The NitroDesk Blog

Transitioning to Offce365

2012-01-23T13:34:00.000-08:00

If your organization just transitioned to Office365, please be aware that there are some recent changes in Office365 which has come to our attention which may cause you to see an error when performing the quick configuration.
This error shows up as an error code 451 when performing the configuration if you used the server name as m.outlook.com

We have uploaded a beta version which overcomes this error. The beta is available at the following locations
For Smartphones : http://nitrodesk.com/tddownloads/nitroidbeta-droid.apk
For Tablets (honeycomb or higher) : http://nitrodesk.com/tddownloads/nitroidbeta-honey.apk

If you install the beta version, the 451 error should go away and you should be able to configure normally.

Syncing status with exchange servers

2011-12-28T09:41:00.000-08:00

Lately we have been receiving a lot of support requests around this issue, and hence this post. Please read carefully, support may be simply unable to fix your issue. TouchDown has been tested to make these status changes to the device and back. However, there are factors that are outside our control that may cause some of these updates to simply not work. While support will try to establish a cause, we are typically unable to actually solve issues which are outside of the applications control.
Basics
TouchDown never talks directly with your outlook on the desktop. Outlook and TouchDown are simply "clients", which display what they think the exchange server account contains. The source of all the data is the exchange server which you connect Outlook and TouchDown to. There may be times when either of them may be out of sync with the server.

How to see what the server really knows
In order to see what the server knows about your data, you must connect directly with the server. The best (and only) way to do this is to login to OWA, or (Outlook Web Access). OWA is NOT OUTLOOK. For this, you must first find out the OWA link for your exchange server. If in doubt, ask your administrator, the link may take the following forms
https://mail.company.com/exchange
https://webmail.company.com/owa
(in some installations where security is not a priority for the organization [or where the administrator may find it desirable to have all your data to be trasmitted in plain text over the internet for some odd reason], https may be replaced with http.)
Once you know what the link is, you should navigate to the link on a PC browser. THe server will at that time ask you to authenticate yourself. Once you login to the server, you will see a view much like outlook, but inside your browser. What you see in this view is what the server knows. Any changes you make here will eventually be reflected in outlook and touchdown if all is configured correctly.

How read status (and deletions) works on Exchange
Outlook to Device
When you mark an item as read on Outlook, outlook eventually sends the status change to the exchange server. The exchange server maintains the status of each of the emails on the server, and eventually sends the status change to the device, IF it determines that the device is displaying the email

What can go wrong
1. Outlook fails to update the status on the server for some reason. To find out if this is the case, you have to see what exchange sees. After you mark items as read/unread in outlook, if you dont see the changes reflect back in TouchDown, login to the server and see if the server shows the items as you marked them. If it doesnt, chances are outlook did not update the server correctly. Make sure that you allowed enough time for Outlook to actually mark those items on the server.
2. Outlook updated the server, but the server did not update TouchDown. This can happen because the server doesnt always immediately update the device for changes like a read status change. Typically such changes are delayed to prevent too frequent updates to the device in an effort to save battery life. In such cases, changes such as these MAY be delayed until a more significant change such as a new email, new contact, a new event etc are detected. You can however force touchdown to proactively check for changes by pressing Menu/Sync on the TouchDown main screen a couple of times.
3. You deleted an item, but it still appears in TouchDown because you may be syncing the Deleted Items folder in TouchDown. This is by design.
4. There are some other lesser known and encountered situations where this may happen, such as cases where there may be multiple devices syncing to the server and the server faces internal issues when updating all devices involved. For example, we have known one or two situations where users have had this problem go away after they removed other devices from syncing with the exchange server. But that does not necessarily mean you cannot sync multiple devices. (In our test environments, we have up to 10 devices syncing flawlessly with the server with no such issues).

Device to Outlook
When you mark an item as read on TouchDown, by default TouchDown does not immediately tell the server about the change. This is again to prevent unnecessary chatter with the server. TouchDown will batch all such changes are send them out the next time a more significant event like sending an email, or when a change is detected on the server. You can change this behavior somewhat by turing OFF the "Defer server updates" option in the last tab of touchdown settings.

What can go wrong
1. Defer server updates can cause batching of updates to the server, meaning that the changes are not immediately sent to the server. Turning it off, or going to the main touchdown screen and doing a Menu/Sync can send such batched changes to the server.
2. TouchDown faces an error from the server when sending the updates. Such errors are typically due to situations where the server returns an error, or is unavailable. While rare, such situations can in some cases cause the change to be lost in transit. With a good internet connection and a reliable server, such situations are almost non existent. In cases where the internet connection on the device is unavailable, touchdown would either wait for a connection or retry the operation for a finite number of times before giving up.
3. TouchDown updated the server, but the server did not update outlook. This is completely out of our control, since TouchDown's work is complete once the change has been sent to the server and acknowledged. if outlook has not updated the change from the server, you can confirm that issue by looking at OWA as described in the earlier section

TouchDown on ICS

2011-12-08T17:03:00.001-08:00

Now that ICS is available, and devices are shipping, thought i would write a bit about TouchDown on ICS devices.There is a fair amount of confusion about what version of touchdown should be used on ICS devices.ICS can run on smartphones as well as tablets.

There are two flavors of TouchDown in the Android Market

1. TouchDown For Smartphones (optimized for phone form factors)

2. TouchDown HD For Tablets (Optimized for tablet form factors)

After playing with both versions on the Galaxy Nexus, i am leaning towards using TouchDown For Smartphones on the device. The main reason is that the TouchDown HD For Tablets, being a honeycomb build takes up a sizeable chunk at the top of the screen to show the action bar, which does not really add much value to the application except provide a way to access the menu options. However, If you run TouchDown for Smartphones on the Galaxy Nexus, the menu would be accessible from a button which looks like a ":" at the bottom right of the screen. I find that wasting a whole row for the menu options was not really worth it.

Tablet mode Screen DisplayPlease note also that when run on the Galaxy Nexus, the TouchDown for Smartphone version will by default open into a split screen view after you restart the application after the first configuration. If you find yourself opening the app into tablet mode, you can go to settings and under advanced tab, check ON the "Disable Tablet Mode" setting.

While the device has a high resolution, it doesnt really have enough surface area to display usable information in this format. To fix this, we are updating version 7.1.009b (this is beta still) to detect physical screen sizes less than 5" when running quick configuration, and automatically turn on the "Disable Tablet Mode" option in the advanced tab of settings.

Here are some screenshots of how the two versions look. To get this exact look and feel, note that you should TURN OFF the "Disable tablet mode option" in the last tab of settings. Tablet mode will be disabled automatically on the device since these views are not ideal.

First is a sample screenshot of TouchDown HD for Tablets showing the split screen view. Note that gray bar on the top plus the navigation tabs which take up too much space.

Here is how the TouchDown for SmartPhones app shows up on the device. Note the : symbol at the far right bottom. Thats the menu button. Also note that these screens are captured using the Black Theme. Read below to see how to set themes.

This is the email list in split screen mode.

Same thing viewed horizontally

Calendar Viewed Horizontally

Now, the classic main touchdown screen, this is the screen you will be normally greeted with after configuration.

Switching Themes

If you want to change the themes on the touchdown main screens and the list views, you can open settings and tap on the Select Theme option shown in the image below.

Note about the DeviceType change in the next version.

In the next version of TouchDown, we are changing the default device type reported to Exchange from "Android" to "Touchdown". While this will not affect an already configured device, if you uninstall and reinstall or reconfigure the device from a clean state, the new string will be reported to the server. Admins can now use that string to better identify TouchDown in Exchange Server ABQ settings.

Screen Capture Security Hole : We think it is dangerous to let android let you accidentally capture your email screen to the SD card if you happen to hold the volume down and the power button for about a second. Hence, we have put in some measures to ensure that if your security policies have PIN or data encryption or SD card encryption enabled, you cannot accidentally take screenshots of the touchdown screens that display potentially sensitive information. We have verified this on ICS.

Version 7.1 is available

2011-12-06T12:18:00.000-08:00

Version 7.1 has been released to the market(s)
The following are the notable changes
- Support for themes (go to settings and in the advanced tab you can select themes)
- Support for Quick Replies by long-pressing the email in the list.
- Configure quick replies by going to the last tab of settings and clicking the quick replies button
- Fixes a MAJOR DLP SECURITY HOLE in some android devices. On some devices we found that regardless of the security level in your enterprise, a hotkey combination (on some devices, an easy to click button at the bottom) is all it takes to send your secure email as a JPEG image into your gallery. This image compromises security in all sorts of ways. This issue will become worse with the release of ICS, which makes the screen capture function a part of the OS itself.

Can enterprises embrace the Amazon Kindle Fire ?

2011-11-25T09:19:00.001-08:00

The Kindle Fire has finally been released, and has made its way to the hands of hundreds of thousands of customers. While it is not known how many of those users are going to bring the device to the enterprise when holiday season is over, it is only logical to assume that there will be thousands of devices making their rounds inside the corporate firewalls across America at least for now.

Google News technology sections are filled with reviews both positive and negative around the device. Mostly positive. After all, the press has been waiting for link bait like this for a while. After the initial obligatory reviews around the device itself, attention is slowly turning towards whether and how well the Fire can adapt to the enterprise. Despite being a glorified electronic shopping cart for amazon, the Fire is still a formidable contender in the android tablet space. Will enterprises embrace it with both hands, or will it fizzle at the enterprise doorstep ? No one knows for sure.

From where we stand, we see IT admins may have little choice but to work backwards from the device and find creative ways to ensure they can support the device. At the end of the day, when the CIO gets a fire for christmas, its pretty much game over, you have to suport it.

As far as device capabilities go, the Kindle fire is a first class citizen in the Android world. it runs Gingerbread, and there is no excuse for not supporting the fire just because it has been heavily customized by Amazon. Amazon has done a great job of changing the OS on the surface to make it friendly for end users, but has not really backtracked on the underlying capabilities of the OS when it comes to security and sandboxing. So it can be made as secure as Gingerbread on any other phone the user may purchase. The fact that most MDM vendors have not taken the effort to test on the fire and publish their agents on the Amazon Market is probably less Amazon's fault and more a factor of prioritization by the MDM vendors. The vendor that makes the necessary investments to support the Fire and to get the MDM agent published on the amazon appstore for android will be met with eager enterprises wanting to support the device.

As always, NitroDesk TouchDown runs on the Kindle Fire with no reduction in functionality or security. From TouchDown's point of view, the fire is yet another tablet running android Gingerbread. The Fire does not have a built in Exchange email client, does not have a calendar application built in, but it has all the necessary underlying support for TouchDown to provide push email and a sandboxed contact/calendar/task/note database to customers who want a tablet experience on it. In fact, TouchDown is the only available exchange activesync client which can provide a full screen tablet optimized experience on the Fire. The only shortcoming on the device we have observed is the inability for the device to maintain a Wifi connection when the device is asleep, preventing push mail from working in that state. We have worked hard to ensure that the Fire is supported as a first class device with all the encryption and security support that the enterprise needs. Any MDM which touchdown integrates with, that publishes their agent on the Amazon AppStore will be immediately supported by NitroDesk.

TouchDown for the Kindle Fire!

2011-11-14T15:16:00.000-08:00

The Kindle Fire ships today, and alongwith it we have updated the latest version to the Amazon Market.
This new version is designed to play well with the Fire, and support a split view a'la the tablet versions on the Fire.
This is the original full blown touchdown feature set, so all the security mechanisms will be in place, ensuring that you can take the device to work if your organization approves of TouchDown.

More information at http://nitrodesk.com/fire.aspx

Enjoy that awesome device!

Version 6.4 is here

2011-02-16T09:46:00.000-08:00

TouchDown Version 6.4 has been published
There are a ton of fixes, most notably improvements in push reliability and protection against some database corruption scenarios and exceptions when composing emails.
New features include
- Ability to sync SMS when using exchange 2010 and Outlook 2010
- Support for Sybase Afaria MDM
- Support for viewing and sending S/MIME signed emails (encryption is not supported at this time)

Honeycomb, finally here !

2011-01-28T12:43:00.000-08:00

Got the HoneyComb SDK yesterday. As developers, it is a relief to be able to get our hands on a preview SDK before the devices go out. Kudos to Google for making such a monumental effort to make it available in a relatively good shape. Impressive developer docs and samples too.

One little glitch though, as acknowledged in the release notes : it is DOG slow. But then again, that's what faster PCs are for, right ?

Had to run out to the store and pick up a screamer to start working on the SDK rightaway. If you want to know what it takes to develop on it relatively painlessly, here are the specs, and with this, you can get it runnning at around half the speed of the original android 1.0 emulator on a Core 2 duo.

Intel i7 950 @3.06GHz 8Mb

6Gb Ram

kingston 64Gb SSD (for eclipse, emulator, build environment, as well as the OS swap files)

New Fragments concept is great, but truly wished it was a subclass of activity, so developers could reuse all the existing code rather than rewriting/refactoing it all. I think we will stick with our own ActivityGroup based Fragments mechanism for now.

Good to see someone is thinking about device level encryption, but unfortunately not ready for primetime yet. However, for Honeycomb versions, we will make use of the OS level PIN policies, since FINALLY they have become trustworthy for those pesky Complex PIN security policies.

Hopefully will have a separate honeycomb ready beta in a week or so for those who already have a real device (wish we had one, but we are mere developers) :-(

S/MIME support and SMS Syncing

2011-01-05T18:25:00.001-08:00

Really excited to introduce support for viewing S/MIME signed or encrypted emails, as well as the ability to take advantage of the SMS syncing capabilities of Exchange server 2010.
These features are not yet available for public consumption, but just to give you a heads up on whats coming.
Happy new year!

Money for nothing..

2010-07-15T23:12:00.000-07:00

I was reading with great interest today on how MSFT is going to attract developers with money to fund windows phone development projects..

This, if true, is indeed great news for developers, you are now slowly the trump card for every company interested in pushing their mobile strategy. First it was Apple who intrigued you with having to sign an NDA to get a hold of an SDK to develop on the Jesus Phone. Next it was Google who let you into the game for a pidddly 25 bucks and the willingness to pick your turf and your battles. Microsoft has outdone everyone by actually offering you money to build your next big thing on their platform. Great job cutting to the chase :-)

What next? HP offering you shares in the company in return for building apps on WebOS ?

While all that jazz about Windows Phone development is cool, the tools are great, the tutorials are fantastic, and getting started videos are useful and to the point, it seems thats all you can actually do on Windows Phone - get started. Looking through the Windows phone development SDK however, makes one wonder whether you can do anything but build some cool UIs with silverlight and some games with XNA.

Maybe i have still a long way to go, but how does one indeed write a serious windows phone application without

Non-trivial networking (by non-trivial i mean connecting to a server, and getting some data, connecting to another device etc). According this this page, sockets are not supported. While it may still be debated whether HTTPWebRequests and WCF are all that is needed for the phone to support serious networking apps, i am not so sure connecting to a web server is the only type of connection which developers should be allowed to have. How are the devs gonna write remote file browsers, remote connectivity tools, cool toys that connect to other devices to share data, if you are going to always have to act like a web client.

Databases: Seriously, i hope i am just being blind here. But almost every developer on Android/iPhone is familiar with and uses the native (sqlite) database heavily on that platform. All i can find about storage on the WinPhone is how you can store "files" in your very own protected areas. No databases ? nice!

Threading : Many applications you run on Android make heavy use of threading to ensure that not all work happens while the user waits. Unable to find a real threading library in Windows Phone, i must assume that it doesnt really exist (yet?). Background threads do many things while you perform other activities : connecting to a server to check for updates, performing cleanup work for the application, backing up data, deleting temporary files and so on.

Background Services : Again, guilty as charged, i must surely be missing something. all you can build with the phone is write a cool silverlight form or an XNA application. No way for an app to hang around in the background periodically checking for messages, events, no way for an app to wake up when an SD card is inserted and perform some work, no way for listening to data connectivity changes, no way to intercept an incoming SMS.... Sure, according to the Jesus Phone, background apps are bad for the consumer, since they can cause the phone to run out of battery. Yes we know red meat contains carcinogens, but do we ban beef ? There are those consumers (android users being one group of such users) who can decide for themselves when an app is taking too much battery and uninstall such apps. No one is holding a gun to our heads..

The list goes on i am sure, i am looking at this from one perspective, with my own personal list of things i would love to build on a platform, others may see other aspects.

Bottomline? I think they should not spend money in trying to attract developers, they should instead invest all that money into making sure the platform is good and ready before thinking of wooing developers. Call the kids to a party where all you have is the clown (who by the way forgot his costume at home)
?

Surely not gonna be fun without the ice-cream..

Takeaways :

While the above may be taken as criticism by the defensive types, recognition of mistake is the first step towards glory (we ourselves try to live this mantra). Without actionable feedback, criticism is waste. So... In order to present a viable development platform for potential developers on the WinPhone, as a developer, here is the wish list :

1. Document more, document better : In case any or all of the above are false, it would be great to actually document those critical components better, clearer and more exhaustively. Omitting the critical components in initial documentation and calling it a beta will only scare away developers.

2. Review whats needed by developers : take a poll, recruit a few Android developers (you cant talk to iPhone devs, since they are under NDA), look at the android documentation for clues on what may be missing. But if you dont achieve some level of library parity, you may be actually losing a lot of potential developers. Some of these components may already be there and used by the system, they may just need to be exposed to developers.

3. Don't assume users and developers are naive : Having dealt with a few thousand android users so far, i can vouch for the fact that most smartphone users are actually smart. they know when an app is sucking their battery, and they know well enough to uninstall those. If "background apps can kill your battery" is really a serious consideration, they should revisit that. (if it is just an excuse for "we dont want to figure out to do it", thats a different story) I dont believe a company that has produced the likes of Office and Exchange can justify punting on this one (unless its simply a matter of willingness. Its their platform anyways)

4. Dont shoot from the hip : yes, we all know android and iPhone are already at the party, but in the hurry to make it to the party, dont forget the pants at home. take the time, dress to kill, then get in that car. We aren't going anywhere. A late but good release is always better than an early release which fails to launch.

Wallace Falls

2010-07-11T20:53:00.001-07:00

Totally off-topic.. but posting , hoping it will cure someones Monday-itis.

FroYo, the Camry and Ferrari.

2010-05-24T08:38:00.000-07:00

So, I have this friend who has just bought a 2 year-old Camry from Toyota. The family really likes this car, it gets them where they're going and does so with little effort or fuss.

The only problem was that it isn't the "latest" model. Not very fast, being a Camry and all. It doesn't handle very well.

Toyota announced that they would be releasing an upgrade kit (at no charge) this summer which would make the car more zippy and enhance the handling.

Not wanting to wait for the Official Upgrade, my friend went searching on the internet and found a site, www.camrymods.com (no, it's not a real site, just work with me here). The guys there have all found that sourcing and installing an engine from an internet site which provides a modified Ferrari engine and engine management system which is a simple bolt-in installation for the Camry. Just Flash, err...bolt in the engine and you will have the latest and greatest of everything for the car!

So he gets one of these kits, spends a few hours installing it, which is, indeed quite simple. he goes out and jumps in his car and starts it up. OMZG, this thing is SO fast now. He's driving around the block and it's just an awesome experience! Fast, handles well, even gets better gas mileage.

After the initial shock of how good everything is, he settles in for his drive to work, turns on the radio and .......the station is set to NPR for some reason. Well, he doesn't listen to NPR, so he changes it to his local Scottish music station. It immediately pops back to NPR. Now... that's just weird. The radio won't play ANYTHING except NPR. (He's in hell.)

He decides he'll fix the radio later, and turns on his air conditioning. The horn begins to blow non-stop, until he shuts off the AC.

Fuming, he drives home and calls Toyota and screams at them for the horrible car they've sold him and demands they fix it IMMEDIATELY as he must be able to get to work in his car. Toyota support is puzzled as to why it's their problem that this guy modified his car and now has all these problems, instead of simply waiting a short while for the official, tested performance update.

Which brings us to Froyo.

I love a good custom ROM as much as the next guy, but when folks go out and install an untested, hacked, non-standard, impossible to troubleshoot ROM on their device and it breaks things that worked just fine on the Official approved tested ROMs, why do they demand that WE fix our product??

The 2.2 ROM that is reportedly being delivered Over-The-Air to Nexus One users is NOT an official ROM. It's hacked non-standard radio ROM that some folks have leaked onto the interwebs for some obtuse reason. It's not been released by Google over-the-air, by carrier pigeon or any other means. Unless you signed an NDA with Google, it's not an Official ROM.

It breaks lots of things in TouchDown and lots of other applications and for the record, it's not OUR fault.

There will always be some minor compatibilities when a new version of the OS is released and we try our best to reduce the impact of these issues on our customers. You guys rely on TouchDown to work effectively and efficiently and we want to continue to enable that.

If you simply MUST have the latest custom ROM, install it and enjoy it, but don't ask us for help with TouchDown not working. We can't fix it.

When the Official ROM is released, we will provide our usual incredibly high level of support for TouchDown and will work with the user community to identify and fix issues as they arise.

Olympus Rally 2010

2010-04-27T08:16:00.000-07:00

Pictures from the event from last weekend..
Ron was part of the car crew, and he bought space on the car for a TouchDown sponsorship with his own sweat.. Many thanks to Paul and Jeff.

Who the heck is this "Ron" guy???

2010-04-02T10:33:00.001-07:00

Some of you have noticed that you're not getting email from Goutham anymore. The witty responses you're used to getting from him have been replaced by this sardonic guy who puts LOLDOGS and FailBlog pictures in his responses to support emails.

Well....That's Me. The New Guy. Not-Goutham.

As G said when he introduced me, I've been a TouchDown fan since almost day one. I was looking for a worthwhile Exchange client to sync my corporate email and stumbled across TouchDown and pinged Goutham when I couldn't get it to sync with the weird, bizarre Exchange 2003 environment that we used at my unnamed large magenta-themed mobile phone carrier-employer. A couple hours of sitting with G and running a debugger against my G1 and we were syncing email and all the other extraneous stuff that we try to ignore. (like weekly staff meetings)

One thing that was amazing to me about that brief troubleshooting session was how impressive G is at writing code, or whatever it's called these days. He's one of those people who sees code in pictures or something I can't begin to comprehend.

Better him than me, certainly, cause if I had written TouchDown it would force-close on you when you tried to create a recurring meeting at 4pm on Fridays.

The other thing that I was quite pleased to find when I left Microsoft and came here full time was how loyal our customers are.

Not empty-eyed, hipster, fixie-riding Apple fanatics, but smart, well read, reasonable people who would clearly rather have a lack of oxygen than a lack of Email. I actually enjoy talking to most of you (you know how you are). The fact that our little product allows you folks to do all that work-related stuff you need to do makes me warm all over.

Like it or not (probably not), you'll be seeing more of me and my posts on the blog. I'm Scottish, so it's not likely that I'll suppress some rant about something or another. There might even be some useful information here for you.

Cheers!

Ron

Introducing Ron

2010-02-28T06:29:00.001-08:00

Ron has been a long time supporter or NitroDesk. When we released TouchDown in 2008, Ron was instrumental in helping us with getting the word out. Ever since, he has been a constant supporter and a good friend.

On March 1 2010, Ron joins NitroDesk as our "main operations guy". Ron will take over most day to day operational responsibilities, while i will be confined to my coding corner. About time too, hopefully we will have some more cool things for you by mid-end of April, and Ron taking over some of the support responsibilities will ensure we wont slip.

I shall let Ron do his own introductions.

Touchdown support : interesting facts

2010-02-08T09:54:00.001-08:00

It has been more than a year since TouchDown has been released. Over the past year, we have seen the customer base rising steadily, and along with it comes the whole issue of how much percentage of time we spend on developing/improving the product v/s supporting existing customers. The support alias currently has roughly 45000 emails in it from the past one year.

Progressively, we have been observing the product development time dwindling thanks to the demands of support. Here are some observations, thought some of you might find it interesting :

Typically we receive about 150-200 emails a day for support. A large portion of these emails are sent by a small portion of the senders. this means, of the 150 emails, about 100 emails are sent by about 10 people.

Most such emails start with a one-liner "TouchDown doesnt work". The moment a user does that to us, we have to start the process of peeling the onion. 5-10 emails later, we pin point the problem down to one of the following most of the time

1. The user is not using exchange or an activesync server at all
2. the users password changed
3. the user does not have an internet connection on the device
4. the server is down or reconfigured

Another typical email we receive is "I purchased from the market - where is my serial number". We have placed large notices of the fact that you will not receive a serial number separately, but still we get this.

Every Monday, Android Market seems to experience large volumes of requests, causing the authorization of the purchases to be delayed by several minutes or sometimes Hours. This generates a flurry of frustrated emails.

Another common email we get : "I cant configure touchdown, please call me (555)555-1234". Rest assured, we will never call you. After having tried the whole phone support thing, getting placed ON HOLD for hours by our customers, we have realized that we dont want to be known as the first company to actually call our customers and provide support.

Most of our users are very appreciative of the quick support turnaround time. We believe that a product so mission critical should come with reasonably fast support. While we officially strive for a 24 hour turnaround time, we always answer in a few minutes if we possibly can. But if our customers would email us with anything more than a one-liner, it may give us more time to make the application better..

May i also take this opportunity to remind you of the following links :
For Configuration help
For Troubleshooting configuration errors
Our Forums
Our Master FAQ

Have a great week!

Announcing the 5.1 release..

2010-02-06T08:12:00.000-08:00

By now most of you existing users may have received the 5.1 update. The 5.0 and 5.1 releases have been so much feature/fix packed, and i am hoping i can use that as the excuse for not updating the blog for a very long time.
Database Wipeouts
With the 5.1 release, now those of you who have been seeing databases getting wiped out, will have some relief, since a workaround has been put in place which will address it for most users.
We found that the databases were being deleted by Android when the amount of time the application is running increases, slowly reducing the available memory, to the point where the database subsystem somehow manages to corrupt the database and delete it. The workaround we have (until android gets some fixes to address this) is to restart the application every once in a while when you are idle.

Email Announcements
5.1 also adds the ability for you lucky Android 2.0 users to speak out email notifications (note NOT appt notifications) where a smoothing lady voice will announce who the message is from and read out the subject of the message. You can customize this to have her say whatever you want her to say. Just insert %from% in the string were you want the from address to be read out, and %subject% for the message subject.

Notification Rules
For the longest time, one of the requests nagging us have been the ability to customize the alerts based on the content of the message or the folder where it comes in or the importance. We have this feature in 5.1 in the form of Notification rules. To create Notification rules, click the Manage Rules button in the last tab of settings.

Mass Configuration
This is a new feature in 5.1 where, a user who is successfully connected to the server, can export his settings in a portable manner and provide it to other users of the same server, so they in turn can quickly connect to the server with minimal effort. This is described in more detail in the Mass Configuration section in the configuration Guide. Note that the suppressions feature is not yet in the public product as we write this and will be in the next version.

Syncing with Outlook via USB

2009-11-12T22:58:00.001-08:00

This is available in the latest beta version of TouchDown, so feel free to try this.
Note though : ONLY Outlook 2003 and 2007.
http://groups.google.com/group/nitrodesk/web/psst-usb-syncing
Note it requires a free sync program to be installed on your PC separately.

Celebrating one year

2009-10-16T07:24:00.000-07:00

Next month we celebrate one year of TouchDown. It has been a tough but exciting race to get as far as we did, and we could not have done without support from customers like you..

THANK YOU!

-NitroDesk Team

Bugs, feedback and comments

2009-10-03T06:52:00.000-07:00

I am sure most android developers face this.. but there are times when the Android market may be appearing to end users as a bug-reporting site. It almost seems like whenever users get into trouble with an application, they seem to resort to simply leaving a comment on the android market.
Most of the times these issues can be fixed in a jiffy if only users were more encouraged to simply write to the developer rather than leave a comment.

Hopefully one of these days the android market will have a "Report a bug" button right next to the Comment button, so users choose the appropriate means to contact the developer, and not simply announce their worries to the whole wide world.

Why NitroDesk NEVER calls

2009-09-28T08:23:00.000-07:00

Once in a while, we get requests from users giving us a phone number and asking us to call. This puts us in one of our biggest dilemmas. If we could, we would call you in a heartbeat, regardless of the the fact that we are in the pacific coast and that it is only 5:00 AM when we get your message.

But after spending a fortune on cell phone minutes and actually spending many hours walking the user through things like how to download the app on the android market, (not to mention being put on hold for 10-30 minutes while the user calls their helpdesk), we have come to the conclusion that we really cannot be providing phone support.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you, but email also helps us multitask while we provide you with support. You can also reach us through the forums if the problem sounds like something others may have faced. (please look to see if your question has been answered before posting). Our forum is at http://groups.google.com/group/nitrodesk

Beta 3.3.000 is now out..

2009-09-06T08:18:00.000-07:00

If you download this beta, please refresh your calendar, contacts and tasks
Here are the highlights of this beta
- Support for categories
- support for multiple exchange accounts (one active at any time)
- Fixes to the PIN entry screen
- Bcc support
- improved message view
- included in the standard system email options
- filter tasks by status and category
- shortcut to compose

cheers
-g

Kerala, Gods Own Country..

2009-09-06T08:15:00.000-07:00

The state of Kerala, India dubs itself "Gods own Country".. Here are some reasons why..

Poulsbo, WA

2009-09-06T08:09:00.001-07:00

A little summer break in the northwest.. photos from a trip from Seattle to a small but beautiful town in the pacific northwest, with a norwegian theme. Uff-Da!

Your myTouch is here !

2009-08-29T13:03:00.000-07:00

As some of you may know, this September we are giving away a myTouch 3G phone to one lucky winner. (see here for more details) The giveaway is being jointly sponsored by AndroidGuys.com and NitroDesk Inc.

So if you havent yet signed up for it, please do so by visiting the above link. (Please don't disqualify yourself by emailing more than once)

Here are some pictures of the actual device you will be getting.

We are also giving away 10 licenses to TouchDown, our best selling Exchange Corporate Email/Contacts/Calendar/Tasks solution.

(see here for more information about TouchDown)

Good luck to all entrants !

Support is 12.30 hours ahead !

2009-08-07T12:24:00.000-07:00

Those of you who have written to support may have seen some Out Of Office replies recently. This is because the support engineer is currently on vacation (if you can call it that) in India, in a timezone about 12.30 hours ahead. (That means he should be sleeping now.)

Once he returns to work (tail end of August), we expect to be more aligned with PDT. Meanwhile we appreciate your patience and apologize for any delays. If you dont hear back for any message longer than 24 hours, a gentle prod should get him off his butt.

Meanwhile here is whats coming in the next beta (perhaps end of next week)

Support for Multiple Exchange profiles
Support for categorization (only when using ActiveSync) of events, tasks and contacts
Appointments color coded by category
Some fixes for the phonebook sync issues
Support for Lotus Notes Traveler 8.5.1 beta
Some UI sexiness (my apologies to the Appstore for using the s-word, i wasn't using your 'sanitized' dictionary app)

have a great weekend!
-g

The app Market Russian Roulette

2009-08-02T10:33:00.000-07:00

One of the scariest aspects of being a developer for a platform with a controlled marketplace comes to light when articles such as this come to light.

The difference between traditional software development and developing for a tightly controlled application market (Such as the ones some fine mobile devices carry) is that your customer base can shrink from thousands to zero in an instant, and there is nothing you can do about it. It is like one of those action movies where the villain plants a little bomb in your head without your knowledge and lets you roam free.

Do something the bad guy doesnt like, and BAM! you are history.

As a Developer, tgreat thing about being part of a market is that you get an unprecedented viral and friction-less access to customers who can try, buy and pay all from the comfort of their phone so easily. All you need to do is make sure that customers are happy. However, the flip side is the bomb in your head. While the individual developer can go find a job when the bomb goes off, companies that bet their strategy on an app market and the access it provides can collapse in an instant by this sort of a setup.

The case of VoiceCentral may not necessarily be unique. As developers get comfortable with a new platform, they always have the ability to build things faster, smarter and better than what the platform itself may provide. Consider backup applications on the windows platform. I havent heard of Microsoft ever blocking off competing backup applications from running on the PC. In fact, they encourage it, and understand that they make money from selling the OS. If a platform company suddenly chokes competing applications from being made available to consumers, the following happens
- consumers lose the right to choose
- companies lose an opportunity to innovate, in addition to their means of living
- you are stuck with what the platform company choses to give you, much like a dictatorial state
- investors hesitate to back companies in the space

I sure hope Android doesnt follow the same path, for the next thing that could happen is "Sorry your application is rejected from the market, because now Android supports ActiveSync and you are competing with it" - and that would be time to bid goodbye to the platfom for good.

Right at this moment, there are a lot of entrepreneurs thinking twice about playing the "app market russian roulette", and that's not good for us as consumers.

Upcoming support disruption

2009-07-15T12:43:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to give a heads up : Starting this Saturday (for a few weeks), support will be a little delayed, due to some travel. Please bear with us during this disruption, we should be able to respond to you within 12-24 hours. If something falls through the cracks, do check back with us.

cheers
-Nitro

Version 3.2.000

2009-07-15T12:35:00.000-07:00

Several changes in this version, including the following :

More optimized Change checking - Eliminated the checking of unchanged folders when sending emails, updating read status etc.
Eliminated unnecessary repeated new mail alerts
Added Free/Busy Status setting for new events
Added the ability to set appointment sensitivity
Calendar view shows color coded events based on availability
Calendar view shows indicators for private appointments as well as recurring appointments
Email importance indicated on email list, and now can be set when composing
Contacts preserve postal addresses when copying to phone
Fixed issue where changes to settings and license key were being overwritten when an update was in progress
Fixed issue where folder selection in email view was not being preserved
Calendar View has a new Options screen invoked from the Menu button, allowing the following settings
- 24 hour display in calendar view
- Ability to customize start and end week days in week view
- Ability to customize start and end working hours for the day
- Ability to show a light-themed calendar rather than the default dark one (New)
- Ability to show the upcoming appointments for the next 7 days in agenda view (New)
- Ability to show All Day Events in the old style (starting at 12:00 AM rather than spanning entire work hours) (New)
New emails appearing in “Deleted Items” folder does not cause new mail alert.
Support for Italian language folders
Support for Spanish Language folders
Typing in contact names when composing emails or creating appointments now also fetch contacts from the phone contact book.
Now you can add Android Desktop shortcuts to Tasks
Event View now has ability to click and dial phone numbers in subject, location and body of the event
Email View now shows list of addressees with the ability to add addressee to contact and to open contact view for addressee
Menu/Search option in Contacts to quickly find a contact
Menu/Search option in Email view to quickly search email subject and addresses for keywords
Calendar Widget shows upcoming appointments
Calendar should show multi day appts correctly now (sorry missed this out on the web site)

Improvements in small steps

2009-06-21T07:44:00.000-07:00

Just released version 3.1.028 on the market.
There are now TWO touchdown main apps in the market. the first one is "Exchange by TouchDown". If you find this in the market, it means you have Android Cupcake, and this is the version you should install, even though you may find "TouchDown (Non Cupcake)".

TouchDown (Non Cupcake) is the version which is specifically built for those customers who dont yet have Cupcake on their device.

The only difference between the two versions is that the Non Cupcake version does not support Widgets (of course the device doesnt have the capability either)
We were surprised to find that even though cupcake was rolled out to T-Mobile US customers, new devices seemed to be shipping without Cupcake. This means you would have had to wait a few days before you would find TouchDown in the market.

Now, on to the improvements in 3.1.028 :
1. The Agenda view in Calendar now shows the next 7 days of appointments. Optionally, it can also be locked to start from today, and not be affected by your date navigation in the other views. You can not slide the agenda view in this mode.
2. Calendar options you can change by selecting Menu/More/Options when in the Calendar view. See next few items for actual options
3. Option: Show 24h times : When you turn this on, your calendar views will show times in 24h. Oft requested, finally implemented.
4. Option: Custom Week Days : You can now select any starting day of the week and ending day. The week view will display as many days you have from start to stop, inclusive. (e.g.: If you are in the middle east, now you can set Saturday-Thursday)
5. Option: Custom Work Hours : You can select start and stop work hours, and this will affect highlighting and All Day events rendering
6. All Day events : Now all day events show up in day and week views from start to stop of your workday (the month view has not been updated to reflect this)
6. "Now" Bar : Current time is shown by a yellowish band on the day and week views
7. Mail Importance field : Now the importance field in emails are displayed in the email list view (works only on activesync connections currently).
8. Better Calendar rendering : We have improved the way day,week and agenda views are rendered.
9. Show Parties in Event view : When viewing an event, you can now see the list of attendees, where you can navigate to any attendee in your contact list, or add any attendee to your contacts with the click of a button.

hope you like these, and as always, let us know what you think
cheers, and have a great week!
-nitro

Home screen widgets, tasks and more..

2009-06-14T13:29:00.000-07:00

Feels like yesterday when beta 3.1.011 was released, but here are some goodies for you in the latest beta :

Email Widget

Tasks and Calendar Widgets

'Nuff said ?

Release 3.1

2009-05-29T12:04:00.000-07:00

Just updated the android market with version 3.1.000
this long-awaited version has several enhancements which have been in BETA for a long time such as
- Out of Office
- Peak Times
- A new Home Screen
- Support for Contact Pictures (point and shoot, crop and set !)
- Better Crash resistance
- Zimbra and Kerio support (though Kerio wasnt officially tested, customers are using it)
- Quick Configuration

Thanks for your patience and support!
-Nitro

Who's the fastest gun ?

2009-05-24T15:31:00.001-07:00

With the new improved "Quick Configure" in the BETA version, here is a question for you, especially those who installed it fresh : How long does it take to get setup and going with the new version?
Would love to hear your comments on how long it took (not necessarily counting the time to sync the initial data) to finish the config wizard..

cheers
-g

Announcing 3.0.097 (BETA)

2009-05-21T16:32:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to update on the release of the next BETA to the usual link. Here are the important features.
Contact pictures :
Now contacts with photos on your exchange address book will have their photos show up in TouchDown when you open the contact. Also, when syncing contacts to the phonebook, these photos will also be copied over.
You can also tap on the photo of the contact to change the picture, either from the phone's pictures choose or directly from the camera if you are having dinner with him/her.
Out of Office:
If you are using exchange server 2007, now you can click the Out Of Office button on the last tab to schedule, enable or disable your Out Of Office message.

Email View options :

When viewing an email, now you can tap on the header block to make these navigation and quick-operation buttons appear.

Easy Configuration :

Now when setting up TouchDown, you can click the Easy Configure button on the first tab to quickly set the configuration up. This will work for activesync, exchange 2003 or 2007 servers, but not if you have a server without activesync, but protected with ISA.
Note that the user id to enter here depends on your server configuation. Some servers require DOMAIN\ALIAS, others requrie ALIAS or some others may require EMAIL as the user id.

Improved Home Screen:

In this release, we have updated the home screen to move the buttons to the left side (you can scroll these up if you are in landscape mode). THe main area of the screen will show you the most recent 5 unread emails from the past 24 hours, followed by all your appointments for the day.

To read more, please follow this link, and also head over to our google group at

http://groups.google.com/group/nitrodesk/browse_thread/thread/8c1613a5522b0ff8

cheers

-g

10,050 active installations and counting...

2009-05-14T09:14:00.000-07:00

Now, that's a milestone in our humble minds.
For those of you who have stuck with us through the various ups and downs of using TouchDown, a big THANK YOU!

You can read the latest comments, good bad and ugly here, thanks to the kind souls that run cyrket. http://www.cyrket.com/package/com.nitrodesk.nitroid

If you havent yet rated or commented on it, please take a minute to enter your rating and comments directly on the application on the android market.

-Nitro

Touchdown beta with OOF (Exchange 2007 Only)

2009-05-13T17:10:00.000-07:00

Exchange 2007 provides the ability for mobile devices to set their OOF settings from the device. We have brought it over to TouchDown. If you are an Exchange 2007 user using either ActiveSync or Exchange 2007 mode in TouchDown, you are welcome to try out our new beta where you can enable/disable/schedule you OOF setting.

Please note that the entry box for the message supports HTML, and hence you can type in HTML code in there (hard, but rewarding). This also means that if you type in a plain text message, the line feeds will be converted to when you read it back.

Let us know if it worked well for you..

Cheers,
- Nitro

HTML Signatures

2009-05-07T13:39:00.000-07:00

The latest beta build (3.0.052) includes the ability for you to include an HTML signature.

Now you can specify a signature with HTML tags in them, here is a sample

John Smith 
Founder and Chief Geek 
Contoso Technologies Inc. 
Phone (w) : 555-526-2525


Which should show up as

John Smith
Founder and Chief Geek
Contoso Technologies Inc.
Phone (w) : 555-526-2525

Clearly not a trivial thing to set up correctly, but hopefully you can tweak and experiment..

Note that you MUST place a in the code for a line break.

A new home for nitro !

2009-04-27T13:26:00.000-07:00

The scoop on live contact sync

2009-04-22T14:04:00.000-07:00

Several folks have asked about the new Live Contact Sync feature in the new version.
Here is how it works.

First make sure that you have checked ON Contacts in the Choose Folders option in the Advanced Tab. This will make sure that any changes to contacts in Exchange will get updated inside TouchDown contacts list. No magic here, this has been how older versions have worked.
Next, if you have just enabled the above option, you want to go to the Contacts View and perform a Refresh All to get the initial list down to the device.
After that, perform a Menu/Copy to Phone on the contacts view to get your current contacts to the phone book.
Next, Go back to settings, check ON the new flag in the third tab called "Update Contact changes to Phone". This will make sure that any changes happening to contacts henceforth would make it to the phone book without you manually moving them. (Dont forget to save settings)

Enjoy
-Nitro

Two more goodies for ya!

2009-04-14T06:19:00.000-07:00

It has been almost 24 hours since releasing the ActiveSync enabled BETA version to the kind folks who signed up for beta. We thought we would follow it up with two little features our users have been constantly asking about

Ability to set peak hours for push and pull
Ability to drop shortcuts to email, contacts and calendar to the desktop

We just finished uploading an update to the beta (hope you know where to get it) which addresses both of the above.

Peak times

There is a new button in the last tab of settings named "Peak Times".

Clicking that will open a window where you can select any day you want on the left side, and the options for that day will show up on the right.

The following options are available :

Range

Click the buttons against start and end times to set the range during which the system will push (or pull) as configured. Outside these times of the selected day, push and pull will not be active. (Note that push may take up to 20 minutes to start after the specified peak time).

All-Day

This means push and pull function all day long.

None

This means push and pull are turned off on the selected day

Non-Peak

If you need to specify a range of time when you DONT want push and pull to be active (say no push/pull from 9 am to 9 pm on a sunday), but want it to be active before and after the range, select the Non-Peak check box. This will effectively reverse the peak times for the day.

ShortCuts

If you install version 3.0.003 from the beta location, you can now take the following steps to drop shortcuts to your desktop.

On the G1 desktop, press the Menu Button, choose Add
Expand the Shortcut option
Click on TouchDown
This will open up a window where you can simply click on the Email / Contacts or Calendar button and the corresponding icon will be dropped on the desktop

As usual, please let us know if something burps.

Thanks for your patience and kind encouragement as always!

-Nitro

Here is a very quick video of setting up touchdown in Activesync Only mode. Pardon the typos made in the userid and email address fields.

FULL ActiveSync ready for preview

2009-04-11T03:28:00.000-07:00

We have finally managed to get FULL activesync support in TouchDown.
Benefits of this version are

Full support for Microsoft ® ActiveSync protocol
No dependency on WebDAV and exchange web services
Simpler configuration (enter Login ID, Password, server and save)
Support for servers which are protected with client certificates
Data transmission a fraction of what’s required for other protocols.
Faster and more efficient propagation of changes from the server, including contact and calendar changes
Changes update instantly on email contact and calendar if the lists are currently being shown
No need to refresh calendar or contacts, after initial refresh
Support for performing GAL search from the contacts view and the ability to add the GAL entry as a contact on the device (no sync back to server) and subsequently to the phonebook.

Note that when using ActiveSync ONLY mode, here are a few things you should keep in mind.

When refreshing for the first time, it will fetch all your calendar entries starting from two weeks past into the future. You dont have to refresh the calendar. In fact refreshing the calendar will do nothing.
You dont have to do a refresh all in contacts anymore
To get your calendar and contacts on to the device, you MUST ensure that Contacts and Calendar are checked in the "Choose Folders" option in the last tab of settings. If you dont check these, no data will appear in contacts and calendar
If you are migrating from another connection mode, please see notes under "Migration" in this article

Getting the beta

To get the beta version on your device, please point your G1 browser to http://tinyurl.com/tchdwnbeta, and click on the downloaded file to install it (if you already have a version running, it should automatically update - but please follow the steps in the "Migration" section below.)

License Restrictions

Due to legal reasons, we are not allowed to distribute ActiveSync support in the free edition. Hence if you are using the free edition, ActiveSync support cannot be selected or used. For the same reason, if you try out activesync mode in the demo period, it will stop working when your Demo expires. You can then continue using the free edition ONLY if you change the Connection mode to either Exchange 2003 or 2007 (with necessary adjustments to settings and changes in experience).

Migration

If you already have touchdown installed, please follow these steps IF you think you may need to revert back to the old installation.

First take a backup of your database by selecting Menu/Backup DB in the settings screen.
Click on the Push indicator on the main screen and disable push if it is already enabled
Download and install the beta version (see above)
In the settings screen, select Menu/Wipe Data
Verify your settings in the first tab (ensure your login ID is exactly as your User ID field when logging into exchange OWA - you may need to provide a domain\userid in some cases).
In the second tab, select ActiveSync ONLY as the connection mode
Ensure that you activesync server name is provided in the server name field
Verify you have Uses SSL checked if your server requires it
Save Settings
If the save button is still enabled, click it again.
Go to the last tab of settings, click Choose Folders
Select Calendar, Contacts and Inbox, and any other email folders you want to sync; Click OK and Save settings
Close settings
Go to the main screen and perform a Menu/Refresh couple of times until it picks up your Last days email (the status will show the items being processed) and your calendar and contacts. This process may take a while, so you might want to keep the charger handy.
Once the updates are complete, you are all set!
If Push is disabled, you can click on the icon and enable it.

If you need to scrap the process and get back to where you were, simply go to Settings, and perform a Menu/Restore DB if you took a backup at the beginning.

Configuring a Fresh Installation

To configure a new installation, follow these steps

Get and install the beta (see earlier section)
Start TouchDown and Click Settings
In the first tab, enter your login id, password and ensure you select the right folder language. If your server requires a DOMAIN\USERID format, please enter that in the User ID field
In the second tab, select ActiveSync ONLY connection mode
Enter just the activesync server name without the additional embellishments (e.g. mobile.mycompany.com) (If you have a port number, suffix a : followed by the port as in mobile.mycompany.com:444)
If your server requires SSL or HTTPS, check ON Uses SSL
If your server uses a self-issued certificate, check on Fetch and Trust Certificate and wait about 20 seconds.
Click Save - at this time, it will initialize activesync.
If the save button is still enabled, click it again.
Go to the last tab of settings, click Choose Folders
Select Calendar, Contacts and Inbox, and any other email folders you want to sync; Click OK and Save settings
Close settings
Go to the main screen and perform a Menu/Refresh couple of times until it picks up your Last days email (the status will show the items being processed) and your calendar and contacts. This process may take a while, so you might want to keep the charger handy.
Once the updates are complete, you are all set!
If Push is disabled, you can click on the icon and enable it.

Troubles and how to shoot them

If your folder list is empty in choose folders

The folder list may not have refreshed properly
Go to the second tab, click ActiveSync button at the bottom
In the popup window, click Refresh ActiveSync button
Make sure that the popup says ActiveSync:ENABLED and Policies:SET or Policies:NONE
Click OK
Save settings
Go to the last tab in settings, click Refresh Folder
Click Choose folders again

If you have any feedback or issues with this, feel free to email support.

NOTE : Support is operating limited hours during day these days, BUT you might experience a max of 12 hour delay in the worst case.

48 hours and still travelling..

2009-04-05T06:56:00.000-07:00

Its been almost 48 hours since leaving SeaTac, but the journey has taken longer than expected. Final destination is Kochi, India. But thanks to a weather delay aggravated by some poor logistics by Delta Airlines, still stuck in Dubai International Airport. All's not lost, since that has given ample time to soak in some sights from one of the best airports in the world.
Enjoy the photos..

cheers
-Nitro

FULL ActiveSync in preview

2009-04-03T12:36:00.000-07:00

If you are the adventurous type, here is something you could try out. The risks are high, but so are the rewards.
With FULL activesync, you get

- Faster and more prompt delivery of your emails, contacts and calendar changes
- More compact data transmission
- Less headaches setting up
- If you had trouble getting your attachments in earlier versions, this will work better

You will, for the timebeing not be able to

- Search the GAL when composing email
- Create and delete appointments
- Reminders for recurring appointments

Here is how to get it

First install the latest beta from http://tinyurl.com/tchdwnbeta
Go to Settings, click Menu/Wipe Data (yes you will lose existing exchange data on the device)
Make sure the first tab is filled in correctly
In the second tab
Select ActiveSync ONLY in connection Mode
Enter the name of your activesync server (e.g.: mobile.mycompany.com without any https:// prefixes etc)
Check ON Uses SSL
Click Save Settings
Click ActiveSync button on the second tab
Click Refresh in the POPUP window. Make sure the window says Policies : SET or Policies : NONE (anything else means you may not be able to use activesync)
Save settings once again when done (if the save button is enabled)
On the Advanced Tab
Click Choose Folders
Choose Calendars, Contacts and Inbox (for now)
Check ON "Enable Push" at the top.
Click Save settings and close settings.

Once you come back to the main screen, you should see Push Active. It may of course toggle to Updating for a while (sometimes a long time if you have too many emails in the past 24 hours or a LARGE number of contacts or calendar entries). Once settled, it should stay on Push Active UNLESS any changes come in.

If it toggles between active and updating too frequently, this means trouble, please turn off push. Your activesync settings may have some problems.

If this worked for you, please let us know your experience.

Cheers
-Nitro

The TouchDown User Interface

2009-03-26T09:34:00.000-07:00

If you are one of those that feel that the user interface (look and feel) inside Touchdown is not up to par, we hear you. When designing an application, one tends to look at different aspects with different levels of priorities. Unfortunately, since the first few versions were released, the user interface has been developed with a view to code and test the functionality faster, as well as to keep the program size to a minimum. Every little additional bit of sex-appeal on the user interface comes with a slower development time and a bigger size of the installation.

However, it is true, that in the new mobile world, looks do matter. Depending on who you ask, you may hear anything from great and functional, to pathetic and crude.

Sadly enough, we have to prioritize database reliability, activesync optimizations for performance as well as new functionality such as tasks and notes and searching and attachments over and above the additional painting to be done. We will get there, as soon we have addressed the more pressing needs of the market. Thank you for bearing with us while we plug all the cracks and leaks before painting the dam :-)

cheers!
-Nitro

ActiveSync errors..

2009-03-25T15:45:00.000-07:00

Some of you may have been facing this issue :
When clicking activesync refresh, you get a Policies: NOT_INITIALIZED.
this sometimes happens when your server is throwing a 403 error when trying to get policies.
If you encounter this, please try this link https://testexchangeconnectivity.com/ and see if the test passes correctly, and let us know at support.

Push is live and a few more..

2009-03-24T08:50:00.000-07:00

On Monday we announced the availability of PUSH email for our customers.
Currently TouchDown uses activesync for implementing Push Email support, as an add-on to the current exchange 2003-2007 syncing. This means, if you have ActiveSync Enabled on your server and account, you should be able to enable push email by doing the following steps

Ensure that your credentials are correct (some users face trouble when the NT domain name is missing in the first tab - this is sometimes required when you are entering an alias as a user id, and not your email address) The typical result would be a 401 error.
Go to the last tab in settings, click on Refresh Folders.
Go to the second tab in settings, click on ActiveSync and press the Refresh ActiveSync button. This should initialize activesync and show your Policies as either SET or NONE - if not, theres probably something wrong with your activesync settings.
Go to the last tab and check ON Enable Push, then save settings.

Once you hve performed the above, if you go to the main screen, it should show Push Active. It may turn to Push off if there is something wrong.

Here are problems some users have faced when initializing activesync

Your user ID contains a space. If this is true, you are unable to initialize PUSH. A new beta build that fixes this issue is available. Email us at support for this.
You have provided an NT alias something like jsmith, but not an NT domain name. If you are using an alias, please make sure you enter the domain name as well.

enjoy!
-Nitro

Push baby push

2009-02-28T15:39:00.001-08:00

Almost there!
Give us a few more days.. stay tuned, we hope you find it worth the wait.
-Nitro

RearView mirror

2009-02-18T08:25:00.000-08:00

Now that it has been almost a week since the release of 1.5.000, thought i would give you and update on whats next. Calendar experience was one of the biggest pain points in pre-1.5, surprisingly many people preferred to have working and usable email, contacts and calendar more than they cared about "push". Turns out, most people once they get comfortable with the way things work, do not really (seem to) miss the ability to get instant notification of new email.

That is not to say that pushing emails instantly is not important beyond a lab experiment. There are folks out there for whom waiting 7.5 minutes to get a new message is unacceptable (mostly coming from other phone platforms which provide it).

So the time has come for us to start "pushing".
-Nitro

Calendar improvements almost live..

2009-02-11T13:59:00.000-08:00

That was a long road, but today we blasted out the notification on the availability of Version 1.4.070, which is the pre-release for 1.5.000 (due out tomorrow), which takes TouchDown a notch higher, providing the ability to see multiple calendar views (day/week/month/agenda) with the ability to create appointments.
There are certain limitations though:

Cannot invite attendees if you are using Exchange 2003 mode.
Cannot create All-Day events (we need to fix that, but in a little while)

With this release we address the first of TWO major shortcomings in TouchDown.
The other shortcoming is the lack of push email. We will try not to keep our customers hanging too long.
-Nitro

Also thought you might like these...

2009-01-30T12:00:00.000-08:00

And since you liked the first one, here are some more.. will be in preview next week.
thanks for all the feedback !

Day-View preview..

2009-01-28T12:59:00.001-08:00

A hug - anyone ?

2009-01-28T12:52:00.001-08:00

Android WebView showing wrong Image?

2009-01-27T06:35:00.000-08:00

There has been at least one report by a user that one of his emails containing a valid image showed up with a wrong image, and instead of the image of a building, it showed something else (less acceptable).

TouchDown takes the HTML code inside an email message and passes it into an Android WebView control to have it render the document. At this time, TouchDown neither inspects nor changes the body of the HTML passed in. So we are all scratching our heads now an trying to figure out where is the weakest link.

Is it the WebView control which is perhaps shows a wrong cached image or navigating to a wrong link (have to assume the user has no idea of this image existing in the cache, or he/she wouldn't have been offended in the first place)

Is it the http stack on the phone ?
the carrier ?
perhaps even the server having served up the wrong image ?

At this time, we are even contemplating disabling image display by default on emails..

Want to check out this GAL?

2009-01-24T08:14:00.001-08:00

If you are on exchange 2003 mode, you can perhaps try out this interim build

http://tinyurl.com/tchdwnbeta

In this build, you should be able to perform a GAL search when composing a mail, in the to or cc window.
Do let us know what you think. Exchange 2007 SUPPORTED now

And.. another minor change is that when you enter a contact name in the To or CC box, you can now start typing either the first or last name (or even the email address) to find the person.

UPDATE: Fixed, now also supports Exchange 2007 !

regards
Nitro

Version 1.4.048

2009-01-23T10:15:00.000-08:00

Version 1.4.048 was released in preview mode on Wednesday. This is one of the first baby steps towards improving calendar functionality in TouchDown.
In this preview version (http://tinyurl.com/tchdwnbeta), we have made the following available (3 and 4 are in version 1.4.048 updated today to the above link).
1. Ability to view meeting invites and meeting responses
2. Ability to respond to meeting invites with an accept/decline/tentative
3. A fairly effectve fix for those pesky blank emails showing up for some people on 2003 (there are still some ways to stump our fix).
4. Contacts sync fix for some of you who have been simply unable to get your contacts list to download.
5. HUGE contact lists (we are talking thousands) took a while to load. Now touchdown optimizes this by loading only the first 500 contacts in the list.

Working on the GAL now, hopefully next week. Once that is done, we shall start on the month/week views.

Have a fine weekend!
-Nitro

aTrackDog warning

2009-01-20T06:49:00.000-08:00

aTrackDog appears to be a fine piece of software designed to keep android app users up to date with the latest versions of the apps they have installed.
It has been an invaluable service to other application developers for the simple reason that they encourage users to move on to newer versions, which is always good for the developer (less support headaches on older versions).

HOWEVER, there is one gotcha customers have to watch out for. From time to time, we provide some of our customers with early releases for testing specific features or sometimes to solve unique problems that they face. These updates are interim, and might even be unstable for general release. When we provide such versions, we have to bump up the version number. If any of the users trying out an unstable beta has aTrackDog installed, we suddenly get hosed with a flood of support calls about how to get the new version.

So before calling us for the new versions, please check the version number on the android market. That is and always will be the latest stable version.

UPDATE: Versions from 1.4.048 onwards should be immune to this problem, turns out aTrackDog has an elegant way for developers to suppress test versions from updating the server (as one of our early customers pointed out - and also pointed out by aTrackDog Developers themselves (see comment).).

What next ?

2009-01-19T10:07:00.000-08:00

This is a series of small steps we are taking as part of the calendar revamp stage we have always been dreading.
Next minor release (expect this week) will support the following

1. Support for folders named in German, Swedish and Dutch. Some people have been having trouble with non-english folder names. In the next release, you will be able to specify your folder naming language.
2. Support for viewing/responding to meeting invites. (a deal-breaker feature for some)
3. Support for viewing other types of messages such as delivery notifications, recall reports, meeting accepts/declines etc.
4. If we really get lucky, we might also bundle in the ability to search for contacts in the global address book.

Once that is out of the door, we will be going into a little lull with releases, while we work on revamping the calendar views (Daily/Weekly/monthly). This may well take a couple of weeks for sure.
Our customers have been very patient, providing us with valuable feedback when things could be improved, slapping us on the hand when we blow things up accidentally, but encouraging us on all the time with kind words and positive feedback. We are always committed to ensuring that you not only get your money's worth with TouchDown, but also have a great experience dealing with NitroDesk as a company.

Thank You!

Attachments, keeping it simple..

2009-01-07T23:41:00.002-08:00

Click the new button

and.. View your attachment list

Click buttons to download or save to another location

Shows sizes of downloaded files (bummer-harder to get size before download)

And if you have viewers, clicking on the row should launch it..

-cheers

Nitro

Move to SD Card option

2009-01-07T23:41:00.001-08:00

Some users may have noticed the Move Database option in the menu on the main screen.
Here is the skinny.
All information which TouchDown downloads (at least as of now) is stored on a database which TouchDown maintains in the phone's internal memory. Some users who have lots of email history (large value in max history), or users receiving hundreds of mail messages a day, or those who try out many apps from the marketplace will find this somewhat limiting, since this can cause phone memory to start running out.

Android has not yet provided a way or option where you can install applications on the SD card (there are probably good reasons why they should not be by default). But some of our early users requested NitroDesk have a feature where the database we use be movable to the SD card, so they can stop worrying about new emails eating into phone memory.

This option is really a toggle: When you select it for the first time, and confirm on the warning, it will copy the database file to a special location on the SD card (
/sdcard/nitrodesk/touchdown/database/1).
If the database is already on the SD card, and you select this command, it moves it back to the phone memory (assuming the copy actually succeeds).

There is a little gotcha here though: Some users have discovered a problem whereby copying the database over still causes some instability in the program (somewhere a reference to the old database is still lying around). So they needed to restart the phone for TouchDown to work properly (typically the manifestation is the inability to send emails). This will hopefully be addressed by a change we made to the build AFTER 1.4.033, so you should get that fix in the next version.

Twitter Feeds
Some of you are already following the TouchDown Development on Twitter.
This is probably not new, but we find that there are a LOT of passionate users out there who love to know the how, what, when and why of TouchDown features. Rather than feed the curiosity through hundreds of emails, we though we would start creating a twitter log of what we do, development wise on a daily basis. That would also be a great forum for instant feedback from those who do have feedback. (Of course please dont expect the "having a bath now" type of notifications)
So if you do twitter, follow us here http://twitter.com/nitrodesk

A brand new Year..

2009-01-02T07:48:00.000-08:00

It's a brand New Year! Let us all hope for this to be a year of change, a year of rebuilding, a year of compassion and a year of joy.

We at NitroDesk hope that this will be a year when every one of our customers get every one of their feature wishes fulfilled. I personally am so excited about my G1. It allows me to take care of business and support issues when i am in the Target check-out line. Some of you who had support issues might have noticed the signature at the bottom. It means we are dog-fooding TouchDown ourselves. Our business is on the line, which we believe is the first step we should take before putting yours on the line.

Every new test as well as release build gets tested on out G1 before it goes public. Every upload to the market is immediately downloaded on to our G1 for the litmus test. However, there is always the potential for human error. We have a lot of customers we are thankful for, for their willingness to go an extra step without giving up. Normal consumers probably wouldn't, but the G1 users are not regular consumers, they are passionate about the device they hold.

And lets also hope for a year when you have more Android Powered phones to choose from. Don't get me wrong, I love my G1 to death, and am not sure will settle for anything less. Someone should make bumper stickers thats say "It's a G1 thing - you wouldn't understand".

Price increase

2008-12-30T19:02:00.000-08:00

We initially started out with a pricing of 29.99 in November. At that time we had no support for 2003, no folders, no move , no multi select, no calendar navigation..
We decided to lower the price to 19.99 till we could get the 2003 support ready to be fair to all users. Now that we are stable on 2003, we will be increasing our prices to 29.99 starting 6th January (to accommodate for those who start the 5 day trial on New Years day - in case you were wondering)
You have all been tremendously supportive of our efforts to build a functional, compact exchange solution for Android. We hope you will continue to support us in the future with vocal feedback and sincere critique.

thanks and wishing all a Very Happy New Year
-Nitro

Acts of charity

2008-12-30T18:31:00.000-08:00

Some of you may have noticed the button at the bottom of the NitroDesk site about the George Foundation. That button was designed by a Boston company called Metropolis Creative. Although it may be a simple contrbution, perhaps 10 minutes for an expert to come up with a button, the thing of value is the willingness to burn time and money to do something that inspires people to give, to take a moment to imagine that there are those who are less fortunate, be it in terms of wealth, health or people who care.
Go here to see more about Metropolis Creative and what they offer.
http://www.metropoliscreative.com/give_back.php

The George Foundation is another inspiring story of courage, perseverance and extreme acts of charity. My personal favorite is Shanti Bhavan, a home for gifted, but underprivileged children. Read more about it here :
http://www.shantibhavanonline.org/

If you do have the means and the will, contribute a buck or two. A latte for us here in the US translates roughly to a day's meals for a child in India. Watch some of the videos on the site to see how George has transformed children who would otherwise be working to eke out a living for their families into children with potential to grow into successful doctors, artists, technologists, astronauts..

And those of you looking forward to the bells and whistles for New Year, its almost here... Keep your eye out for 1.4.031 in the market sometime on or before Jan 1st.

As usual, please help us by reporting any breakage or loss of functionality in new builds. When it comes to dealing with Exchange servers of such varied configurations, it is so hard to make sure that fixing one customers problem does not break another customers connectivity.

Release 1.4.024 stays for a while..

2008-12-20T13:05:00.001-08:00

Winter storms are coming in our area. Hence, we are going to take a little time off. Development will continue, and we will take this opportunity to add some reliability enhancements, and to cross off some low hanging fruit.
Meanwhile, if you are joining us now, please avail of the 20% offer.
Merry Christmas.
-Nitro

Release 1.4.016

2008-12-13T06:56:00.000-08:00

It has been a frenzy for the past three weeks. The huge number of requests for supporting exchange server 2003 swept away every other priority in the book for the last two weeks. Now that we are at a place where 2003 users have parity of functionality with 2007, we can forge ahead once more with product enhancements.
Today, we released 1.4.016. with ability to multi select emails and perform bulk operations such as delete, mark as read etc. We also sneaked in the ability to go next and prev on the calendar view and a slight tweak to automatically refresh the calendar if there are no entries found when you open it.
Whats next you ask? Another biggie: Attachments.
We are fully prepared to face some bad news in this area: First of all, what a lot of people want: "open word and excel documents" may simply not work on the G1. Simply because there may not be a viewer that can read a word document or an excel document. While we can surely get the attachment downloaded and saved on the SD card, opening them may not be possible due to the lack of viewers. Hopefully images, audio (and perhaps with a PDF viewer, even PDFs) will satisfy many users.
One of the options we may consider is to let users upload attachments to their own google docs account and then download back a preview (yuck!). But when you are against a wall, even a comb is a weapon.

Now whats keeping you from getting a G1 over thanksgiving?

2008-11-20T17:08:00.000-08:00

If you ever thought of buying an Android powered T-Mobile G1, but was discouraged by the fact that you could not receive your office email on it, wait no more: head over to the TMobile store and get one right away. When you get home, try out TouchDown from NitroDesk Inc (http://www.nitrodesk.com/). You can try the product out for 5 days before you need to pay. Receive and send emails, get all your contacts from outlook (exchange actually, but most people like to think they are syncing outlook - go figure) on to your phone. See your daily calendar..

I personally think no one should put off buying that beauty of a phone just because of a piddly little problem with accessing office mail. If you were one of those people, start thinking of excuses to explain away why you paid AT&T the early termination ransom, threw away that shiny new Blackjack II you just got 6 months ago and headed to the TMobile store. (I am one of you).

Anyhow, here is to hoping you get that G1 this thanksgiving. And for those of you from across the pond, you dont have any more excuses to wait for Christmas.. do you?

Zenfolio lists NitroDesk...

2008-11-07T08:25:00.000-08:00

Zenfolio is one of the leading online photo hosting sites out there. A lot of you pros might already have an account with them. Recently they pushed out a major software update to their site, fixing a lot of issues and adding some new features.
NitroDesk has always provided integration with Zenfolio, enabling you to manage your collections, photos and categories using drag and drop simplicity, and blazingly fast responses thanks to local image caching.
Zenfolio now lists NitroDesk as one of the applications photographers can use to manage and upload to their site. http://www.zenfolio.com/zf/tools/nitrodesk.aspx
Definitely something to write home about for us..

NitroDesk releases HAvOC for Google Calendars

2008-11-04T06:22:00.000-08:00

November 1 2008, Seattle. NitroDesk Inc. announces the beta release of HAvOC (Highly Available Online Collaboration). HAvOC is a new generation desktop application for Windows which enables Google Calendar users to interact with their calendar and contacts whether they are online or offline.

HAvOC has been designed to be deployed with minimal friction, utilizing ClickOnce technology to enable a click-through installation and automatic updates with new features when they are released. It is also simple to use, with no special configuration required. The user simply needs to provide a google/google apps user id and password to begin using the program. This user id and password are stored locally in a secure form, and transmitted ONLY to Google for authentication.

Once logged in, the program fetches the calendar entries for each day/week/month as the user navigates through the program. It also caches such entries to enable quick navigation as well as to provide the data when the user is offline.

All changes made by the user are updated to the online calendar as soon as possible, but in such a manner as to ensure that if the user is offline, the changes are reflected when the user comes back online. Full concurrency is ensured by the Google infrastructure and HAvOC to prevent accidental overwrites from different access points.

"We are excited to release the beta version of HAvOC to the Google community, and hope that it will be of value to those Google and GAFYD users for whom a desktop, always available option is desirable" said Goutham Sukumar, Founder of NitroDesk Inc.

System Requirements: NitroDesk HAvOC runs on Microsoft Windows XP or Windows Vista, and requires Microsoft .Net Framework 3.0.

Pricing and Availability: NitroDesk HAvOC is currently available in BETA and is free. Once the final version is released it is expected to be priced at $9.99, and it can be securely purchased and unlocked directly from the program.

About NitroDesk Inc. NitroDesk Inc was founded in May 2008 to create applications that combine robust on-line services with a rich desktop experience. It's head office is currently located in Sammamish, Washington.

(C) 2008 NitroDesk Inc. All rights reserved. NitroDesk is not affiliated with, endorsed by or owned by any of the online media sharing sites it connects with or the desktop media cataloging applications it integrates with. Microsoft, Windows, Vista are registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Other product names mentioned herein may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

Finally, true offlining for Google Calendar and Contacts..

2008-10-27T09:48:00.000-07:00

Are you a heavy Google Calendar user?

Ever missed your calendar or your contacts when you were without an internet connection (airport, plane etc)?

Ever wished for an Outlook experience for your Google Calendar(s) ?

HAvOC is NitroDesk's answer to all of the above. Simply put, it is a desktop client for Google Calendar, which not only gives you a swift and rich calendaring experience, but also caches your calendar events for those times when you are offline. Now you dont really have to care if your are online or offline. Just fire up HAvOC and view/edit your calendar events and contacts. When you get online, your changes will appear on the server.

Currently in BETA, you can get it from http://www.nitrodesk.com/dk_havocFeatures.aspx

As usual, drop us a note if something breaks..

God's Own Country

2008-09-14T18:41:00.000-07:00

What do you call a place which looks like a tropical rainforest from the sky, that has rivers meandering across it every few miles, lush green fields of paddy, glassy lakes and backwaters lined with coconut palms and serene beaches all the way from north to south?

Kerala calls itself Gods Own Country, and rightfully so. Kerala is the state lining the south-west coast line of India. It is home to a variety of flora and fauna. Although it is very densely populated, concrete jungles are not very common here. From the air you would never be able to tell that it is home to over 32 million people within its 15,000 square miles.

But once you get on the ground, you experience things you have never experienced before - both good and bad :-)

Here are some snaps from Gods own country.

Lets start with the drive, which i think is the most exciting (and scary) part of your life here.
Regardless of where in Kerala you go, you cannot miss these "line buses" which ply between various towns and cities. What is special about these buses is the driver behind the wheel. No road is too narrow for these operators, no street is too crowded and no other bus is un-passable. If you hear the rumble and the horn coming at you around a corner, run for cover!

Some of my favorite roads in Kerala. Freeways are no fun at all once you have diven through these. Crossing one of these patches require careful planning, quick steering work and most of the times driving on the wrong side of the road.
... And finally,

Nothing like the monsoon to add a little "splash" to your drive.

PicasaWeb now supports Video uploads

2008-09-10T22:15:00.001-07:00

http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2008/09/picasa-web-albums-enables-video-uploads.html

And now so does NitroDesk :) (assuming you have oodles of space in PicasaWeb, and a fast connection (havent been able to control timeout on the picasaweb api))

You can upload the following files to your picasaweb account through NitroDesk.
- 3gp, avi, mpg, mov, mp4, wmv
The only limitation is that you cannot play the video within NitroDesk. NitroDesk will only show a thumbnail if you double click on the video.

Uploading of movies from Picasa2 Desktop through nitrodesk however, is a problem.. Picasa button api seems to be copying over just the thumbnail as a jpg.

The build should be online by Thursday Morning Pacific, along with the new Bulk-Load feature.

Bulk Loader...

2008-09-09T21:05:00.000-07:00

Finally worked out some more improvements for a couple of our nice users who helped clear up some requirements for bulk loading..

In the next build, NitroDesk R3 will have a new BulkLoad button in the tool bar. Clicking that will open a dialog where you can select a folder in your computer. As soon as you choose the folder, the number of folders with files, total images and the total megabytes will be displayed.

There are three options for upload destination
An existing gallery/album: select an existing album to which all images will be uploaded
New Gallery/Album: Give a name for a new gallery to be created, into which the new images will be uploaded
Gallery Per Folder with pics: For every folder which has pictures in it (if you choose to include subfolders), a new gallery will be created with the title of the folder, and images in that folder will be added to the new gallery.

Additionally, you can choose resizing options for scaling down images before upload.

This goes to the two SmugMug users (you know who you are :-) ) who helped clear up the requirements.

Hopefully to be released tomorrow when i get to a place with high speed internet.

Lessons from a Dialup world

2008-09-09T21:00:00.000-07:00

After enjoying years of Comcast, moving (albeit temporarily) to a remote location in the world where Dialup itself is a luxury is a real eye opener. For NitroDesk, it means image resizing options needed a modification to enable me to finish uploading my images for friends and family in the US. Now NitroDesk has two more options for image resizing on upload (800 px and 320 px).

Of course this change is not available to the public yet. You see the installer with the new bits is too large for dialup :-)

Visualization-only Sorting order

2008-08-22T07:14:00.000-07:00

Next feature up: Ability to sort albums and photos while viewing (without affecting the order on the site). Zenfolio user brings up an interesting point about how hard it could get to find albums to rearrange photos into.
Now you will be able to (hopefully today if testing goes well) right click on the root Albums node and specify Album and Photo sorting order. This will not affect the site, will be instantaneous and will provide you with an easier means of organizing.
Gotcha though: If your albums and photos are sorted in any order other than Site order, you won't be able to rearrange the order of photos or albums using drag and drop - obviously :-). But you can drag photos between albums (where supported).

Getting your online media to your local DAM

2008-08-22T07:00:00.000-07:00

Expression Media 2 has got a lot going for itself when it comes to managing your digital media assets, and is definitely up there with the other favorites like LightRoom and Picasa2. The small team in Redmond has been burning a lot of midnight oil getting it ready to ship. I personally find it quite an extensive and well thought out tool set.

Recently, been thinking about usage scenarios that can be enabled with NitroDesk and Expression Media 2. The result is the new ability for NitroDesk Media Edition R3 to pull down an entire site or seleted albums (from ANY supported PHOTO site) on to your local computer, and generate a catalog set file in XML, which you can very simply import into your Expression Media 2 installation in a couple of clicks.

The result ? If you have a large collection of organized pictures in your online albums, you can now get the originals and start cataloging them with Expression Media 2.

R3 is ready!

2008-08-19T00:30:00.001-07:00

Just released Media Edition R3 after an exhaustive (and exhausting) round of testing. The new site also features a slightly less cluttered appearance with the dark theme which we all love so much. The old site used to look like a truck from south india with all its flashy colors.
Primarily intended towards simplifying the management challenge (drag and drop where applicable), R3 also features a new timeline view. Do check it out if you have time.
enjoy!

User - inspired improvements coming in R3.0 (NEXT WEEK)

2008-08-08T08:08:00.001-07:00

Some SmugMug and Zenfolio users really care about what they want in their software. http://www.dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=887021&postcount=11 and some other offline feedback from Zenfolio Users gave a lot of insight into what photographers really want in their management experience.

So, after a little bit of contemplation over what fits and what doesnt, i think we will go ahead and make the following improvements in R3.0 (all of the following will work with SmugMug AND Zenfolio, other sites miss out on categories, but get the remaining ones)

Main Browse window to be revamped, removing the sexy but horrible-real-estate-usage left side album bar.
Instead of the left album bar, there will be a pane which contains a combo box on the top to select the service, a tree which shows the hierarchy
For normal services, there will be two root level items - Folders and Timeline
For some special services (such as SmugMug and Zenfolio), ther will be a Category node
The Folders node contains a flat list of folders in SmugMugs case, and a hierarchy (in Zenfolios Case) - Bummer that Flickr has dragged its feet on collections API - so much potential to help their users - now impossible.
Clicking on a folder shows all photos under the folder in the wall pane (main area)
You can select one or more photos from under a folder and drag them into any other folder in the tree (Much better than using the transfer view). But works only for SmugMug, Zenfolio , Flickr and PicasaWeb.
Clicking on the FOLDERS node shows all folders at top level
You can select one or more folders and drag them into any of the categories or sub categories.
The category node will show the category/subcategory tree, each showing how many folders belong under it. (not showing actual folders in the tree)
Clicking on a category shows all folders under it on the wall pane.
You can select one or more folders and drag them into any of the categories or sub categories.
The Timeline node showing Years at first level, Months at second level and Weeks at third level.
So a path to the leaf may look like 2008/April/Week 1 and clicking on any of the weeks will show all the pictures from that week. (maybe we will restrict the number of photos shown to 1000 or so to prevent UI wait time.)

Getting closer to kinda sorta like having an Adobe LightRoom for you online albums :-)

Sigh- now if only the online sites would actually help out with promoting the product. I think most are happy to provide the API to developers, but none expect the developer to actually quit his full time job and make this a living.

A supported high quality product requires careful coding, extensive testing, release processes/discipline. None of this can be achieved easily by hacking - it is a full time job, and the bills pile up, units have to sell, and that needs awareness/sales.

Good products dont sell themselves anymore.

What makes Media Edition different?

2008-08-06T07:56:00.000-07:00

A. Problems solved:

Most photo sharing sites are deficient when it comes to providing a supported unified tool for uploading photos efficiently.
There are a bunch of unsupported fragmented tools which address different parts of the problem (uploading, backing up etc).
There are virtually no tools for transferring your photos between to different photo sharing sites
There are not many tools which are aware of more than one photo sharing site. (typically these tools are built by enthusiasts of each specific site)

B. Competitors

Tools povided by the online sites themselves (none provide complete browsing and management functionality for their own site in any efficient way)
Hundreds of enthusiast tools for each site, each of which solve a small part of the problem. The reason for existence of these tools prove that the problem is real.

To really see the difference, one must do the following:

Sign up for a service such as SmugMug, Zenfolio, flickr or PicasaWeb
use the native functionality for uploading and managing a few hundred of your online photos for a week
download NitroDesk
use NitroDesk to manage your photos for a day
License NitroDesk and become a believer. :-)

Offline, the next frontier for web apps

2008-07-22T08:04:00.000-07:00

Saas has enabled organizations and its users achieve rapid time to ROI thanks to the several services who have made it look oh-so-easy to signup and drive off. Salesforce is one of the best examples of successful saas deivery, providing you as a small/medium/large business with all the key components required for sales, marketing and support.
Salesforce has mastered the art of the "service in the sky", and with its reasonable service plans, can enable anyone to ramp up on a CRM, at a cost of tens of dollars a month per user, rather than the traditional thousands of dollars upfront for the hardware/software and consulting.
One of the thorns on a SaaS providers back though is the question of offline access and the fidelity of the data / experience in online and offline modes. SFDC (SalesForce Dot Com) has made available several tools which can be used to provide the user with an offline experience, where the concept is that the user launches a separate application when needing to be offline, and whenever the user anticipates going offline, he/she will synchronize the online and offline worlds before and after to ensure data is reconciled.
The concept is indeed innovative , and the browser based offline mode goes great lengths to replicate the original salesforce experience. It is still however, windows based and is really a thick client installation which cleverly exposes its functionality within a browser using activex controls.
IMO, the offline tool is the one lifesaver that redeems salesforce from the offline problem and is not to be taken lightly. Any other SaaS vendors doing similar business-critical services, should take note..

The Philosophy behind NitroDesk.

2008-07-16T12:02:00.001-07:00

Thought i would start with a general introduction on what nitrodesk is and what it is not.
NitroDesk as a company, strives to bring online services (photos,videos) and saas functionality providers (Calendaring, Contacts, CRM) to the user through a medium that is more powerful than a mere browser (and other modules that run in its sandbox).

Traditionally, browser based applications are preferred over locally installed applications such as Word, Excel etc for delivering web based functionality, due to the ubiquity and cross-platform nature.

However, the browser does not do justice to some applications such as Photo management and CRM services, and restricts the true potential of such applications. Imagine a photo sharing site which can be managed from the desktop just as if the photos are present on the desktop, without having to wait for page refreshes and with the ability to perform tasks faster than the browser refreshes..

- Imagine a desktop application for a CRM service such as Salesforce where you dont have to be always connected to the web to not just view your contacts, accounts etc., but also let you edit these without requiring you to be online.
- Imagine this CRM desktop which can let you double-click on an attachment, open up the attachment in word, and when you save the document, saves it back to the attachment.
- Imagine this CRM desktop where you can drag and drop files from your desktop to the document list, or even on to an account to perform an attachment.

The primary focus area of NitroDesk Inc. is building such domain specific applications, the first of which is Media Edition, that lets photographers manage, upload and transfer photos between many different online photo storage sites.
The second product is CRMSoda (pronounced Cream Soda), which strives to provide a seamless online and offline experience for Salesforce.com users. (more information and some crude videos at http://www.crmsoda.com/)

The concept is definitely not going to go down well with everyone. But then, as Guy Kawasaki advises, we are not afraid to polarize the audience. It just means that people care :-)

HDR from non HDR

2008-07-16T11:59:00.000-07:00

Just used this interesting service at createhdr.com to generate an HDR photo from regular JPEG. Dont know if this is indeed true HDR, but i think it makes it a little more interesting..