>We’ve only solved a small part of a bigger problem. The SaaS platforms we use for work don't work well together. It shouldn’t take cycling through ten different apps and Chrome tabs to stay on top of everything.
>We’re now looking to bring Slack and GitHub into a unified notification inbox in the menu bar. We want to better organize everything you use as we’ve done with Google Calendar.
I’ve spent almost a decade in the productivity space (founded Shortcuts at Apple, fka Workflow) and everything is always confusing.
Everyone is seeking the holy grail of computing (“the computer does exactly what I want and it’s a seamless experience”) and there are a billion and a half ways to attack the problem. Starting with a “hair on fire” problem and expanding to other hair on fire problems is not a wholly unreasonable way to go about it. It’s important to have a larger vision, but execution is perhaps the most important in this space (as with most consumer tech).
Sure, but saving a click or two when joining zoom meetings for mac users that don't use the native calendar app doesn't really scream "hair on fire"...
I ended up building my own solution to this because I regularly miss meetings by minutes and want a one-click solution to jump into meetings (I can have up to 10 a day) even though I use the native Calendar app.
I saw this and it resonated deeply with me. It's an exceedingly small paper cut, but a paper cut nonetheless.
The Zoom client has already a built in calendar integration. Once connected, it will show you all upcoming meetings for the day including a button to join the call. It's quite convenient.
As someone who has to have zoom, teams, and webex meetings with clients I would enjoy a tray item that would just organize all those into a lista and have one click access the task tray, integration with various calendars (mainly icloud and google) would be even nicer. Even if it just summed up my week. Extra points for cross platform. seems as if someone probably hasn't already built in emacs probably :)
It's not just a click or two when we are joining several meetings in a day. Personally I'm annoyed by repetitive tasks that are slow due to external factors. Joining a meeting through Meet on Chrome involves -
1. Open a new tab on the right user profile
2. Navigate to meet.google.com (second slowest task)
3. Click on a meeting. Wait for it to be setup (slowest task)
4. Join. Wait for a couple of seconds for the stream to setup.
I would rather club multiple slow steps requiring user action into one long wait time that I can completely ignore.
Maybe I’m too cynical but I remember back in the days of multiple IM services, MSN Messenger, Yahoo, AIM, etc. One company would try to implement interop with another, only to be shut out a few days later.
I’d posit that if they are even remotely successful at building a unified notification inbox they’ll get their access shut off very quickly. These companies don't want to share.
If they build a unified notification inbox, I will pay for that. I had one of those when I used a Blackberry and I miss it as I now have to check 10 sites periodically to stay on top of things.
Honestly, the last thing I want is a unified inbox. I get inputs from a dozen different streams and have segregated them by platform to better manage my time.
I want it to be really easy for people to get a hold of me if the information is important or if they are important to me, e.g. via SMS or voice.
I want it to be very difficult to be overwhelmed by low signal content unless that is my focus at the time, e.g. mailing lists, work email, etc.
And I want to be able to select my focus. When I am reading about mountain bikes, I want to read about mountain bikes. I don't want to sort through work messages, family memes, or tech news at the same time.
Man I really wish BB10 had come to the market earlier. I honestly don't doubt it'd still be around today if it wasn't for the fact it entered the market so late. BB were too busy dragging their feet for years after iOS and Android hit the scene. If they started work on BB10 as soon as the iPhone was released, I think we'd still have BlackBerries and more importantly a third platform. The Apple/Google duopoly benefits no one except Apple and Google.
I still have a Q10 somewhere, it's such a nice phone too.
There's still a lot of things I can't talk about because some of the people who I worked with, who are great people still work there.
Internally, 33% of every dollar went to the Blackberry Wireless division because Blackberry was created before commoditized mobile chips existed. In effect, this means we paid for the chips, paid an extra fee to unlock it just so we could flash our software.
It was an ongoing battle between the spec for Bluetooth being released and having our own version, validating it against every single thing out there that could connect to it and then shipping it out. This made it extremely pricy to deliver a feature on the wireless stack and often things just weren't supported which came with the original chipset.
It's difficult to turn the ship around without just firing everyone involved and going "just grab what's there just like Android is doing"
I still have a special Z10 that I was allowed to keep after working there.
It's a red Z10 running an unlocked bootloader which allows you to hold down volume up-volume down and boot into Android 5.0 environment.
Sadly "Project Exodus" was considered inappropriate at the time just like the original Android Player on BB10 since it was considered inappropriate to think anything other than BB10 was the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Edit: 2 years after I left, Blackberry devices became Android devices... so I guess I was ahead of the curve or something?
It is probably not possible, you have to unlock on premises using a signed version of the tooling on a beta version of the OS on the device.
Your key2 probably has a customer version of the OS running it, so it would never be able to be unlocked :(
I argued about this but eventually the security of the "ecosystem" takes over the usability of unlocking older devices so they can be used for something else.
As someone who has never owned a Blackberry, can you explain what this means? I'm not sure why you need to check sites for notifications, that seems like the opposite of a notification.
As someone who has never owned a Blackberry, can you explain what this means?
BlackBerry funnelled everything - email, BBM, tweets, Facebook messages, whatever - into a unified interface. Basically you didn’t need to care where a message came from, you saw it all in one place and could just reply from there. You would not need to check one app for email, another for IMs, another for tweets etc.
Isn't this just notification center? I don't think you can reply to say, a slack message from it, but most services have some form of notification support that will redirect you to the proper app context
I don't think you can reply to say, a slack message from it
I think Slack post-dates BlackBerry but you could definitely reply to e.g. a FB message from within it. BB wrote and maintained their own FB connector to facilitate it, FB never shipped a BB app.
Yeah, this is the other thing I'm baffled about here. My iPhone is my unified notification inbox and I can do all of those things right from the lock screen. I definitely never have to visit sites to check notifications.
And you can add calendar, todo, notes, etc etc widgets to it. It is slow and you can’t use the keyboard to navigate it. I think developers are very limited in what they can do with it. That said, it covers 80% of what users are looking for here ...
> The SaaS platforms we use for work don't work well together.
Try O365. It just works. Seems like every app works well with the other ones.
>>We’re now looking to bring Slack and GitHub into a unified notification inbox in the menu bar. We want to better organize everything you use as we’ve done with Google Calendar.
That's risky. Major OS already have notification centers/aggregators.
O365? Outlook.com is terrible. Crazy a** js that doesn't mark messages as read with no discernible way to reliably trigger that, shows me the email message version from before spell check as I am waiting for it to send, super laggy, arcane hover triggered menus that want to do a million undocumented things, just to get an email address from an email chain, etc. The only two worse online experiences for me are logging in to att.com and trying to shop on homedepot.com. Microsoft should not be in a discussion with those two head-lice.
Your critique is coming from a sincere place, and acts as a harbinger of the troubles that users of Superpowered are also likely to face.
The trouble is that this kind of SNAFU is common when you are dealing with multi-application use cases, so this criticism is going to apply doubly to any new player in the space, including the topic of this discussion.
Correct, but my point was that there is room for said new player if that is the best we have right now. It is truly basically unusable for me on my device. I don't plan on getting a new device, but rather quitting the part time work that requires me to use that mess (along with so many other bad decisions they make, that make my work about 80% more time consuming than it should be).
So many different functions. My company is purely cloud and we use Google as much as possible, but we still have tons as we need a help desk, a task board, HR software, credential management, Office for some people, Udemy, etc.
One, every subdivision of a company might have similar needs, but each one has niche table stakes that only one app provides. Case in point: Lawyers still use WordPerfect [1].
Two, and this is where I think Superpowered, the company in question, will stumble, is that every attempt to unify these disparate needs has ended up into a unholy giant mess of "Enterprisey" software that tries to be all things to all people. Inevitably there's at least one key area where it sucks to bad for the table stakes requirement of that user base that they never adopt it, strike out on their own, and now you're back to "why do we have so many apps?".
What's the alternative? You could try to centralize all of your apps onto Google or Microsoft or Zoho, but frankly if you want the best user experience, you have to work with several different companies.
>We’ve only solved a small part of a bigger problem. The SaaS platforms we use for work don't work well together. It shouldn’t take cycling through ten different apps and Chrome tabs to stay on top of everything.
>We’re now looking to bring Slack and GitHub into a unified notification inbox in the menu bar. We want to better organize everything you use as we’ve done with Google Calendar.