It’s great to see that Alina Dizik is reviewing Slife in The Wall Street’s Cranky Consumer column today. She does bring up a few things that we are hoping to improve, such as being able to sign-up without a credit card, among other things that we would like to address.
We are planning to bring a number of changes to the Slife platform in 2010. The key goal is simplicity. We are still finalizing all the details and hope to reveal our grand plan soon.
Just a quick post to let all of your know that we’ve released a minor update to the Slife client today, for both Windows and Mac.
On the Mac, it should be available through auto-update. If you would like to update the Windows version, login to your Slife Web/Teams account, click on the “Download” button and choose the Windows icon.
The primary reason for this release is to bring the client to parity with some backend changes we’ve made to Slife Teams. But we have also made a few changes that will result in slightly better performance and stability.
Coming up, the v3.1 client – some new features and bug fixes. Stay tuned.
We first announced our plans to open source the Slife v2.x client right at the beginning of the Summer, around the same time that we released Slife Web. We were shooting for an end-of-August release but couldn’t meet that deadline.
The good news is, we only slipped for a couple of weeks. The new “old” Slife client is here, as open source and under the GPL license. We are very excited about this and wanted to share this announcement with you as soon as possible, even though it’s close to 6PM on a Friday here on the East Coast.
To be clear, this is the Slife v2.x client, the rich desktop client that precedes our current Slife web-based platform. And it’s the MacOS X version of the client. For the time being, we have no plans to open source the Windows client, since there was so little demand for it. We are calling this the Slife v2.5 client.
We decided to host the project under Google Code, a pretty good platform that has been recommended to us by lots of people. There’s not much there right now, except for the source code and the application as a zip file, but I am sure things are going to get busy as more people get involved and contribute to the project.
Over the years, like any other software company, we’ve benefitted tremendously from the generosity of others who’ve built and distributed software as open source. This is the first time we are giving back and we hope to do more of this in the future.
And we are back from our quick break, more energized than ever. It’s surprising how just a few days off can make such a big difference.
In the wake of our return, we see that the Wall Street Journal has published a story titled “Tools to Manage Online Time Wisely“. It profiles Slife and similar tools such as RescueTime. Andrea Coombes wrote the article – we had a very nice conversation with her a week ago and knew the story was coming, but didn’t know exactly when.
Ok, now it’s time to get back to work. We have lots of items on the to-do list. By the end of the week we hope to be able to announce more details about our open source plans and availability of Slife v2.0. We know there’s a lot of people interested and we can’t wait to unleash it to the world.
As we hinted earlier this week, we were close to releasing some important updates to Slife Web. Last night we finally flipped the switch and did it. Here’s a quick overview of what’s new.
When you go to your Activities now, you will see a row of links for each activity. ‘Settings’ lets you configure goals for your activities and ‘Associations’ allows you to see which apps and docs are linked to the activity:
In the Applications and Web & Docs views, whenever an item is associated with an activity, a label will now indicate which activity that is. A light blue glow will also highlight items that are associated with activities so that it’s easier to spot them.
We are always updating our database of application icons, and now you can help us keep up! Whenever you see an app without a default icon, you can click on the “Choose icon” link and upload an icon yourself:
And finally, a big change for this release. We are introducing 3 account plans to Slife Web. Whereas before you had to pay $5/month for an account, now you have options:
You can upgrade your account at anytime:
If you had a Slife Web account before this update, we moved you automatically to our best plan, Premium. But instead of paying $10/month, you will continue paying the $5/month you signed-up for originally.
It’s really great to have this release out of the door. As you will soon see, it paves the way for some really cool features that we will be bringing to Slife in the not too distant future.
Now that we have announced Slife 3.0, what about Slife Teams?
The short answer is, we couldn’t be more excited about the future of Slife Teams!
Slife Teams was originally designed as an aggregator of Slife data for multiple users. Imagine a small graphic design studio where everyone uses Slife to keep track of time. If you could bring together everybody’s computer usage data, it would be super easy to find out, for example, how much time the entire team spends on projects and how much to charge clients. Also, by giving the entire team access to everybody’s computer usage, Slife Teams could be used as a powerful communication tool, making it easy and automatic for team members to discover what their colleagues are up to.
Unfortunately, as we came to find out when we released Slife Teams, the largest majority of companies that became interested in the service were looking for a solution to monitor employee productivity, not keep track of time or improve office communications.
We understand that employee productivity monitoring is a fairly large, profitable space, and represents a need companies have, but at the end of the day, we simply don’t want to be in that market. So the new release of Slife Teams, which coincides with the release of Slife 3.0, emphasizes overall team communication and awareness while removing functionalities that would allow a manager to track employee activity at a fine level of detail.
We like to think of the new Slife Teams as a lightweight awareness communication tool that combines automatic activity analytics with microblogging to make it very easy for teams members to stay up to date with each other’s activities.
Check Slife Teams and find out for yourself how it can improve communication in your office, company or organization. We will be talking a lot more about Slife Teams in the weeks to come.
About a year ago, we released Slife 2.0, a complete redesign of the original Slife client. Today, less than a year later, we are really thrilled to announce the release of Slife 3.0. We’ve been working on this new release for a few months and couldn’t wait to tell you more about it.
As we hinted in the previous post, Slife 3.0 is much more than an evolution of Slife 2.0. It’s a complete change in direction when it comes to Slife’s user interface and software model: Slife 3.0 is now a web application based on a thin desktop client and the Slife 3.0 client is now open source. The web-enabled Slife is now Slife Web, and it lives at slifeweb.com.
Let’s talk a bit more about these two big changes.
Slife as a web application
Slife is now a web application, supported by a very thin Slife client. The client makes all computer activity observations like before but instead of displaying them in visualizations, it streams them up to a web account online. All visualizations and interactions take place on the web.
Here are some of the reasons why we decided to make the switch from a desktop to a web application:
1. A web app allows us to build new types of services and interface with other web apps in a way that’s not possible with a desktop application. Imagine logging time and activities with Slife and sending it over to Freshbooks for invoicing and Basecamp for project management. We have some really exciting new features planned for Slife Web.
2. The move to the web greatly simplifies the client application and improves it along several dimensions. The new client is very lean and takes up little system resources (memory, CPU, etc). This has been one of the most popular feature requests for Slife and we are happy to finally make it happen.
3. Whenever we roll out new features or need to make changes to Slife Web, we can do so immediately and transparently, at the server level. We will be able to bring innovation to Slife faster and offer a more stable platform as a result.
4. As a company, our goal is to support and improve Slife for a very long time, but we need it to be a self-sustaining product from a financial point of view. For many years Slife was totally free, but we can’t distribute it gratis any longer. Offering Slife as a web application allows us to charge for the service following the now common software-as-a-service model while offering great value, excellent technical support and a rock-solid product.
The open source Slife client
When we made the decision to bring Slife to the web, it became really clear that open sourcing the client was the right thing to do. Why not give users the flexibility to modify the client to suit their needs? An open source client gives peace of mind to anyone interested in investing in the platform and might even lead to new Slife uses and applications. It’s a win-win situation.
Another motivation was our desire to offer an open source software platform for activity analytics that supports research in a number of areas, from productivity to context awareness. Slife itself grew out of a research project back in 2003, and we are still very much interested in contributing to the academic community.
Over the next few weeks we will be posting more about Slife Web, Slife Teams, the open source client and all of its new features. If you would like to try Slife 3.0, head over to the Slife Labs home page, take the video tour and sign up. For $5 a month, you get everything that Slife has to offer. It’s super simple to get started and we offer a free 30-day trial period.
We are very excited to say that Slife v2.1 is ready for download. That’s Mac and Windows. You can get either one from our downloads page or simply restart the version of Slife you already have – it will auto-update itself automatically.
For v2.1, in addition to a variety of minor bug fixes across the board, we implemented a number of features that have been popular for quite some time. Let’s go over some of these new features in detail.
Running Slife In The Background
Just go to ‘Preferences>General’ and check the box “Run Slife as a background application”. Next time you restart Slife, it will be running in the background and not show up in the dock or application switcher. That’s it.
Associating Activities With Folders
Go to your desktop, create a new folder and call it “Stuff”. Create a new TextEdit document and put it inside the “Stuff” folder. Now go to Slife, click on the ‘Activities’ view and create a new Activity. Call it “Activity Test”. In the Activity Editor window, switch to the ‘Web & Documents’ tab and create a new item “Desktop/Stuff”. Make sure the checkbox for “Desktop/Stuff” is checked.
Now, whenever you are working on the TextEdit document inside the “Stuff” folder, or any other document really, Slife will be aware of that and track time spent on it. In order for this feature to work, the document window must be standard – if you can cmd-click on a window title and see where it’s located in the file system, so can Slife.
Search Fields In Activity Editor
In the Activity Editor window, sometimes it’s hard to locate application and document names. Starting today, scrolling won’t be necessary since we are adding a search field for the ‘Applications’ and ‘Web & Documents’ tab.
Sharing All Computer Activities With Slife Teams
Before today, setting up the Slife client to work with a Slife Teams account required the creation and sharing of specific activities. That’s no longer the case. Now you can share all computer activities with Slife Teams from the start.
We decided to make the change because we received input from lots of users saying that they would like Slife Teams to work just like Slife, but for groups. And that’s ultimately what Slife Teams is all about.
Other important changes in Slife v2.1 for Mac include:
How about Slife v2.1 for Windows? One key change in the Windows version is that minimizing the application no longer hides it completely. We also fixed a bug where activity events were not being captured and drawn at the 12AM hour. The Slife Teams sharing option and goals metric modification also applies to the Windows edition of Slife.
If you have any comments, feel free to leave them below. We already have a list of work items for upcoming versions of Slife and we will be talking about those soon.
It’s been a busy summer for us here at Slife Labs, with the release of Slife 2.0 and Slife Teams. One of our priorities has been to be super responsive when it comes to feature requests and bug fixes. We posted an updated to Slife 2.0 already and we are working on a bigger release, Slife 2.1.
As far as Slife Teams, we already have more than 200 teams, groups and businesses with accounts, evaluating and using the system. It’s still in beta, so there’s a lot of work that we can do to improve the service. Closer to the end of the month we will be rolling out a new release for Slife Teams, with new features. Slife Teams is slowly becoming a great platform for group actvitiy analytics and collaboration. If you don’t have an account yet, let us know and we will send one your way.
Finally, Slife Windows 2.0 has been a major focus this month of August. It’s coming along very nicely and we would like to have a beta out fairly soon. In the meantime, enjoy your summer!
It’s been a month since we released Slife 2.0. Today we have an update, Slife v2.0.1, that addresses a number of issues in the v2.0 that came up in the forum and in our own tests. Here’s the list of changes:
You can download Slife v2.0.1 here. We will be updating the link in the download page and releasing it through auto-update for everyone later this week.
Over the next few weeks we will be working on some of the excellent, but more substancial feature suggestions. Stay close!