meetings

MooPlan 1.0 is out!

Yesterday evening has been  quite a night. I was watching a movie with a friend of mine when my cell phone rang, with a US number on screen.

Hi, I’m calling from Apple. I’m finishing the review of your MooPlan app. But I just miss a few things before it can go on sale.

I sent the application for review about a week ago, and 24 hours after that, I received feedback from Apple requesting me to modify 2 icons that infringed Apple’s trademark. No big deal, the app was resubmitted with the hour. And then I didn’t have any news for a whole week, and I was not worried because I had read so many people complain about the slow review process and the impossibility to get in touch with anyone inside Apple.

And then BOOM! A guy from Apple calls me twice the same evening, just to get my application in store as fast as possible. And a few minutes after the second call, TADAAAA! MooPlan 1.0 is ready for sale. Isn’t it great?

So ladies and gentlemen, it’s my pleasure to announce that my first iPhone application is on sale, and you can get it here for $0.99 or €0.79. If you want to know more about what it does, head to the official website.

Just a few thanks:

  • Special thanks to Groovy and Grails communities for producing such a great productive Java platform that allowed me to focus on the iPhone side of things. Grails was really ideal for me: RESTful services are so easy to build, and scaffolding is just great to quickly produce an administration interface. And it was so fast to learn! I didn’t know anything about Groovy and Grails 6 months ago. And thanks also to Guillaume Laforge and his buddies for the tweets.
  • Thanks to all my friends and colleagues who tested the app: Frédéric Navarro, Mounira Hamzaoui, Clément Mary, Geoffrey Bogaert, Thomas Le Goff, Quentin De Mot, Louis Jacomet, Jérôme Vanden Eynde.
  • Thanks to my employer, Axen, for supporting me in this self-training effort.
  • Special thanks to my Geekette friend, who beared with the movie interruption and supported me for the final steps. Hopefully in a few years, we’ll laugh about this screenshot.

So that’s it. I have the feeling that this release could be the beginning of something big. I feel it in my guts. Now it’s up to you guys. And as I read it in a German restaurant last week-end.

If you like it, tell others. If you don’t like it, please tell me.

By Sébastien, ago

Hello MooPlan!

logoHave you ever tried to organize a meeting or a gathering of some sort, whether it be for business, a birthday party or something like that? Well, if you have, you have certainly experienced the pain of finding the right moment when everyone is available at the same time. When one is available, another one is not, and vice versa, and then people change their mind. Really painful.

Fortunately for us, there are solutions on the web. One of them, and the one I use all the time, is called Doodle. Basically, what Doodle allows you to do is to set up some sort of a quick poll, saying “I want to organize such event and I propose a few time slots”. When your poll is created, you send an email to all the people you want to invite, with a link to your online poll. Invitees go there, check boxes to say if they are available or not on each slot, and once everyone has answered, you can determine which slot is the best option. All good, right?

Well, this solution is better than nothing, but it still has 2 major shortcomings. First off, it’s not integrated with anything like your mailbox, your address book or your agenda, which means you have to enter all the information manually, and invitees have to check their agenda manually too. Second, it’s on the web, which means that you can only organize meetings or check your availabilities when you are connected. Those shortcomings have a very important consequence: it can take an awful amount of time to get everyone to reply and send the final invitation, which means that the first invitee to answer might not be available anymore by the time your send him the final date… and we’re back where we started.

I use Doodle a lot, for business meetings, for Poker games with friends, and so on, and I’ve seen that happen a lot. And boy it’s frustrating. Then a couple of months ago, I was playing with my iPhone and I thought “Wait a minute! I have my calendar, my emails and my address book in there. Wouldn’t it be nice to integrate all of that to make it easier to set up gatherings?” Guess what! That’s what MooPlan does now!

So let’s see what it does. It’s a simple 3-step process:

  1. The organizer sets up a meeting, gives it a title, a description, invites a few people from his address book and proposes a few time slots. Then he sends all of that to MooPlan which dispatches invitation emails to everyone.
  2. Every invitee gets an email with a link inside. If they are reading the email on an iPhone, they can click a link to install MooPlan application from the App Store, if they have not already done so. If they have, they can just click the other link to open the invitation directly into MooPlan. They click on the slots on which they are available, and they reply.
  3. Back to the organizer, who sees how many people have already replied. And when enough people have, he just chooses a time slot, clicks “Send Final Invitation”, and BOOM! All the invitees get another email with the final date, location, and all the details of the event.

Now I know what you’re thinking. How is that better than Doodle? Well first, it works on your phone, natively, without any weird web interface, so it’s very easy to use, and you can organize meetings and reply to invitations on the go. Second, it’s already integrated with your address book and your emails. Now of course it still misses integration with the most important part: your calendar. Wouldn’t it be awesome if MooPlan could automatically check your availabilities, or create events in your calendar? Sure it would, and the good news is that MooPlan will do just that… once those capabilities are available for iPhone native applications. And with all the fuzz going around concerning the next version of iPhone internal software, good stuff is coming, that’s all I can say for now. This is just a first version.

When is it going to be available? Well, not tomorrow. I’ve just completed the first full cycle, but there are still a few things to fix, and a lot of testing to do. I don’t think I will be adding any new features in this release, even if I have plenty of ideas. Hopefully, I’ll be able to send it to Apple by mid-April. So stay tuned…

By Sébastien, ago