I have a secret.

Last Wednesday night, when I should have stayed home and gotten rid of a cold, I instead went out to a big gala event to celebrate the secret renaming of the Tri-Borough Bridge to the Robert Kennedy Bridge.  Hey, I wanted to see what all the fuss was about, and it was to support a good cause!

It was great to see Alec Baldwin and other uber-famous people perform Speak Truth to Power, and I tried to ask Martha Stewart what she thought of the whole Mark Cuban thing, but she just smiled.  I don’t think she heard me over Kerry Kennedy’s passionate speech.

Those people all have their secrets, too.

I have another secret. Last Thursday night, when I REALLY should have stayed in bed, I again went out to another event for Witness, because who doesn’t want to meet Peter Gabriel, or take home Michale Stipe’s signed iPod?

Zenbe has its own secrets. Its loaded with secret features that make your email experience better. Except that, unlike a real secret, we don’t want them to be secrets.  They are just so embedded in the app, and so task specific, we have a hard time explaining them in the UI.

Here are some of my favorite, or most aggravating ones:

Picking an Avatar from Flicker

Avatars are fun, but its intimidating to pick one. Thats why we added the Flickr Tab to the avatar picker.  Just click on the pencil (a pencil icon means “edit this” anywhere in Zenbe) on any Avatar space, then select the Flickr Tab. Enter a search phrase, I usually just pick the person’s name, or maybe an animal or idea that represents the person, and see what Flickr spits up.  There is always and interesting image that you can associate with the person.

Finding Email or Files with the gray filter bar

Those gray bars that appear in every list, in the mail tab or files view, are filter controls. You can use them to find email or files in the view you are in. If you are in your Inbox, and filter on a tag, you will only see items with that tag, that are in your Inbox.  This is different from the search box in the upper right, which searches ALL YOUR EMAIL (or all your files) wherever it might be. 

Tagging a File makes it easy to find, and keeps it around

You can organize files separately from email. If you go to the files tab, and use the tag filter control, you can quickly find any files that are associated with that tag.  If you tagged an email, any attachments in that email will show up.  You  can also tag files on the files tab, and they will show up too. If you tag a file, we know you care about it, so even if you delete the email, Zenbe will keep the file. 

Keyboard shortcuts

They are there, just read the help to learn more. 

I’ll write more about all our wonderful secret features later. Right now, i have to get back to shaking this horrible cold…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 25th, 2008 at 12:50 am and is filed under Announcement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.