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!

new Unyverse Client version 1.4 Beta

We have great news for you. We have been working hard last month to correct a bunch of bugs and add some cool new features you asked for!

We just released a new version of the Unyverse client version 1.4 beta.
You can download it here : http://www.unyverse.com/download/ from your desktop or from your device, start Unyverse and go to Settings > About > Check for update

Unyverse v 1.4 new features:
1) Import your phone contacts into the Unyverse Contacts app by selecting the Import Contact item on the phone. This was a top request from you. This is a great way to backup phone contacts and edit them on your computer.
2) iPod / Phone like animation between screens. It was also a request from you. There is a settings to disable it for low end phones.
3) long press on Back menu on Java phone goes to Home screen. This is usefull when you navigate a lot and you want to quickly go back to the Home screen.
4) Back hardware key now minimizes the app on Windows Mobile Smartphone edition when it is on top of the history. This is compliant with the Windows Mobile guidelines
5) Windows Mobile 2003 is now supported
6) Support of Helio Ocean and touch screen Motorola phones (A780 and A1200)

The following bugs have been corrected
1) On Blackberry, in the edit box screen, when modifying the text then clicking on the Back key and selecting Save, the changes are now saved.
2) Better error management when there is no network
3) Up / down arrows scroll indicator for Windows Mobile in the caption
4) more robust server synchronization when adding/modifying items offline and exiting the app without having time to upload the modification
5) A lot of small minor rendering enhancements in the list and text screen.

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.

Send quick notes to your mobile from your Google toolbar

We recently released a cool new Unyverse button for the Google Toolbar, which you can download from here: http://unyverse.com/download/desktop.aspx

The basic functionality is that it groups all the bookmarks to each of the Unyverse wikis you may have subscribed to (contacts, notes, shopping lists,..) in one convenient button that you can access from any web page.

Note that to make it really useful and usable you should use automatic sign-in to your Unyverse account, so that you don’t have to type in your account details each time you click on the button. To do this, simply check the “Remember me” box on the sign-in page on the Unyverse web site. If you weren’t already signed-on, the button doesn’t show the list of bookmarks, but a link which says : “Sign In to Unyverse”. Then once you’ve signed in the links don’t appear immediately, there’s a refresh rate of about an hour. Whereas if you use automatic sign-in, the bookmarks to your apps will always appear when you click on the button.

But the really cool part – or hack you may call it  - is that you can use the Google toolbar search input box to enter notes. Just type in any text in the search box, then click on the Unyverse button, and a new note is automatically created in your Unyverse Notebooks wiki, which means it is instantly available on your mobile. You can also select text on any web page and right-click the selection to send it to Unyverse as a new note . New notes are created as unclassified.

Unyverse for Google Android Mobile Platform

These are exciting times for mobile software companies and for all of us. I’m sure you all know that Google is entering the Mobile Os market and will provide a free open source complete operating system and application player for mass market mobile phones. Mobile phones using the Goolge Android platform should be available second half of 2008.

From a customer point of view, this is just great as it pushes new innovations at an even quicker pace in the mobile phone and mobile software market.

Although the Google announcement does not give a lot of technical details, a complete SDK will be released on Nov 12th 07 and you can be sure we will start working on it as early as next week to provide you a Unyverse client version for the Google phones.

By looking at the YouTube video found on the Open Handset Alliance website, we can figure out there will be a Virtual Machine for the Android platform. Another Open Handset Alliance partner, Esmertec, just announced they are providing a complete Java ME stack for it. It means the current Unyverse version for Java phones might even work on the Google mobile platform…. That’s cool.

Of course, I’m pretty sure we will have some work to have a better and complete integration such as Google Maps or GMail integration, but it is likely we will have a Unyverse client pretty quickly.

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.

We launched the site today!

Unyverse is now live at www.unyverse.com. After weeks of sleepless nights, working hard to finalize the web pages and fixing last minute bugs on the mobile client software, it’s finally online! And we’re all very excited and eager to know how people are going to use the service.