Creative Time Formats

Someone emailed today and mentioned that they felt limited by our time input field. Their life was being made harder because they were forced to enter the hour, a colon, the minutes and am/pm. However, this is not true.

There are many time formats you can use!

Try it out. 1pm, 1600, 10, should all result in valid times. If you have a favorite time format that we don’t support let us know and we’ll throw it in there.

Perhaps in the future people will expect to be able to use creative time formats but until then it should be explained. And since our documentation is a little sparse and this probably the first public mention of our time formats the blame for any confusion is on us.

I wonder what other ’secret features’ we have.

Spongecell at Carson, api, api, api

I went to the Carson Workshop in London last week. This picture is proof:

The big message was that every application should have a mountain of public apis. Flickr and Amazon are always the big examples. Spongecell has a few channels for retrieving events and some methods for creating events and we’ll have some more soon.

Someone presenting at Carson mentioned that once you publicize an api you cannot change it. People will be using that api and how are they going to recall that application they created that uses your api? They can’t. So make sure the api is right the first time.

That’s swell, I thought. I’ll think about my apis before I put them out there.

and then yesterday the president discovered this script!!!

I didn’t tell anyone they could use my javascript functions as a public interface! We had planned on people sending and receiving data with spongecell but I never expected someone to stick their fingers into our innards. This is great! People have asked us to become open source but there’s no need to ask. Just create a grease monkey script and you are in control.

Mr. w4g3n3r wrote a greasmonkey script that enables the scroll wheel inside of spongecell. Scrolling up or down will change the days displayed in your calendar. You can also zoom out and in if you scroll while holding the space bar down. I never got around to including this functionality mostly because browser scroll-wheel support is poor for macs. Thank you Mr. w4g3n3r! now I don’t have to write this.

I never thought I would write a blog but now I need some way for you to hear my exclamation.

Enough Calendars?

I love Joel on Software (we use the wonderful Fogbugz here at Spongecell) – his recent post about the glut of calendars on the web has some interesting points, but it doesn’t capture the problem we are trying to solve. Eventually, Spongecell will address his specific features and corner cases – but for now we wanted to release an easy calendar with rudimentary mobile features. I think Spongecell succeeded at this.

Spongecell was built out of frustration with the status quo of calendaring. I’m disorganized and forgetful, and had several failed attempts to integrate calendaring into my life. Most involved a new gadget, web app or pad of paper – I’ve had a palm V, a Visor, a Treo, a hipster PDA (mini-moleskine) and at least three “ok now i’m really going to use yahoo calendar” moments. In the end, people don’t use calendars because they are cumbersome, painful and horribly unusable. Online calendars aren’t there when you need them, and the PDA is dying a slow death.

How do you fix this? I’m a believer in delivering new services using platforms and applications that people already have and know how to use. This means, no new desktop applications, no complex syntax (hint: syntax != natural language), no new mobile application to download and most importantly, no steep learning curves. These requirements make for a more challenging product to deliver, but a much more rewarding and accessible user experience.

At Spongecell we want to make your calendar easy to use and accessible when you need it.

Spongecell Launch Party

Last wednesday we had a party to celebrate our launch at Ritual Coffee Roasters in the mission. There was an an amazing turnout, and a great time was had by all. Thanks to Kearstin and Melissa for the awesome decorations, DJ Swayzee for spinning, the Ritual crew for putting up with our antics, and of course, my mother for catering for the 150+ who showed up.

Keyboard Shortcuts on Spongecell

Here are some useful keyboard shortcuts when using Spongecell:

T – Jump to today
S – Jump to Spongebar
N – New event
Left Arrow – Display fewer weeks
Right Arrow – Display more weeks
Up Arrow – Scroll calendar up
Down Arrow – Scroll calendar down
ESC – close the event editing window

Spongecell Mobile

If you don’t carry a palm/blackberry/pocketpc or haven’t mastered the intricacies of the outlook plugin or syncML for your phone, mobile calendaring can be a real pain. Spongecell makes it easy. Once you have set up your mobile phone number in your profile – there are 4 ways to interact with Spongecell while away from your desktop:

1 – Send a txt message with a new appointment to sponge@spongecell.com – for example, “Dinner with bob next thursday”. Time isn’t mandatory, the sponge will do it’s best to figure out what you mean.

2 – Subscribe to your calendar via RSS feed. There are many different time frames to choose from. Hint – feeds in “weeks” are Sunday through Saturday, and feeds in “days” are Today + X days.

3 – To find out the details of your next appointment, send a txt message that says “next” to sponge@spongecell.com. This also works for “today”, “tomorrow”, “next thursday” and a date such as “june 23″ to get a list of appointments.

4 – Set a reminder to be sent to your mobile phone. Just click the “Text Message” box in the event details.

5 – One more coming soon.

Hint: add sponge@spongecell.com to your mobile phone’s address book.