neato! has come a good way from its initial release which only received links and text from a bookmarklet in your web browser. Later, phone to computer was added, bringing with it a native Chrome browser extension and a new neato! page for you to receive content.
v1.0 will be bringing a bunch of newness. But first…
New UI
In this shot, you get to see the new theme and color scheme. I’m a firm believer that even if your app only does one thing it should look good doing it, and neato! is no exception. You can see that the important information of knowing your personal code is right up front and easier to see. Below it is your new friend code, which I’ll explain in detail later.
The left button is the “Add a Friend” button, which will also be explained later. The middle button is the “Send To” button to send stuff to your computer and other neato! users (more on that later). The third button is the “Reload Dashboard” button for those times you’ve accidentally swiped the dashboard away, but the card is still open.
Below the buttons is the familiar History list of the last 10 messages sent to your phone in the last 24-72 hours.
Scrolling down the scene, you can see the rest of the history list, with a button to refresh your history to make sure you’re seeing the latest list of stuff sent to your phone.
Below the history list is a new “Preferences” button. All of the old settings have been moved to a new Preferences scene (Metric stats sending, auto-close card, IPK handler, etc). You can also access the Preferences from the application menu.
Overall, this streamlines and cleans up the app. It’s not as cumbersome to navigate. When the app first launched and it only did one thing, it made sense that it all fit on one card. Now with different directions to send data and more preferences, the options needed to split off to their own scene.
Phone to Phone
The biggest thing besides the new UI that you’ll see in 1.0 is that you’ll now be able to send stuff from one phone to another (provided they’re both running neato!). Before you can just start sending stuff to a phone, you’ll have to add the other person as a friend. You’ll tap the Add Friend button and then type in the user’s Friend Code in the dialog box. After doing that, they’ll get a pop-up alert asking if they will approve your request.
What’s great is, as long as the neato! dashboard notification is running, it doesn’t matter what the active app is — you’ll get your notification anyway. Tapping approve will add the other person to your contacts and send them an alert that you’ve approved their request, which will then add you to their contacts as well.
Once you’ve become friends with someone, you can tap the “Send To” button, which will pop-open the usual Send scene, but with a new option (I haven’t updated this scene to the new theme yet):
You now have a “Send To” field. This will let you select whether you want to send the info to your computer, or to a friend.
Note that these screenshots were taken days apart, so just pretend “Geoff” says “Geoffrey”.
Speaking of names, when your Friend Code is first generated, you’ll be asked for your name. This will be sent to your friend for requests and for their contacts list. You can change your name in the Preferences.
If the stuff you’re sending is just plain text, your friend will have it pop-up in the usual Text View scene automatically. However, for security reasons, if you send your friend a URL, they will get a pop-up alert asking them what they’d like to do.
This way, you won’t be interrupted, and, you won’t have any nefarious or inappropriate websites popping up on your phone.
You’ll be able to remove friends from your contacts, which will revoke their ability to send you anything.
What’s Next?
In addition to all that, v1.0 will bring a new dashboard notification. Instead of how it is now where you just tap it to bring up the main card, there will now be three buttons. The first will let you open up the main card as usual. The next will allow you to open the preferences directly. The third will be a dedicated “Send To” button so you don’t have to launch the main card just to tap “Send To”.
Also, in addition to just sending text and URLs to other phones, you’ll be able to send an individual contact to another neato! user. This is great for those times when a friend needs a mutual friend’s phone number. You could look it up, remember the number, send it to your friend, then they could copy/paste it into a new contact. OR, you could tap the eventual Send Contact button, pick the mutual friend, send it to your neato! friend, then with one tap, they can have that contact saved on their phone. That’s the plan, anyway. Haven’t started coding it yet.
And yes, the Chrome extension will be updated.
I still plan on a Firefox and a Safari plugin. It’ll come by the end of the year most likely.
So, there you have it! A run down of what’s to come in the next neato!, which should be finished this weekend(ish).
UPDATE: I’m trying to keep the app “un-social.” That is, neato! is meant for direct communication of information (not conversations) between two people that know and trust each other. I don’t plan to allow you to search for or discover users. Friend capabilities will not stretch further than outlined above.
We’ve all got a billion social networks and usernames and passwords to worry about already!
Think of neato! phone-to-phone as “enhanced SMS”.
