March 10, 2010
Soshiku 1.0.1 for webOS now available

Soshiku 1.0.1 is now available in the App Catalog for the Palm Pre and Pixi. This update includes:

  • A “sign up” button on the login screen for new users
  • The enter key submits the login form
  • When viewing an assignment, only incomplete tasks are fetched instead of all tasks (speeds up loading time)
  • When viewing an assignment, tasks that are assigned to other people now have the check box disabled and text under the task that says “Assigned to [person’s name]”
  • Profile pictures on discussions and on “My Profile” are asthetically improved
  • A specific reason is given when an error occurs instead of a generic error message (if applicable).

These changes have also been pushed to our Github repo.

7:34pm  |   URL: http://blog.soshiku.com/post/440361879/soshiku-1-0-1-for-webos-now-available
March 10, 2010
Soshiku Pro - not bad for an 18-year old

The awesome Christopher Dawson over at ZDNet Education, who has written about Soshiku back in 2008, has just shared his thoughts about Soshiku Pro. He writes:

While this is all well and good, many of the students who could benefit the most often can’t afford the $5/month. If Soshiku were to explore licensing deals with schools, however, then districts could provide the service to their students for free and enable chat and collaboration among classmates.

After expressing my glee and thanking him about his article, I posted my response in the comments:

I completely agree with your points about students and pricing (which I hope the low price helps with, cheap enough for most students yet still supports my expenses). I would love for Soshiku to team up with schools and become the norm in progressive classrooms. I dream that will be our “next big move” (I wrote about that briefly in a blog post titled “The Future”: http://is.gd/a6vZ2). I just need to figure out how to execute something that big. ;)

You can read the full article at http://education.zdnet.com/?p=3709

11:24am  |   URL: http://blog.soshiku.com/post/439436467/soshiku-pro-not-bad-for-an-18-year-old
March 2, 2010
Introducing Soshiku Pro!

We’re excited to announce that we’ve just launched Soshiku Pro. Soshiku Pro is a new subscription-based paid plan which comes with some really cool new features. Here’s what you get if you upgrade to Soshiku Pro:

Unlimited Everything — With the free plan, you can only have 10 courses, 20 assignments, 20 tasks, and 10 attachments.* Once you run out of space, you have to delete them in order to make room for more. But as a Pro user you don’t have to worry about how much of anything you add. Keep unlimited amounts of everything for as long as you want.

* per assignment

Realtime Discussions — With the Pro plan, you and your partners are able to chat in realtime; your partners’ messages show up instantly as soon as they hit “Send”. No hitting refresh! You can pop out the discussion window so you can browse other parts of Soshiku, or even other websites while chatting.

Recurring Assignments — Now you can add assignments that are due every week! No need changing the due date every week; on your specified week-day, Soshiku automatically updates the due date to a week ahead for you.

Quick-Add — Have a lot of assignments to add and don’t want to wait for pages to load each time you add them? Just invoke the Quick-Add window, which lets you add assignments the same way you add them via email or text messaging which uses natural language parsing.

Fast Complete — When you need to mark an assignment as completed, you need to click several links and wait for pages to load. Not with Pro! You don’t have to go to each assignment’s page; just check the box next to the assignment’s name. Your assignment is instantly marked as completed and there’s no page to load.

And No Ads!

Get a 7 day free trial when you upgrade today! Soshiku Pro is only $5 per month. Compare the Basic and the Pro plans at http://soshiku.com/plans.

10:25am  |   URL: http://blog.soshiku.com/post/422379116/introducing-soshiku-pro
February 10, 2010
Soshiku now available for the Palm Pre

Soshiku is now available for the Palm Pre & Palm Pixi! Here are the features:

  • Manage your courses and assignments
  • Edit notes
  • Add and check off tasks
  • View attachments
  • Share messages with your partners
  • Receive email and/or SMS notifications

The Soshiku app syncs with your account on Soshiku.com. Find it for just $1.99 on the App Catalog.

10:47am  |   URL: http://blog.soshiku.com/post/382190684/soshiku-now-available-for-the-palm-pre
February 6, 2010
Soshiku for webOS source now on Github

Hey webOS developers! Want to help us test out the Soshiku app on a device and send feedback before we submit it to the app catalog? The source is now on Github.

3:33am  |   URL: http://blog.soshiku.com/post/373988897/soshiku-for-webos-source-now-on-github
February 1, 2010
The Future

Since there hasn’t been any exciting or big news in these past months, it might seem like the development of Soshiku has been stagnant. Today I decided that Nonatomic should be more transparent, so I’d like to share with all of you what’s happening, why there hasn’t been significant updates, and the roadmap for everything I want to do in the future.

These are listed in the order of what I want to do first to last.

  • Launch Soshiku Pro — These past few months I’ve been paying attention to our most requested features and have been working on Soshiku Pro, a $5/mo plan that includes most of these features. Soshiku Pro is ready to go, but the reason it hasn’t been launched is because I’m still waiting to obtain a merchant account, which is a special type of bank account that is needed to accept payments from credit cards. I won’t go into much detail, but I’ve had a very hard time getting a merchant account since I just turned eighteen and have no credit. Ideally, I’d like to launch Soshiku Pro in February.
  • Release a Palm Pre and Pixi app — I’m very enthusiastic about Palm’s new platform, webOS, as well as developing for it. I’ve been working on the Soshiku app for a little while and I really like what it has become so far. The reason a webOS app is being released before an iPhone app is because the webOS SDK uses technologies that are familiar to me, while the iPhone SDK requires time to learn and understand. The app is going to be open source and be posted on Github so other people can contribute. Expect the app to be released sometime in February.
  • Release an iPhone app — I’ve been slowly learning the iPhone SDK for a while, but after the Palm Pre app is released, I’m going to work on the iPhone app full force. The iPhone app is also going to be open source.
  • Release an API — Developers, developers, developers! Those two Soshiku apps need something to interface with the Soshiku website, so I created an API for internal-use for now. Though after the apps have been released, I’m going to work on and refine the API and release it to the public for everyone who wishes to develop with it. I also plan on creating a page on Soshiku that showcases third-party apps. I can’t wait to see what developers will come up with!
  • Soshiku for schools? — I’m mulling over the idea of Soshiku for schools and teachers. Imagine being able to see the assignments and exams your teachers have added, even keep up to date on school news. Obviously this will be a big addition, and I hope that Soshiku can someday change education for the better.

So this is everything I have in mind for Soshiku in the future. I feel like 2010 is going to be a great year not only for Nonatomic, but for all of you!

12:55pm  |   URL: http://blog.soshiku.com/post/365591835/the-future
January 19, 2010

Excellent walk-through of Soshiku by eduTecher!

11:36am  |   URL: http://blog.soshiku.com/post/343029376/excellent-walk-through-of-soshiku-by-edutecher
January 19, 2010
Add assignments to courses with long names more easily via SMS

An anonymous user on our UserVoice site came up with a good point:

It’s great that I have a course called “Historical Challenges of the Roman Catholic Church”. But it’s a total pain in the rear to text!

Well I’m glad to announce that we’ve made it easier to add assignments to courses with lengthy names when using SMS. Now, Soshiku first looks for courses with the exact name and if none are found, courses are searched with partial matches of your text.

So if you have a course with the name above, you can just say “hist”, “chal”, or even “roman c”. (With the final SMS being “essay in roman c due today”, for example).

And like always, if no courses are found, a new one is automatically created for you.

11:24am  |   URL: http://blog.soshiku.com/post/343017454/add-assignments-to-courses-with-long-names-more-easily
October 15, 2009
New redesign, new business name

Soshiku’s company has a new name!

We’ve changed our name from Definitialize to Nonatomic. Actually, Definitialize was not an official business since it has never been registered as one. The name was a placeholder until we could think of a better name for our official business. We didn’t like Definitialize too much, so we went with Nonatomic. And good news: Nonatomic has been registered as an LLC in Washington state! This is a big step forward so we can execute our big plans in the near future. ;)

Now, about the redesign. It’s been a little over a year after the launch of Soshiku in September 2008 and we figured Soshiku was in store for a slicker, newer interface. Not only have we updated the look of Soshiku, we’ve also made some changes that we think enhances the user experience.

Smaller logo and header

Gives you more room to focus on your content.

New “Jump to” bar

Now on every page is a “jump to” bar that lists all of your courses. This lets you instantly go to any of your courses from any page. Speaking of courses…

New course layout

We thought the courses page were a bit lacking, so we’ve updated them to look just like your home page with the calendar and all, except only showing the assignments and tasks belonging to that course.

New overall look

Out with the boring, light blue look and in with the more sleek, softer look of the menu bars. We hope you continue to enjoy using Soshiku!

11:42am  |   URL: http://blog.soshiku.com/post/213944364/new-redesign-new-business-name
October 13, 2009
Preview the new Soshiku redesign

We’ve been hard at work with giving Soshiku a much-needed facelift. We are planning on making it live sometime this week, while in the meantime making sure there are no bugs we have to squash. If you’d like to preview the new design right now, just visit http://s.soshiku.com. You can log in and use it just like the regular Soshiku site, except be aware that the profile pictures do not work (this will be fixed when it goes live). Have fun and let us know what you think!

1:21pm  |   URL: http://blog.soshiku.com/post/212205958/preview-the-new-soshiku-redesign