Posts Tagged ‘outlook’

Back Online – and back to business

Friday, December 11th, 2009

the-matrixWe’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!

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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)

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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

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Upcoming MeshTop Release

Thursday, August 13th, 2009

MeshTop Logo

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

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

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

Twitter Logo

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

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Posted in Development | Comments