We’re very excited that the Wall Street Journal mentioned us in their Technology section in a great article about using a stylus with the iPad. They called our app “stellar” and “easy-to-use”.
As always, let us know if you have any feedback at contact@tabularasalabs.com.
We are happy to announce that Jot! 2.6 is now live in the App Store. Many of you have asked for more font sizes and they’re finally here! Whenever editing text you’ll see a new popover menu allowing you to choose from 4 different font sizes.
Many of you have also asked for folders as a way to organize your Jots and that is also here! You can create or edit as many folders as you wish. Within a folder change to edit mode where you can select multiple Jots to move them to another folder.
We’ve also learned that many people use Jot! with an external display when projecting to an audience. We’ve supported external displays since the iPad1 with a custom view on the second display that is slightly different from the main view (and it lags a bit behind). Now that the iPad2 includes video mirroring, we wanted to make that an option as well. In the settings app choose Native Mirroring to use the new iPad2 mirroring when projecting to an external display.
Every feature in this release came from one or more customers who emailed in to suggest it. Thank you! We appreciate your emails with questions and comments.
We hope you enjoy these new features. Please continue to let us know how we’re doing and what you’d like to see in the future, either here in the comments or directly at contact@tabularasalabs.com.
We often use Jot! when thinking about user interfaces for new features and new apps. We were recently thinking about building a new app and so naturally we used Jot! to start sketching out screens. In Jot! 2.5 we introduced backgrounds, which allow you to take a photo or choose a saved photo and use it as a background. In our case, we thought it would be great to have an iPad as a background to sketch on. So, we created iPad images in the various orientations and now we add these as backgrounds whenever we want to sketch out an iPad app UI.
If this is useful to you too, feel free to grab the images below to use as backgrounds. Click or tap on the image to get the full-size version. If you’re on an iPad you can tap & hold on the full-size image and “Save Image”. Then import them from Jot! using the camera icon and selecting “Select from Photos” where you can find the images in your Camera Roll.
Please let us know if you have any questions or feedback: contact@tabularasalabs.com.
In Jot! 2.5 we introduced background images. You can hit the photo button to either take a picture or select one from your photos to use as a background image.
Then Jot! away on top of the picture.
In Jot! 2.5.1 we now support PDF documents as well. If you have a PDF in another app with an export option, you can “Open in Jot!”.
Jot! will use the first page of the PDF and open the background editor where you can resize, rotate and position the page on the Jot! canvas.
Then jot away on the PDF. We hope you find this useful. Please continue to send us feedback. Leave a comment or email us at contact@tabularasalabs.com.
I certainly have. There are lots of reasons for bad meetings. I think some people think their job is to attend meetings so they schedule them just to justify their value or feel like they’re doing something productive. The worst kind of meeting in my opinion is a status meeting. You know, where 30 people sit around being bored for 58 minutes while the other 29 people go through their status. Then you spend 2 minutes talking about what you’re working on (or could have been working on for 58 more minutes if you weren’t sitting in this status meeting) to 1 manager who is noting it all down. Ugh, those are the worst (except don’t tell the manager that).
Status meetings usually mean time for me to jot doodles. This got me wondering how much money was being spent on salaries for everyone to sit around doing nothing.
(one of my Jot! doodles of Batman)
As a fun little experiment I decided to build an app for that. It’s called Simple Meeting Cost and it’s available in the app store (for Free!). Just configure your employee types and salaries, tally them up and start the meeting.
Whether this number is truly significant or not probably depends on your company and your employees’ salaries. One thing I found is that if you have too few people or too low of salaries, the clock ticks depressingly slowly.
So, give it a try, have fun with it, and please let me know what you think. Maybe it will give you a good excuse to get out of some bad meetings and do something productive instead.
We’ve just submitted Jot! version 2.5 to the AppStore, and we’re very excited about this new release.
2.5 has the following major enhancements:
We’ve made a change to how we charge for Live Sharing – now, everyone gets up to 5 free sessions every month, and you can purchase 5 additional sessions for only $0.99. No more monthly subscription. We hope this makes Live Sharing more compelling to use.
We are also updating Jot! for the iPhone: adding Live Sharing, backgrounds, expanded color selection and line width.
To celebrate, we have put Jot! on sale – it’s $0.99 until 2.5 is approved by Apple.
Enjoy!
Have you ever been on the phone and wanted to sketch out an idea on a napkin or whiteboard, but the caller on the other end is unable to see what you’re drawing?
Introducing Live Sharing
Live Sharing is our upcoming service that will allow you to jot on your iPad and share your whiteboard with another Jot! user over the internet, wherever they are physically located. It’s the virtual shared whiteboard that we envisioned when we first set out to build Jot!
We spent most of our time in 2010 building out the core drawing features of Jot!, which we think offers the best whiteboarding experience on the iPad. We still have more drawing features that we plan to add soon, but we wanted to launch Live Sharing first. Apple just announced subscription in-app purchases and we’ll use those to allow customers to sign up for the Live Sharing service.
We need your help to check out this service before we make it live. We’re looking for up to 30 people to try out our new service.
If you’re interested, please email us at contact@tabularasalabs.com. Because this is a service that requires at least 2 to tango, we would prefer pairs (or better yet, groups) of iPad Jot! users. For your help, we’ll provide you and your friends with a free 1-year subscription to Live Sharing.
Thanks for your support as we continue on our quest to change how we record and share our visions.
Last week Geoff and I had the pleasure of meeting Rick from Arter Mobilize at MacWorld and seeing how he and his team use Jot! for iPad in their unique process to win customers and scope projects.
Arter Mobilize designs and develops custom mobile apps for businesses and they’ve developed an amazing process for keeping their projects in scope and on budget. Rick is a self-described “professional doodler” and when he first meets with a prospective customer, he explains that they extensively use mockups before actually developing anything in order to to flesh out the app that they will build.
Once a customer has signed on, Rick and his team hold a 2-3 hour kick-off concept design session where they use Jot! to mockup the screens to be built. They start with a fresh .jot file that they’ve saved with 2 iPhone templates as a “stencil” and immediately start drawing the screens as they talk to the customer.
When they want to move on to a new screen or try a new concept, they copy and paste the whole clean iPhone stencil first so that they always have a clean iPhone stencil to work with for the next screen mockup. They use the duplicate and copy/paste features to move things between mockups.
Rick has come up with a way of pricing development based on purchasing credits. Credits are used to purchase UI elements and these are applied during the design phase, which gives his clients an immediate way to determine the scope and price of the app they’re building. More UI widgets = more credits. I think this is ingenious. As a developer, I know that UI complexity doesn’t necessarily equate one to one with development effort, but it’s a great way to give clients something tangible that they can equate to the cost of their app. Even if it’s not 100% correct, it must be invaluable to give clients a transparent and understandable way to realize the cost of their apps as they’re designing them.
In the end, they flesh out all the screens and assign credits to the UI elements so the client knows the cost of the project up front. This gives the client complete ownership, control and customization of the development process to purchase what is needed.
They take their Jots back to the shop and create full-fledged mockups using a mockup tool (they use Balsamiq). They can then produce a formal concept report to their customers that fully describes and illustrates all of the screens to be included in the app.
Rick is a visual thinker and exactly the kind of person we had in mind when we created Jot! and we were privileged to meet him. You can work with Rick on your next mobile app by emailing him at rick@artermobilize.com.
We would love to meet you too and hear how you’re using Jot!. If you’d like to be featured here on this blog, email us at contact@tabularasalabs.com.
Email us your feedback or join the conversation in the comments.
Maggie over at AppsforIpads just wrote a review on Jot (thanks, Maggie!). In the review, she also created just as an example one of the most vibrant whiteboard sketches that we’ve seen. We designed Jot to be a way to get ideas out of your head and on a whiteboard as quickly as possible, but Maggie shows that even those quick ideas can still have quite a bit of visual oomph.
(Definitely prettier than the sketches we create)
It’s been a while since I’ve blogged and I apologize for the long silence. I’ve been enjoying the holidays with friends and family. I hope you had a great holiday as well and I wish you the best in the new year. The holidays are a time to reflect and to look forward and I’d like to share my perspectives on the past, present, and future of Jot!
2010 was an amazing year for us by all accounts. We launched Jot! in June, we were featured under New & Notable in the App Store in November, and we grew to over 50,000 downloads across all versions. We started with Jot! for iPad and added Jot! for iPhone as well as a plethora of features suggested by you. There have been ups and downs, but we easily doubled our expectations for the year. We’d like to thank each and every one of you who have tried our app. We especially appreciate all of you who have written to us with your feedback and input. This has truly helped us to create Jot! as it exists today.
We’re currently working hard on the next iteration of Jot! and we are very excited for the next release. We’re adding more collaboration and sharing features and several drawing features in the next few releases. We believe that Jot! will replace the whiteboard in your collaborative working environment and we can’t wait to unveil our next rounds of features.
As we look to the future in 2011, we hope to bring our app to near completeness. We won’t sacrifice on our principles and we’ll keep Jot simple and easy to use, while adding critical new features. We believe Jot! will be the best collaborative whiteboarding app out there this year.
Again, thanks to all of you for trying our app, emailing us with your feedback and suggestions, and for following along as we continue to build the future of computing.
May 2011 bring you fortune and happiness and we’ll deliver the best that we have to offer in Jot!
Happy New Year!
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