Hey everyone,

We’re looking for Zenbe users who want to alpha test our initial IMAP implementation.

For more details, please see the forum post about our IMAP Alpha Test.

We fixed the problem with the Contacts Importer that caused performance problems yesterday. Import away!

Update 21 Aug 2008: The contacts importer is now enabled.

Due to some problems with our contacts importer we had to temporarily disable it.

We’re working on a fix and will hopefully have a patch out by tomorrow.

We’re sorry for the inconvenience.

Good morning,

This weekend we had some problems with our service that handles fetching email from your non-Zenbe accounts. The service failed and unfortunately it failed in a way that our monitoring service did not detect it properly and alert us of the issue in a timely manner.

Service should be restored now and we’re going to be getting some extra server capacity this week to help ensure it does not happen again. We’re also investigating why the monitoring service did not give us an alert.

I apologize for the inconvenience and thank you to all the users that reported the issue in the forums.

This morning we rolled out some enhancements and fixes to our contacts import process.  We know many of you have been frustrated by problems importing your contacts.  We’ve made the import process more robust by improving error handling and expanding the types of contact data that we extract from the external services.  Our Google Contacts importer is even able to pull your contacts avatars right into Zenbe.

We hope these enhancements will make your contacts import experience better.  This is an important part of the app that we will continue to improve on.  Thanks for your patience as we grow.

For any users that continue to have problems importing your Outlook csv files please contact us at feedback at zenbe dot com and we’ll work with you to get your file imported properly.

For our iPhone app users, please be aware that we’ve had a couple reports of people losing their list data when they update the application. This seems to be a problem with the App Store update mechanism. I haven’t seen anything official from apple, but other applications are having the same issue. Here’s some of the reports from the wild:

• http://www.tuaw.com/2008/07/25/data-loss-from-app-store-updates/
• http://www.appletell.com/apple/comment/is-there-an-iphone-app-update-bug/
• http://www.appletell.com/apple/comment/data-loss-from-app-store-updates/

I know this may be too late for most of you, but if you haven’t updated to v1.2, I recommend that you “sync” your data to our servers before updating. Go to lists.zenbe.com to create a free account, then hit the “sync” button in Zenbe Lists and enter your account credentials. If your data is ever lost, it will be restored from the Zenbe servers the next time you sync.

If this post is too-little-too-late for you, I apologize. I’ll post an update here if/when we find a way to recover the lost data.

Also, the MacBreak Weekly podcast, Episode #100, [iTunes link, about 28:30 in] mentions that updating and restoring apps via iTunes may avoid a variety of issues that occur when using the App Store in the iPhone.

We’re very pleased to announce that the latest version of our iPhone app, Zenbe Lists v1.2, just hit the App Store.

This is the first version where we’ve had a chance to start incorporating the great feedback you folks have given us.  Feature-wise things aren’t too different, although we’ve added a couple of little things. Most of the work has been in “housekeeping”. We’ve been cleaning up some of the more insidious bugs, and tweaking the usability of things a bit for the better. Here are the blow-by-blow details …

Bugs that were fixed:

• Last item in long lists not being visible
• Passwords with ‘&’ or ‘+’ not recognized
• Done/cancel buttons sometimes fail to appear when editing item description
• Item summary cleared when date picker opened.
• Crash when current list removed during sync
• New items sometimes not positioned properly
• Various UI bugs in landscape mode
• Allow lists with empty names

New Features:

• List of lists can now be reordered
• info button for more information about the app
• Settings: Move checked items (on by default)
• Settings: Sync on launch (on by default)
• Settings: Enable landscape mode (on by default)
• Settings: Display build info
• Settings: a couple of “advanced” options I don’t want you messing with.
• Improved network awareness
• Display version info in splash panel and settings

Enjoy!

FYI -

Zenbe.com is back up and running normally. The system upgrade was completed. We rolled out a bunch of nice little feature enhancements that I’ll describe in detail in my next blog post which should be up within a day (it’s going to take me a little while to get all the screenshots together).

If you find any bugs or issues, please report them on http://forums.zenbe.com or send an email to feedback at zenbe dot com.

We’ll be doing a planned system upgrade this weekend on Sunday morning between 8am and 10am Eastern Time.

The Zenbe.com site may be unavailable during this time. Zenbe Lists should be unaffected.

I’ll post back here when we are online again.

We’ll be rolling out a few feature enhancements, defect fixes and some infrastructure changes required to support future projects. I’ll post more details here after the upgrade is complete.

Good news, Apple has approved v1.1 of our iPhone Lists app!  Before you get too excited, know that we submitted this version to the App Store on July 7th, before we had any of the outstanding feedback everyone has been sending in.  Sadly, this means that none of the bugs that have been driving you (and us) crazy have  been fixed yet.  Instead, it’s just a minor update for…

• Simpler “share” emails - we’ve simplified the verbage contained in emails that are sent when sharing a list with someone.
• Now using the correct server name for share links.
• Various UI tweaks and improvements - nothing too notable.

We’re already looking forward to getting v1.2 out there for you to play with.  Look forward to a batch of new features and fixes for bugs, including the now infamous “can’t see the last item” bug.

In other news, we’ve learned the hard way that you need to be really careful what you put in your Terms of Service.  The most popular (and therefore, first) comment on our App Store page is the one that provides an out-of-context (and now obsolete) quote from the section on, “Your Intellectual Property Rights”.  I’ll be the first to admit it sounds pretty scary, but it was intended simply to make sure we had the right to copy and publish your content in ways necessary to do all the stuff you’ve come to expect of Zenbe: backup your data, make content you share available to the people you want to share it with… that sort of thing.  Regardless, we’ve updated our Terms to be less threatening, so hopefully there’s longer any cause for concern.

While it’s unfortunate that this is the first comment users see for our app, I can’t tell you how pleased we are at all the nice things everyone has had to say about us.  This has been a great first week for us and the praise and feedback has been a real moreal booster.  So, “Thanks!”