Stephen Fleming's dashboard

The other thing to note is that every hour that I have to answer the same questions on forums that I also have as official bug reports is an hour where I'm not, like, actually fixing bugs or adding features.

For example, for the past three days I've been adding the ability to search on any fields, like in 1.0 but even better. But, right now, instead of getting the beta out so people can test it, I'm posting in this forum, trying to do damage control and defend my company's support.

At any rate, here are the release notes for this feature; hopefully I'll get a beta out tonight:

- There are now three major search categories: "Title & People", "Descriptions" and "Numbers".

- "People" now includes all people involved, whether actors or illustrators or what-have-you.

- "Descriptions" includes tracks, primary synopsis, your synopsis, your review, notes, features, genres, media types, languages, and a ton more.

- With the first two categories you can enter the medium type now, too, so you can type "Book Niven" to find Larry Niven's books.

- "Numbers" includes Library of Congress (if filled in) and Dewey Decimal and prices.

- A tooltip on the search field now shows you exactly what fields will be searched in each of these three categories. (There is some overlap between them.)

- If you type multiple words, we now consider each word separately when searching -- before, if you typed "Niven Mote" you'd have to have a person or title that literally contained "Niven Mote", in order. Now you can have a person named "Larry Niven" and a title that's "Mote in God's Eye" and it'll be found, like you'd expect. (This is like iTunes' search.)

- You can now quote substrings to search literally, for example, "Larry Niven" (with the quotes) will only match against Larry and Niven in that order, with exactly one space between them. (This is what the old searching behavior always was in 2.0.1 and before.)

- You can even switch the search field category to "Descriptions" and type "Blue Book" to see all your books with blue covers!

Chris: The MacNN forums are primarily for users to talk to and support each other, as are most forums on the web. All of us at DM and at Golden % Braeburn have spent the last month digging out of the 34,000 e-mails we received after we launched Delicious Library 2, and we finally got down to ZERO in our INBOX only last week.

We have to prioritize, and if a customer sends us e-mail asking for support that's what we service first. We like to maintain a presence on forums, but if something's got to give, that's what will give first.

The other problem is there's so much noise in the MacNN forums that it's very hard for us to find real questions to answer. It makes it so there's 80 tons of stuff for our single support person to read, and there are only so many hours in each day. (And, if we start moderating, people cry "censorship!", so we feel like we can't win.)

mpmchugh: I will make it official if it seems it's working out for us. It certainly seems promising so far.

-W

mpmchugh said:
"The problem with not linking to it is that you can't properly evaluate it, if your users aren't aware of it!"

Well, the MacNN forum for DL has never lacked for user postings (even though there isn't an official DM link pointing to it), but it's rare lately that any DM staff drop by to help with problems (last visit by DM tech support was over a month ago!). And that's for a product that has yet to ship with up-to-date online help! Call that customer support? 'Cos I don't!

That's why I interpret Wil's comment to mean he's evaluating whether the DM staff will want to post to this forum.

The nice thing about having an official link on your website is that you can always change it if this solution doesn't work out — at least users will know where to go for the current solution. The problem with not linking to it is that you can't properly evaluate it, if your users aren't aware of it!

That said, I've used Get Satisfaction for other products, and it seems to work well, so I say use it until a better solution comes along, but make it official and keep your users in the loop... otherwise, it's kind of a pointless exercise.

-Michael

We only just started this forum last week, and we're not sure if it works for us yet... We don't want to keep jerking customers around and saying, "No, send mail here! No, post on this forum! No, wait, over here!"

So, we're slow-launching it. I'd appreciate your feedback on whether you think it should be our main forum.

-W

Why is this board not linked to on the delicious-monster.com Help page or in the the site footer!

Wht's the use of starting as help board if it's not linked to from the product site?

-Michael

Just curious...How did Twinkle handle geolocation before the Tapulous accounts were added? It was there before when Twinkle only ran on jailbroken iPhones, but if the Tapulous servers are driving this, were they always there behind the scenes, just not using Tapulous account names to ID us? Regarding attached photos, weren't you using TwitPic, or some similar Twitter-picture service, before? That allowed other users to post comments (whether they were Twinkle users or not) to the picture via the TwitPic Web site, which would then appear as new tweets from the commenter, referencing the link to the picture, on Twitter. Are there plans for adding commenting features by non-Twinkle users to your own photo-display pages? Delivering messages if Twitter is down...yes, there is value in this, for sure. I like this idea. The only problem is that there is another failure point between the user and Twitter, so your system/servers has/have to be even more reliable than Twitter, which doesn't seem impossible. :) – dmetzcher, on July 23, 2008 16:25

Twinkle pre-AppStore did most of this very well. As for "deliver messages when Twitter is overloaded", Tapolous can be down too. Granted, nothing ever can be down on the same level Twitter is :-) – GR, on July 23, 2008 11:16

Twinkle pre-AppStore did most of this very well. As for "deliver messages when Twitter is overloaded", Tapolous can be down too. Granted, nothing ever can be down on the same level Twitter is :-) – GR, on July 23, 2008 11:16

Hmm, it still seemed to be showing that default Tapulous avatar for me as of today. However, due to the program crashing pretty much every time I use it now, I can't further confirm or deny. – Klinsek, on July 23, 2008 06:38

Hmm, it still seemed to be showing that default Tapulous avatar for me as of today. However, due to the program crashing pretty much every time I use it now, I can't further confirm or deny. – Klinsek, on July 23, 2008 06:38

We made an architecture decision based on the functionality we wanted to provide. The Tapulous network lets us deliver messages when Twitter is overloaded, do geolocation for nearby tweets, and attach photos, and the Tapulous network exists whether you use Twitter or not. We see real value in those things.

Chris, Tristan,

Twhirl can post to Twitter and also pownce and jaiku. However, it does it without asking for an umbrella login, without putting another roadblock between me and the Twitter server, and more importantly, WITHOUT KEEPING MY TWITTER LOGIN AND PASSWORD ON THEIR SERVERS.

I really don't see the point in the Tapulous ID.

It's kinda nice that this can be handled on the server side rather than having to wait for 1.1 to become available in the store.

Awesome communication, and even better results :]

That's fantastic, I was kind of happy (for obvious reasons) that there seemed to be a bug and it was showing my Twitter ID / Avatar.. now that it's not a bug, rather a solution I'm even happier. This is a great app and I'm happy to put it back on the top of my recommendation list. – Joshua, on July 22, 2008 05:23

In response to everyone's feedback, tonight we've made server-side changes so that now people with Twitter accounts in Twinkle will see their Twitter screen names and avatars by default.

Maybe the Tapulous server(s) is/are down. If so, maybe it reverts to Twitter ID/picture and just shows those? – dmetzcher, on July 22, 2008 02:13

So it's back to using my Twitter name and avatar. Is there any rhyme or reason why it switches back and forth?

Actually whenever I try to open Twitter Settings within Twinkle, Twinkle crashes. I have reinstalled and it still is happening (on both my original iPhone and my iPhone 3G).