In the spirit of the new year, here's a quick year-end
review and year-ahead preview.
Looking back on 2009
Between the improvements that came from your fantastic
feedback and the new features that came from our R&D team, the list of
changes was huge!
The biggest change was the release of reQall Pro, with major improvements such as the Here and Now page, locations, Google Calendar
integration, Outlook integration,
add by email and reply by email. At the same time both Pro and
reQall Standard were updated to add recurring dates, sharing with non-reQall users,
integrating with your iPhone/BlackBerry contacts, and call/email/browse from
your items. Some other changes in ’09:
- reQall for iPhone got push notifications, maps of your items, creating Places from the map, recording on the iPod Touch, and eyes-free recording.
- reQall for Blackberry now provides real-time location-based reminders, an offline mode, an automated connection setting, and support for locations on Verizon Storms/Tours (many thanks again to reQall user Maxx for helping on this).
- On the web, the 3rd party contact import code was completely replaced, and the Memory Jogger pages were added.
- All 3 major platforms were updated to include Evernote integration.
- Outlook integration got a lot of attention with support for Exchange, Outlook 2000/2002, 64 bit platforms, setting reminders and two-way sync.
- Keyword recognition was changed to add extra words, recognize your places and allow you to strip keywords.
- We replaced our computer transcription software with Yap, which provides a much better automated transcript.
- There were many other changes that you requested, such as changing the subjects of reminders, adding Canadian numbers, changing the distance for location notifications, supporting new browser versions like Firefox 3.5, etc.
Looking ahead to 2010
As you can see from everything we created in 2009, our goal
is to take the strain off you and let
reQall handle it! This is our mantra for 2010—we’re going to be releasing
more upgrades and features within reQall, all of which are designed to make
your life easier.
This is why our main focus is on a new user interface. We’ve gotten feedback from you and
from Don Norman, our Chief Mentor, on ways we can improve the interface to both
make it simpler AND give you more control. We also found that the
existing interface couldn’t easily handle some of the new capability we’re
working on, like categories and
tagging. This new interface
should be available in Q1 on the iPhone and Web. We’ll then put it on the
BlackBerry.
We'll also start on our next high-priority item—reQall for Android. We know many of
you want this yesterday, and we wish it were available. We’re driving to get it done as quickly as possible and will come back
with an expected release date.
Other than these 2 specific items, our focus for the first
half of 2010 is on making reQall even
more intelligent. We’ll be doing more with locations and with helping you to take action on your to-do’s. Our chief brain, Sunil Vemuri, has a
major new feature coming so that more than ever you can let reQall handle it. We’ll let you know about this soon and get some of you to try it.
Like any fantastic group of users, you’ve given us many more
things to do. For some requests, we’re waiting on others, like any-time
location alerts on the iPhone (Apple needs to allow apps to run in the
background) and BB OS 5.0 support (RIM needs to release the 5.0 SDK). The list
of your requests is too long to get everything done this year, but we do have
many things queued for the first 6 months of 2010.
Thank you for 2009, and we wish you the very best for 2010.
We’ll be working for you throughout the year, so please don’t forget - let reQall handle it!
