Matt Legend Gemmell's dashboard

Hi Danoz,

Regarding the ability to access numbers/email-addresses other than the ones you've chosen for a favorite, I'm currently working on a feature that will let you do this from the overlay - likely by double-tapping the overlay's Call or SMS button (to get a list of all numbers for the contact), or double-tapping the overlay's Email button (to get a list of all email addresses for the contact). Hopefully this will provide the functionality you need.

Regarding tap-hold as an interaction, I've had a couple of requests for this in the past few days, and I'm certainly open to considering it. My feeling was that if I do allow tap-hold, it should only trigger Edit Mode - since Favorites looks very like the iPhone's home screen (deliberately) and that's what people will be used to. If I get enough feedback about it, though, I'd certainly be willing to think about allowing tap-hold as an alternative way to trigger the overlay or such.

Regarding relationships, I have a planned feature for supporting Groups (i.e. the groups of contacts which you see in the Contacts app), which would let you have one favorite which contained multiple contacts. I'm still thinking about that one since there are some UI decisions related to it, but it's on my radar.

Thanks for the feedback. :)

Hi all,

Just a note to say that, as promised, Favorites 1.0.2 is now available on the App Store (as of Tuesday 4th November) so be sure to check for updates to your applications in iTunes. :)

Hi there,

I use Get Satisfaction as a central location for providing support for my iPhone software products (and soon for other software too), and so I was interested in today's email about the premium services on offer.

I like the new features you're making available, and I do think they add considerable value for businesses who are using Get Satisfaction. Congratulations on rolling them out - I'm sure that I speak for everyone when I say it inspires confidence that you now have a revenue model for the service - which should guarantee that it will be around for a long time to come.

Having said that, to be frank I think that the price-point is perhaps a little high. The basic package (taking the introductory 3 months offer into account) is $1,440 for the first year, then $1,788 per year thereafter - which is a lot, especially when you're also going to be monetizing the (excellent) free version of Get Satisfaction by showing advertising.

I'd be very interested in signing up for the premium services, and indeed in developing using the API (I've already developed a very popular library to allow Mac OS X and iPhone developers to use the Twitter service from their applications using the Twitter API, for example), but not at the current price-point. Perhaps there's scope to introduce additional tiers of service, or modify the pricing structure in some way, to take account of the fact that Get Satisfaction provides support for many very small business (such as my own, which is a one-man company) as well as large corporations. :)

Just some honest feedback from a current user who's very happy with Get Satisfaction and the principle of transparent, open communication with customers. I wish you every continued success, and the very best of luck with the new premium services.

Just a note that I've now completed work on Favorites 1.0.2 and have submitted it to Apple today (Thursday 30th October). I expect it to be available in iTunes sometime in the first half of next week; probably Tuesday or Wednesday.

Version 1.0.2 takes extra steps to work around the changed-IDs problem, by also storing the full composite name for each favorite's contact (like "Matt Legend Gemmell" for me). If it can't find the contact for a favorite using its original ID, Favorites will then try to find a contact with a matching full name, and if it finds one it will seamlessly update the favorite with the contact's new ID.

Once again, thanks for reporting the issue and for helping me to track it down. I hope you'll enjoy version 1.0.2, and rest assured that I'll be working hard on some new features for Favorites 1.1.

Hi all,

With the help of rather awesome Favorites user (and fellow iPhone developer) Andrew Creek, I've managed to figure out why this is happening. In a nutshell, when MobileMe sync (and perhaps other contacts-syncing services) is enabled, the unique identifier for each of your contacts is changed from what it was before.

Favorites keeps track of which contact is assigned to a favorite by using the contact's unique ID (sensibly enough, since it's unique and we would expect it to never change). If you create some favorites and then enable MobileMe sync, the ID will no longer match. This is a nasty state of affairs.

Versions 1.0 and 1.0.1 of Favorites delete any favorite whose contact cannot be located, which is why you would lose your favorites in this situation. Version 1.0.2 of Favorites, which I'll be submitting to the App Store shortly, no longer does this, so you'll have the chance to update the contact assigned to problematic favorites without having to recreate all of them.

The solution at the moment is, if you're using MobileMe or other contacts-syncing services, be sure that all your contacts have been synced _before_ creating favorites for those contacts. This should prevent the favorites being removed in most cases, and as I said Favorites 1.0.2 will address the issue further.

My apologies for this issue - it's actually mostly an issue with how MobileMe sync works, but I've taken steps work around it. Thanks to the 4 users who reported the issue, and special thanks to Andrew for his willingness to help track down the cause.

Just a note that Favorites 1.0.1 is now available on the App Store, which should hopefully address this issue. If you've encountered the crash before, grab version 1.0.1 and try it out. If you still have problems after that, get in touch via the contact form and we'll look into it promptly. :)

Hi there,

I've had this report from one other person too, and I'm working on it. If you'd like to help me debug the issue by testing beta versions of Favorites, get in touch with me directly via the contact form at http://instinctivecode.com/contact and we can sort it out. :)

Hi Zeno,

Faster startup is definitely the joint most popular feature-request (along with multiple pages of favorites), and rest assured that I'm working on it. I'm exploring various ways to achieve a quicker launch time, but the workflow you describe is likely to be how it's implemented.

I'll keep you posted on progress.

Hi Martin,
A per-favorite override for the global default action is certainly something I'm considering adding. Thanks for the suggestion. :)

Hi Dan,
That's a good idea, and certainly something I'd be interested in doing.

It's not currently possible with the iPhone SDK (since the only way to trigger the creation of a new SMS is to use the "sms:" URL protocol, which doesn't support pre-filling the actual content of the message), but it's certainly a feature I'll keep in mind as new capabilities are added to future releases of the SDK.

I've added it to my list of potential future features, and if it becomes feasible I'll be happy to implement it - it's definitely something I'd use myself.