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.
You may have noticed that we’ve been quiet here recently. That’s because we’ve been busy working on some improvements for the Slife client and also the web applications (Slife Web/Teams). We hope to push out a new release in the first week of December.
We are also about to enter holiday territory, first with Thanksgiving and then later in December with Christmas. The pace of business is slowing down.
The closeness to a new year and the aforementioned slow down make this an ideal time for planning, and this is what we are going to do for a large part of December. And take a well deserved week of rest, of course.
Until you hear from us again, which shouldn’t be too long from now, Happy Thanksgiving!
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.
For quite some time, one of the most popular feature requests has been the ability to associate web sites and documents with keywords. Today, we are bringing this capability to Slife Web. It’s very cool.
Let’s say you would like to associate the keyword “wall street journal” or “wsj.com” with the “Reading News” activity. Click on the “Activities” tab on the left and hit the “Associations” link for the “Reading News” activity. This is what you will see:
At the top are the associations you might have already made by going into the “Applications” and “Web & Docs” views. Now, there’s another section at the bottom where you can enter keywords.
Slife is always trying to match document and web page titles and urls with your keywords. When it finds a match, it counts time towards the activity the keyword is under. The match doesn’t have to be exact. As long as the keyword is contained within a title or url, it will work.
Give it a try and let us know how this feature is working for your, we would love to hear your feedback. Since today is Monday, it’s also time for this week’s worklist. We are in the middle of a big update to Slife Teams and that will be our main focus the next few days. We also plan to do a little bit of work to make sure this new keyword feature is working very smoothly for everybody.
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.
After a happy summer weekend, most people wouldn’t be too excited about going back to work on Monday morning. But today is a really special day for us at Slife Labs. We are finally releasing the new “Productivity Plus” product we’ve referred to in the past. It’s called Slife Rewards and we think it represents a whole new approach to productivity software.
We’ve been studying the problem of time management, information overload and productivity in general for quite some time. The conclusion we’ve drawn after many years developing products and talking to customers is that it really comes down to motivation. It’s cool and interesting to visualize activities and useful to keep track of time automatically, but if you are trying to change your behavior in order to focus on your work and say, not spend a large part of your day browsing from one Internet distraction to another, an extra motivational push is really helpful.
Enter Slife Rewards. As a feature inside Slife Web (you will need a Slife Web account to use it), it allows you to associate activity goals with rewards. If you reach your daily productivity goals for an entire month, such as “spend no more than 20 minutes on email every day”, you get a reward.
Initially there are two types of rewards you can choose from. You can either choose to receive an item from your Amazon wish list when you meet your goals or you can choose to make a donation to a cause you care about. There are several causes that we are supporting initially, from the American Red Cross to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. We plan to add more causes and reward types in the future. The possibilities are endless.
Now, what’s important to understand about this new service is that you are actually the one who’s financing your own rewards. Within Slife Web, you make deposits to your Slife Rewards fund and we use your funds to buy and send you a gift or make a donation on your behalf. Our role is in providing the incentive platform to help you reach your productivity objectives, but the reward is on you. There’s no catch here. Also, because of the overhead associated with reward processing, we will charge you a small fee ($2) every month you reach your goals and process your reward.
For additional details and a video, please check the Slife Rewards site. We would love to get your feedback about this new tool. Because of this new service we are also adding a new section to our Terms of Service.
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.
Over the last 2 weeks, we’ve been working on the issue that prevents Slife from tracking document names in Adobe Photoshop CS4 and Illustrator CS4.
Unfortunately, it looks like Adobe made some changes to the way these two applications expose information associated with open documents and a resolution to the tracking problem is turning out to be much more complicated than we expected.
This is just a quick update to let you know that we are aware of the problem and working on it. We are contacting the folks at Adobe and trying to understand what our options are. We will post an update to this as soon as we have more information.
Here are some of the things we will be attacking this week:
If you’ve noticed that your activity data was logged to an incorrect time/date in the past, there was a small issue with timezones that we addressed last week. Let us know if you are still having problems.
We are beginning to look more seriously at open source licenses for the Slife client. I was surprised to find so many options out there, many of which are listed on the Open Source Initiative site.
We are probably going with simplicity. The MIT license seems well suited for what we want to do. It’s also short and straightforward.