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Back Online – and back to business

Friday, December 11th, 2009

We’re back online and we’ve got an updated version of MeshTop rolled out!

We had about a month and a half of down-time (kind of ridiculous, right?), but during that time we took a good look at MeshTop and were able to iron out a lot of major usability issues regarding the immense memory usage that was plaguing the platform. We’re still not 100% satisfied with where the usage is at, but we’re making progress =)

During our time offline we also brought on three more interns, and snagged one of our developers back from Minesage (who had been pulled into a project for a couple of months- we had dearly missed his support, but we’re glad to have him back now!).

Do check out our latest build, and please do connect with us on Facebook and Twitter we’d love to hear your feedback!

Tags: outlook, twitter
Posted in Development | Comments

Crunch Time – New MeshTop for Outlook New Implementations Scheduled for October

Friday, October 9th, 2009

We’re all back at work here in Beijing after our eight day holiday to celebrate China’s 60th Anniversary. It was a great time to rest and catch up with friends and family around Beijing or back home – but now it’s back to crunching through our backlog and getting some of our ideas implemented into our next alpha release of MeshTop.

We should be aiming to have our first closed beta release by the end of October. Do send us an email to let us know if you’d be interested in receiving an invite to be a beta tester.

Beta Request Email: hello@meshtop.com

Tags: Development, meshtop, outlook add-in
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MeshTop Features – Navigating Through MeshTop

Monday, September 7th, 2009

MeshTop has many different views: Network, Photo, Wall, Panel, Bar, Twitter Gadgets, Other Gadgets and so on, just to name a few. But it can get a bit confusing with so many views, so I wanted to highlight how to quickly navigate the specific features and views directly.

Navigating through MeshTop is quite straightforward – At the top of SidePanel view, there are five buttons for navigation. The first two arrow buttons expand or collapse MeshTop to the Bar view or the Network view. The following three buttons allow you to navigate to the three main views: Network, Photo, Wall.

panelnavigation

At the top of the Expanded view are the same three visual buttons which toggle through the Network, Photo, and Wall features of MeshTop.

expandedview

While in the Collapsed view, you can also navigate to these three main views using the navigational buttons at the bottom of the Bar view.

These are the three features that we’re highlighting in MeshTop at the moment, but we’re working on additional network and feature integrations as we finalize for our first release.

Stay tuned, and let us know of things you’d like to see in future releases by connecting with us through the feedback bar on the left, or through twitter!

Posted in Development, General | Comments

The Relationship Between User Interface Design and Software Usability

Friday, September 4th, 2009

Taking a short break from the developer’s side of things – we have a guest post from the designer of our MeshTop team. She talks briefly about designing with the purpose of integrating a software into another as a plug-in.

“The main goal of user interface design, is to develop a way to allow users to use products simply and conveniently. The functions of any products are realized by the interaction between human and machine, including color matching, style, and design; so the the main factor of UI design should be focused on the human cognition, and should be reflected as the central idea in the design.

The overall design tone of the interface in MeshTop takes its basis from Outlook, in order to smoothly integrate MeshTop and Outlook in a manner that avoids any disjointed feel between the two interfaces. Harmony with Outlook, whether in the aspect of Color Site Text font or button design, is the goal for avoiding visual fatigue of users and also gives a comfortably meshed feeling for the users.”

Clearly, using the design of Outlook as a basis for the UI definitely isn’t the most exciting and creatively freeing guideline to follow, but it comes back down to the focus on the user – how will the user receive a plugin that is a creative masterpiece, but is disjointed and has no relation to the base product as an add-in software?

We would love to hear some of your experiences as designers who have designed within restrictions – what are your stories?

(Image from: Better By Design)

Tags: Design, meshtop, outlook, User Interface
Posted in Design, Development | Comments

Quick Tips To Group Friends with MeshTop’s “Search and Tag” Feature

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

In our previous post we revealed some general features of our Network View of how you can use tags to group your friends one by one, and our integration of Facebook chat, allowing you to chat with your online Facebook friends.

This week, I’d like to give a brief tip about how to quickly group your friends with the search and tag function. On installation, MeshTop gathers all the contact information from your email address book, and social networks, allowing you to search through your whole network using the MeshTop search function. The MeshTop search not only searches through name matches but also email and company matches.

For example, if I wanted to search for all my colleagues in the MeshTop department I could perform a search on the query, ‘meshtop’, and the MeshTop search will identify the company name or email domain name ‘@meshtop.com’ matches. Each search query is automatically converted into a temporary tag, allowing you to quickly add this tag to your favorites. Utilizing the MeshTop search function with MeshTop’s tagging feature allows users to quickly sort contacts friends to different groups when you first use MeshTop.

Ye Sun

Tags: Development, facebook, meshtop, outlook, outlook add-in
Posted in Development | Comments

MeshTop Features – Organize Your Network Contacts With Tags

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

Apologies for the long break between posts – its been another crazy week of developing and planning. We decided to postpone our release date slightly in order to squeeze in some more features and integrations into MeshTop before we release our version 1.0 – it’s a bittersweet decision to make since we’re aching to let our product loose, but at the same time, we’re really excited about the additional integration’s that we’ll be providing in this first release.

Apart from that – I wanted to highlight some of the Network Tagging features of MeshTop, and also illustrate how you can use the Network view to interact with your email, Facebook, and Twitter contacts from this single view. Select the Network View through the Network button on the MeshTop sidebar to expand the Network View window. Contacts from your Outlook address book, Facebook, and Twitter accounts will be displayed across this network view.

networkview

Since this network view can become quite complicated if you have a large amount of contacts, we’ve implemented a Tagging feature to allow you to group friends together in categories, and also a search feature to filter through friends quickly. Initially, there are some default tags in your tag list: All friends, Facebook, Twitter, Family, Close Friends, and Colleagues, however, you can also add your own custom tags to this filter.

networktags

The Network view also enables users to quickly filter and interact with their vast networks by right-clicking to reveal a drop down menu with various actions specific for both the Facebook and Twitter networks.

networkorganize

These are just a few of the basic features of the Network view in MeshTop – we’ll be revealing more of these features in future posts. By the way, please feel free to follow us on twitter, or to shoot us some feedback on what you’d like to see in an Outlook Social Network mashup tool!

Tags: meshtop, Network View
Posted in Development | Comments

Google Hasn’t Taken Over The World… Yet – MeshTop on Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2003

Friday, August 14th, 2009

Do you know which email client holds the largest market share? I thought that it was Gmail (I figured that Google is pretty much close to taking over the world). However, CampaignMonitor did a study on Email Client Popularity, and they found that Outlook 2000, 2003, and Express hold the largest portion of the market share for Email clients. What I found most surprising is that Gmail only had 5.51% of the market share!

Email Client Popularity (June 2009)

(Research and images from CampaignMonitor)

Anyhow, how does this relate to MeshTop? Well, its good news! This report supports our focus on creating MeshTop as a plug-in for Outlook. We desired to find a medium that would streamline Twitter and Facebook into the current work-flow that people already had, and our decision led us to launch our first release on Outlook 2007. The New York Times recently did a study on how American spend their days, and as shown in the graph below, a large portion of the day is spent at work – where Outlook is the predominant Email client utilized.

How American Spend Their Day – Reported By The New York Times

(Research and images from the New York Times)

One interesting thing to note from the report “Most popular email clients in June 2009”, is that market share for Outlook 2007 is only 7.55% and actually lags behind the older versions of Outlook 2000, 2003, and Express, which has a cumulative market share of 32.8%.

So why did we build our first release of MeshTop for Outlook 2007 instead of Outlook 2003? First off, we didn’t have this report. But also, we wanted to ensure that we were building for the latest builds of Microsoft products. Fortunately, we have already been working on making MeshTop backwards compatible, and will be releasing support for Outlook 2003 in the beginning of September 2009.

The next step would be for us to prepare for the next release of Microsoft Office products for Outlook 2010.

We’d love to hear feedback regarding which version of Outlook you are currently using?

Tags: facebook, gmail, meshtop, outlook 2003, outlook 2007, twitter
Posted in Development | Comments

Upcoming MeshTop Release

Thursday, August 13th, 2009

As a software product, the most important thing to consider is the user experience – and that has been our focus in the past year’s efforts in developing MeshTop. MeshTop’s release is upcoming and as the development team’s Tester, I’m really looking forward to the release of our product.

Microsoft Outlook is a powerful Office tool that I work with in the office (and many of us work with), in our daily lives. Moreover, the mass movement of Social Networking Services has seen Facebook and Twitter rise up as the two favorites to connect users to friends, family and businesses. Currently there aren’t too many solutions that allow users to access these three communication tools in one client. In many cases I’ve seen many users log on to Facebook and Twitter either through their web-browsers, or Facebook/Twitter clients, and then interact separately with their emails through Outlook. This method requires a good amount of alt+tab juggling (unless you’re fortunate enough to have a dual-monitor setup of course), and can become quite bothersome while trying to keep up to date with these three networks.

The Outlook Meshtop plug-in is a solution to the problem, allowing you to work on Outlook, while also keeping track of Facebook and Twitter interactions with friends simultaneously; ~~[insert cliché phrase here]~~ kill two birds with one stone. Hopefully this should increase your productivity and not become a distraction to your daily tasks!

Send us any feedback on MeshTop at:
hello@meshtop.com
follow us on Twitter

Tags: add-in, facebook, mashup, meshtop, microsoft office, outlook, twitter
Posted in Development | Comments

A Question From My Friends – To Switch To MeshTop Or Not?

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

A good friend of mine asked me, “Why should I change from my usual Twitter client to MeshTop?”.

Frankly, I don’t know why- heh. If you have used a tool for a long time in your work-process, then I guess there isn’t much reason for you to change to another tool. However, there currently aren’t many mashup tools integrating Twitter and Facebook into Outlook, and we think that MeshTop will be able to fill that need. I’m really excited about the future of MeshTop, but there’s definitely a lot more that we can develop; we would love to hear some more user feedback regarding our current release, and anything that you would like to see implemented in MeshTop for future releases.

Send us any feedback on MeshTop at:
hello@meshtop.com
follow us on Twitter

Tags: Development, facebook, feedback, meshtop, outlook, twitter
Posted in Development | Comments

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