We’ve had numerous enquiries from home-schooling parents in the past and as a result we’re looking into some new features specifically aimed at teachers and home-schoolers. So if you’re a parent or tutor who specialises in home-schooling please get in touch with me via the comments or contact form and you can help us test and expand our new features which will allow you to interact with your pupils more easily.
Notely hasn’t received any external updates in a while (there are a lot being beta tested though!) but in light of recent traffic increases and the back to school rush I decided to push a nice little update out ahead of schedule. Facebook Connect.
Facebook Connect has been long overdue for Notely; Facebook is the social network of choice for students the world over so why not integrate logins closer with such a great site. Notely already has a Facebook app which appears to be well received so lets get connecting!
The changes are live now, but may take some time to propagate. If the login page looks weird try clearing any browser caches to clear out old CSS. If you have any issues with Facebook Connect or you see any odd error messages popping up do let me know (please use Notely’s Get Satisfaction page) as I have ripped out the Facebook Connect code from the development site which has some extensive changes waiting to go live.
Jolicloud the new brain-child of Tariq Krim (founder and former CEO of Netvibes) is taking shape and looking great. Today they releaseda screenshot of the Jolicloud app directory and I have to say it’s looking pretty sweet. We even noticed a certain great web app aimed at students in there…..
Which brings me around to Jolicloud again. It is a great idea; a simplistic, beautiful interface wrapped around (I assume) Ubuntu netbook that is sure to strike a chord with students and web professionals alike. I know I’ll be installing it as soon as I get the chance! Come on beta.
So sign up now and scubscribe to their twitter feed and all that because this is going to make some waves pretty soon.
Being a sucker for anything with a little apple on it, I recently subcummed to the iPhone. So far the user experience is way better than any other phone I’ve owned. The ease of use and interaction is simply brilliant and most of the apps being released are great too.
This in mind I’ve been toiling away in Xcode for the past week or two to create something for Notely. This being my first dealing with application development on OS X so it’s been a rocky week but with the help of a few great sites I’ve gotten over most of my issues.
Since the app is coming close to completion I though I would throw up a few images and see what feedback came in…so..here goes.
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iPhone app showing the home screen
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iPhone app showing the users Notes
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iPhone app showing the users Notes in detail
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iPhone app showing the users contacts being deleted
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iPhone app calendar
Mail me or submit comments and suggestions to Get Satisfaction and I will see where they can be slotted in.
So I’ve been working hard on a couple of new features that some of you have been requesting and wanted to give you all a sneak peak and ask for any feedback on the ideas. So onto the features.
Mindmapping
I’ve developed a text to mindmap feature that turns formatted text as a flash mindmap. The text must be formatted in the correct manner, something a little like this:
Months of the Year
Spring
March
April
May
Winter
October
November
December
This will, when processed, create the following mindmap.
When viewing the mindmap you can expand and contract nodes to create the appropriate view for your learning.
Questions & Answers
The second new feature is a questions and answer service. I’m hoping this will replace the need for a separate forum..which I really don’t have the time to manage. With this new tool users can ask and answer questions (funny that). Answers provided can be voted upon and the answers with the highest user approval will be promoted to the top of the answers list. This will provided a basis for older pupils to help out those a few rungs below them. I’ll even be popping in every now and again to ask and answer questions. Here are a few screenies of the new service, as ever feedback is appreciated so don’t hesitate to contact me either in the comments, e-mail or Get Satisfaction.
I’ve always thought of web applications such as Notely as replacements for traditional desktop apps. Being a web application allows Notely to be flexible, focussed and constantly updated. One thing that web applications often do wrong is support; most sites throw up a an FAQ. Not Notely!
We’ve added even more ways for you to get support, we’ve now got a dedicated support email (hmm you can guess what it is I think), a support form, a new manual and I will be using Get Satisfaction.
The Support Form
The new and improved support form allows you to send in bug reports and support requests, simply fill out the form specifying as much of the information as possible and as detailed an explanation as possible. It’s even possible for you to add a screenshot of your problem. With all this information submitted it should be fairly easy for me to figure out waht the problem was and fix it.
The Manual
The manual comes in two flavours; videos with subtitles and a HTML walkthrough. The manual aims to explain all the key tools within Notely and shows you in detail how to use each of them. The manual is currently only in English but in time I’ll get it translated.
Get Satisfaction
From now on I’ll also be logging into Get Satisfaction, a sort of out-sourced crowd-sourced support system, to check for new posts. You can ask questions about Notely on our page here. I would encourage you all to sign up to Get Satisfaction and help other users out, the less time I have to spend on support the more time I can devote to developing Notely.
I hope these two new tools (along with the current FAQ) will make Notely more of a candidate to replace traditional desktop tools for some of you out there.
Due to the impending release of Notely version 3 Notely will be taking some time out next weekend (3rd May 08 01am – 5rd May 08 01am GMT) in order to do some major server/database re-jigging. So that’s the bad news…now for the good news.
When we come back on Monday morning we’ll have a brand spanking new site with tonnes of great new features for you all. Version 3 of Notely won’t look radically different but there will be over 20 changes under the hood including some much needed new features all aimed at making you better organised and allow you student to organise your workload much much better.
) if not contact me and we’ll see if we can sort it out; it was a big job moving 5000 or so users to a new database!