Wow, October has really sailed by, at least we didn’t miss Halloween. Noopsi received a ton of bug fixes at the beginning of October and even got a couple new features that you might, or might not, have noticed.

The biggest new feature is pdfs and ppts can now be viewed inline (much like Youtube videos and pictures). If you paste a link to a powerpoint or pdf file Noopsi will go ahead and show you the actual file instead of just a boring old link. Hopefully we’ll be able to do this for doc files in the future.

We also re-ordered how results are displayed in things like search and share, they are now ordered by when you last edited something, hopefully this will help Noopsi surface what you were looking for faster.

There was also a little feature added here or there that don’t really need a mention but make the overall Noopsi experience better for you, the user.

The month of August brought Noopsi tons of new features which were pushed out on August 28th (yes, I know this post is a little late). Let’s take a look at the bigger changes you might have noticed:

Tags

If you haven’t been in school for a while, you might not remember what a union set is as opposed to an intersecting set. Most webs apps take an OR (Union) approach to requesting multiple tags, if you request both your todo and work tags then you will get everything marked with either todo or work. Noopsi now takes an AND (intersecting) approach to showing tags, if you request todo and work then you will get only things tagged with both todo and work. This involves a little more work on the db side of things but in my opinion makes tags infinitely more handy.

Timezones

Noopsi used to automatically sniff your timezone offset. The idea was to minimize what the user would have to set before being able to really use Noopsi. This technique turned out to be shortsighted. Now, Noopsi doesn’t try to guess your timezone but waits patiently for you to set your timezone in your settings. This was honestly the only way I could eliminate all the ambiguity associated with timezones.

New Stuff Highlighting

One of the biggest complaints I would get revolved around shared lists being moved back to the top of your stream because someone edited it. The problem was if you weren’t the person that edited it you had no idea what changed. Not anymore, now the changed items/lists will be highlighted when you first load the page so you know what has changed since you last viewed the page. This is definitely my favorite new feature.

Submit History

Noopsi now keeps your submit history for you. This is kind of a boring feature but it is nice to know that if you lose edit privileges on someone else’s list you will at least have a copy of the changes you made.

Bug Fixes And Tweaks

On top of all the major changes there were tons of little changes and tweaks made here and there. Then there were two (soon to be three) more updates in the last week to address the bugs that inevitably pop up when adding new features. Thanks to all the people that submitted bugs.

The problem with being a developer is I like slinging code more than I like writing blog posts (evidently). This has got to change because when I am interested in trying out a new Internet application I often check the blog as a first sign of the App being abandoned. if I see there hasn’t been any posts for a while I often think the App might not have much time left on this earth and wonder if it is worth trying at all. So I am kicking myself for not updating this blog more since Noopsi is most definitely still under heavy development.

Since our last blog post we have pushed out two significant updates that fixed tons of bugs and added some new features, but you might not have noticed because we didn’t put out any formal notice.

Now, what are we up to right now? Well, Noopsi is having issues with iCal feeds not getting the correct times. They send the correct time in UTC but calendars like Google Calendar (the calendar application I happen to use) use your set timezone to override the feed timezone. This makes all my iCal feeds from Noopsi six hours off. So, after some research I mapped out how to fix this and mumbled to myself, “this should only take a couple hours.” Well, four full days later I am almost done fixing it.

What was the problem you ask? Well, Our goal was to make Noopsi dirt simple to use. So simple you shouldn’t even have to spend any time setting boring config stuff like your timezone. In keeping with this goal Noopsi would snoop your timezone offset automatically. This works if you just want an offset and you update it every now and again to account for changes like Daylight Savings Time. This doesn’t work if DST has switched over and Noopsi hasn’t updated the offset yet. Or if you don’t have Javascript enabled. Or if Noopsi happens to need the timezone (e.g. “America/Denver”) rather than the offset.

Turns out the easiest way to tackle all these hurdles is to make the timezone manually set by the user (boo!) so Noopsi always gets it right without any hiccups. It took a good bit of code re-writes and additions to get Noopsi to allow manually setting your timezone and although we’re sad that Noopsi can no longer do this automatically, in the long run we know it is the best way to make sure Noopsi doesn’t mess up your dates.

The good news? We are almost done with this and Noopsi will soon be updated. The bad news? All user’s timezones will be blank until they manually set their timezone in the settings.

So, I guess this concludes the Noopsi state of the Union. Remember, feel free to contact us with any question, comments, and feature suggestions you might have.

What do these things have in common?

1. tag with tagname1, tagname2
2. .tagname1
3. #tagname1

If you answered: they have all been used to tag Noopsi at some point in its life then you would be correct.

I am not sure if anyone will really find this post (or future posts like this) helpful. But I want to catalog a little about how the syntax of Noopsi developed.

Noopsi started out with more of a converstational syntax because I wanted the syntax to be similar to how a person would speak. It turns out this led to way more typing than was needed, way more parsing code than was necessary, and a syntax that was so anti-KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) that no one probably would have bothered to learn it (except me).

The first tagging syntax was inspired by Stikkit (Stikkit was purchased by Twitter and is no longer operational) and was actually parsed out of the input so it would magically disappear when you looked at what you had submitted. I decided this was a bad idea because it had to be on its own line, which made it impossible to tag an entry, and was too verbose to use quickly.

So, after some deep thinking, I decided to completely remove the “tag with” syntax and stick with just the quick tags syntax which had developed to allow entry tagging. Quick tags were also inspired by Stikkit, but where Stikkit used the at symbol (e.g. @tagname) I decided that would be bettered served for sharing with other users and settled on the period instead (e.g. .tagname).

The period syntax actually survived quite a while, but was replaced when I started really using Twitter and kept seeing stuff like #tagname in more and more tweets. I decided it would be better to bend Noopsi to Twitter’s impromptu tag syntax than try and force my own tag syntax creation upon the world.

Interestingly enough, the reason why I never thought of using the pound symbol for tags before was because it was being used to create private items. I thought a private item was like a comment to yourself and the pound symbol is used for comments in programming languages like Python and PHP. The underscore became the new trigger for private item creation when the pound symbol moved over to tag creation duty.

So there you go, that is the quick and dirty story of how Noopsi went from long and verbose tagging to simple and quick tagging.

-Jay

I must admit, when I was first planning Noopsi I didn’t have much interest in the social part. Sure, I thought it would be cool that you could easily share an item or a list with someone just by @-ing their username. But I was more interested in the solitary experience. After all, I was building Noopsi to scratch my itch, and was just hoping other people would find it useful too.

And even while I was knee deep in coding the sharing part was always on the backburner because I wasn’t that interested in sharing my stuff with others. Then my wife signed up and suddenly the sharing part of Noopsi was way more important than anything else.

Sharing stuff back and forth with her was great but I quickly felt the limitations. For example, when she shared something with me that contained a date, I didn’t get that date pushed out to my upcoming feed. I couldn’t search it, and if she tagged something it didn’t show up in my tags. And why couldn’t I see new shared stuff in my home screen? It sucked having to click “shared” to see what was new.

Well, all that has changed. Stuff shared with you is now truly shared with you. Appearing in your home page. You can search it. If tagged, it shows up in your tags. If it has a date, it is in your upcoming feed. And what can I say, sharing has become incredibly useful to my wife and I. And honestly, probably one of Noopsi’s more important (if not the most important) features.

I can’t tell you how happy it makes me when my wife shares an item with me containing some date I’m supposed to remember and it gets pushed out to my Google Calendar via Noopsi’s upcoming iCal feed without me having to do anything. I now use Google Calendar about 4000% more than I did a few months ago.

We also finally managed to get the Noopsi Twitterbot up and running. As well as fixing all (knock on wood) the email problems that have plagued us since the very early days. And of course, lots of bug fixes we hope you didn’t notice anyway.

I don’t know if I am going to make these a common occurence or not, but I am just so excited that Noopsi now has a print view.

Before, when you wanted to print you got the whole webpage, but now, you get just your content in a nice clean format the way it is meant to be viewed on paper.

Why was print view not implemented before? Simple, I had never needed to print anything before, but today I did, so Noopsi now has a print view (How’s that for a feature request turn-around time!).

There were also a couple of little bug fixes and minor UI tweeks that should make your Noopsi experience that much better. If you have any suggestions for improvement, please let us know.

The latest Noopsi micro-update included a public activity stream where you can see the latest “touched” public items and entries from all the users.

I hesitated doing this because most of the activity in Noopsi takes place privately. For example, I probably make at least 10 private lists for every one public list which makes Noopsi seem much less active than it is.

However, I finally acquiesced because I want prospective users to be able to see what Noopsi is all about and how they can use it and fit it into their lives.

In the current economic client, isn’t this what everyone should be doing?

People often tell me that they want to start their own business, they just need an idea. What they really need is to just start doing something. (source)

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