Xoopit Team Blog

Xoopit takes "Best Overall Award" at Yahoo! Open Hack Day 2008

This weekend Yahoo took a huge step forward in opening up it's services to the development community at their 2008 Open Hack event.  Xoopit's own Jerry (not to be confused with Mr. Yang), got his hack ON this weekend and brought home Yahoo's "Best Overall Award" for hacking Xoopit directly into Yahoo's Mail Environment.  Thanks for representin', Jerry.   ;)

The weekend was a blast and there were a lot of really cool hacks including Tripit's sweet Travel Planner for Yahoo Mail (Tripit won the award for Best User Experience). 

The Yahoo Mail team did a stellar job hosting and helping their developer community through lots of hands on support in their snazzy Yahoo Mail Lounge.  They went out of their way to understand our vision and challenges around developing for the platform and as a third party developer, felt like Yahoo is working hard to create a great experience for us.  Mark, Steph, Brian, Talia, Scott, Jason, John, Erik, and the crew, congratulations for being first to market with your developer program for Open Mail!!!

Overall, we believe that the Yahoo's vision for transforming Yahoo into an open platform for next generation applications is awesome.  Yahoo has a huge number of properties with great content, so it's going to be really interesting to see what happens over the next 18 months as these new services begin to take root.

Most Requested Feature, and the second, and the third...

Albums

Photos are such a big part of the Xoopit experience we had to make some changes! First, you'll notice much smoother flow when flipping through photos and in our photo bar on top of the inbox. Second, no more getting overwhelmed by that gigantic Flickr set someone sent you! Xoopit now rolls up remote albums into one album thumbnail. Click on that thumb to get at the rest of the pictures. You can change your preferences for this on the Settings page.

Choose Your Own Adventure

After our last major milestone, we had our entire engineering team take a week we called "Choose Your Own Adventure", after the books that all good software engineers read in their youth when they weren't playing with Legos.

Over the course of the week the team added some of our most requested features, drastically improved performance and created some interesting new UI experiments.

Here's the awesome list of what was accomplished:

• Xoopit for Gmail now loads much faster. Also, when you search in Gmail the Xoopit results will appear at the exact same time as the Gmail results.
• You can now filter out images, videos and files from particular senders. To play with this feature, just hit the "ignore" button when hovering over a thumbnail, or experiment with the filter directly on the Settings page.
• Xoopit can now index the contents of your document attachments, e.g. Microsoft Word docs or Adobe PDFs. This is off by default. To turn it on, go the Settings page. Once you turn this feature on, Xoopit will keep a copy of the attachments' text on our servers. As a neat bonus, if you turn this on and hover over a zip file, we'll show you the list of contents.
• The ability to delete your account is now available on the Settings page as well.
• You can try out our new Sidekick UI by clicking here or dragging the link to your bookmarks bar.

We also made a lot of internal improvements that will result in better data for you and a better engineering process for us.

• Xoopit's ability to follow links does a much better job normalizing these URLs and thus you should see fewer duplicate pictures from 3rd party photo sites.
• (For engineers only): we overhauled our unit testing framework, continuous integration system and various other tool chains to make software engineering better. We also now have a much better machine configuration system that our Ops guy lovingly named Motherbrain.

Login Issues Begone!

Various issues were contributing to logging you out of Xoopit for Gmail on a frequent basis. These are now gone. If you are still having problems, see this article on 3rd party cookie policy.