Digital Life Simplified
MeshTop Features – Navigating Through MeshTop
Sep 7th
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.
At the top of the Expanded view are the same three visual buttons which toggle through the Network, Photo, and Wall features of MeshTop.
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!
The Relationship Between User Interface Design and Software Usability
Sep 4th
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)
Quick Tips To Group Friends with MeshTop’s “Search and Tag” Feature
Sep 3rd
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
MeshTop Features – Organize Your Network Contacts With Tags
Aug 26th
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.
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.
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.
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!
Follow us on Twitter @hellomeshtop
Email us at: hello@meshtop.com
A Word From Our Developers – Simultaneous Updating to Twitter and Facebook
Aug 17th
(image from: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/)
MeshTop and Twitter
Twitter has always been in the back of our minds during the development of MEshTop. We had integrated Twitter in MeshTop before it became a fashion phrase in the news and in politicians’ words. No later than the summer of 2008, we had already built a demo version of MeshTop with the Twitter REST services. MeshTop continues to evolve with each new release of Twitter’s services, which are pretty resource intensive, to continually catch the changes using Twitter’s REST. Sometimes we have to abandon our implemented ideas, but fortunately, more often than not, we are watching MeshTop users enjoying more and more powerful support for Twitter’s services.
“What are you doing?”
As seen in our 1.0 release, MeshTop introduces the “What are you doing?” gadget to the sidebar view, which supports the feature of updating the status of both your Twitter and Facebook accounts. Updating to Twitter can be performed both by clicking on the ‘Reply’, ‘Direct Message’, or ‘Retweet’ buttons in menus, or you can tell MeshTop what your response method by typing directly in the box, and MeshTop will identify the Twitter gestures, “@”, “D” and “RT”.
MeshTop also offers interfaces for users sharing links and images through the use of shortened URLs. Shortened URLs are highly praised by some bloggers for avoiding long encoded links (meaningless for most users unversed in CS). Currently you can select between the TinyURL and Bit.ly service providers in ‘Options’ menu, which are both popular with Twitter users. MeshTop also allows you to share images through the TwitPic API. After clicking on’ Share an Image’ on TwitPic, you are able to select an image in your computer file browser to send to TwitPic, which will return the shared image location expressed in a shortened URL. MeshTop also allows users to post these shortened links for webpages and images on their status updates on Facebook as well.
Follow us on Twitter @hellomeshtop
Email us at: hello@meshtop.com
Google Hasn’t Taken Over The World… Yet – MeshTop on Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2003
Aug 14th
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?
Follow us on Twitter @hellomeshtop
Email us at: hello@meshtop.com
Upcoming MeshTop Release
Aug 13th
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
A Question From My Friends – To Switch To MeshTop Or Not?
Aug 11th
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
@hellomeshtop!
Jul 20th
Hello and welcome, from MeshTop!
I’d like to give a short introduction to our company, and hopefully later on through the weeks I’ll also be able to introduce some of our team members here.
MeshTop is a software division of Minesage, the Business Intelligence branch of the larger SagesGroup company. MeshTop’s goal is to provide the next generation of free tools for social networking, and our current team of developers hopes to bring you innovative and exciting technologies in the areas of social networking and social media applications.
We started our MeshTop for Outlook project in 2007, and our initial idea was to provide a tool for Facebook users to communicate with each other, while also giving them a tool to organize their information quickly. At the end of 2007, we developed a tool called Visual-Sage, which was built upon Microsoft’s new WPF technology. Visual-Sage’s functionality gave users a chat client for Facebook, and also a visualization tool for their networks. However, as Twitter began to dominate the social network world from 2008, we didn’t want to miss out on this potentially huge network. This integration of Facebook, Twitter and Outlook, was later termed MeshTop.
Head over to our main website to browse around if you haven’t checked out MeshTop yet. We hope that MeshTop will be one of the leading social mashup tools for users.
Send us any feedback on MeshTop at:
hello@meshtop.com
follow us on Twitter
