downloads of Unyverse in 24 hours and even received a first employment request!

 The most downloaded app is Wikipedia, followed by the Contacts wiki, and then the News reader. We now have to promote the Notebooks and other wikis like the Quote of Day and Shopping list a bit more. Java/J2ME is by far the most downloaded version. The figures are consistent with the number of Java versus Windows Mobile devices out there, but it’s good to validate that people are downloading software onto regular “feature” phones and not just smartphones.

An important functionality that we are aware is missing for the Contacts wiki is an Import CSV tool to re-import existing contacts from another software. There’s also been demand for a Blackberry and Treo version. We are working on all this actively so stay tuned.