Blog*spark

We have been making some changes to Notespark in preparation for version 1.2, and you may have noticed some changes and some bugs.

First, the bugs.

On the phone, iPhone OS 3.0 introduced an annoying bug where you often find yourself unable to see the bottom of a note, which is covered up by the keyboard. This has been fixed in version 1.2, but until it is available on the iTunes Store, you can use the following steps to avoid the bug:

1. Quit and restart Notespark
2. When viewing a note, be sure to hide the keyboard (using the ‘done’ button) before using the ‘back’ button.
3. If you ever forget, and get into the state where the keyboard is hiding part of the note, quit and restart Notespark again.

There were a handful of server bugs, but we think all of them have been fixed. Let us know if you see any more.

Now, for the changes. You may have noticed that all your notes on notespark.com are now protected by https. This, again, is in preparation for v1.2, where all communication between the iPhone and the website are done securely through https.

Version 1.2 contains other features, such as push notifications and clickable links. Stay tuned!

While we weren’t mentioned by name, there is a screenshot of our app in a PC World article called iPhone Apps that will soon be obsolete.

Hooray! We’re famous! Uh…

To be honest, we knew that Apple would introduce note synchronization at some point. It would have been stupid for us not to anticipate it, right? The big question was what form the note synchronization would take.

We had four basic guesses as to how Apple’s note sync would work:
1) Cloud sync to MobileMe
2) IMAP sync to Mail.app / Outlook
3) Wireless sync through Bonjour
4) Wired sync through iTunes -> Mail.app, or possibly Dashboard notes app

As far as I can tell, it looks like Apple chose option 4. That’s not to say that they won’t also add 1-3. Also, I’m not real clear on how their solution will work for Windows.

While we recognize that Apple’s sync solution will be good enough for many, we’re betting that cloud sync + sharing will be attractive in its own right. Sales so far have not slowed down, although we expect them to temporarily slow down once iPhone 3.0 ships.

Meanwhile, we have a few tricks up our sleeves for Notespark, and we’re also busy working on something else… Stay tuned.

Just used wordle to create a visualization of the words used on blogspark.

The site would be better if done in Flash, tho. ;-)

While designing Notespark, we did a lot of UI mockups. As it turns out, I prefer using Fireworks for this kind of work over Photoshop, because it’s easier to manipulate objects on the screen. After doing some Google searching, it appeared there weren’t any good templates for doing iPhone mockups, so we built our own.

The file is pretty complete now, so we’re sharing it with the rest of the world. We started out with a combination of bitmaps and vectors, but we found that vectors were easier to edit, so every single item has been redrawn as a vector [*], which should make it easier to edit to your heart’s content.

[Download the CS3 version]
[Download the CS4 version]

You may use this file freely for “normal” use. That is to say, you can create mockups, show clients, work with team members, etc. That’s what it’s for.

If, however, you are planning on distributing a modified version of this more broadly (e.g., on your blog, or with your book), we ask that you follow the conventions of the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Please include an attribution to metaspark.com along with a link to the URL for this post (http://blog.metaspark.com/2009/02/fireworks-toolkit-for-creating-iphone-ui-mockups/). The attribution should be in the file itself, as well as on the blog post or wherever you reference it.

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Hat tip to Teehan + Lax for giving us the idea. We probably would have just used theirs if we didn’t prefer Fireworks over Photoshop!

* Except the picture of the iPhone itself and the background of the start screen. We’re not that crazy.

After releasing Notespark 1.1, there were too many people signing up at once, often importing long batches of notes. Because our importer was not terribly efficient, this was bogging down the system for everyone.

Well, we deployed a rewritten version of the importer today, and so far, so good. For those of you who were having trouble importing big batches of notes, please try again. For the rest of you, the importer won’t be slowing you down anymore.