June 19, 2010
The Soshiku app is now 50% off until July 23rd

The Soshiku app for the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi is now 50% off - just $1 - in the App Catalog until July 9th 23rd. But don’t thank us, thank Palm! They’ve made all the apps in the App Catalog half-off (while reimbursing the developers for full price) so now would be your chance to get all the apps you want while supporting the developers for their hard work. Have a great weekend!

Edit: Palm just extended the sale to July 23rd!

June 10, 2010
Soshiku has a new toll-free support number

Hey there, we just redesigned our contact page. Take a look! And do you know what else is new? We have a new support phone number! If you have any kind of questions or concerns, just call us at 1 (877) 395-1151 to speak to a live person (me, of course ;)) or you can leave a message and I’ll gladly call you back.

Customer support is very important to me, as I want all of you to be happy with everything Soshiku has to offer.

A big shout out to Twilio, the service I used to setup the help line in about a half of an hour! Be sure to check them out if you have an interest in cloud-based telephony.

You can always email us at support@soshiku.com as well. And we love mail! Feel free to send us mail to 2606 2nd Ave, Suite 103 Seattle, WA 98121.

May 12, 2010
Top 25 Free & Freemium Web Apps for College Students

Thanks to Nurse E.D.U. for including Soshiku as number 7!

May 8, 2010
Soshiku has been featured on Chompie!

A big thank you to the people at Chompie.com for featuring Soshiku on their site. In their words, “Chompie actively updates a collection of the most useful new websites, applications, products and services on the internet.” Glad to know Soshiku fits their criteria!

Soshiku on Chompie

May 7, 2010
Are you a Pro user? Take our survey!

If you are a Pro user, you’ll see a message (shown above) with a link to a survey the next time you log in. This survey will help us know what you like and dislike about Pro, and what we can do to make it even more useful to you. Thanks so much!

May 5, 2010
Feature update: discussion email notifications

Last year in August we added a new feature that let you receive email updates when new messages were posted on certain assignments, but you had to click a checkbox for every assignment you wanted updates for.

With the launch of our newest feature (sharing assignments with partners), we’ve decided to merge the two features and make it more automated. Instead of having to explicitly mark which discussions you want updates for, you will now automatically receive email updates (given you have your email set in your profile) on assignments that have been shared with you.

For example, if Mark shares an assignment with Katie, they will both receive email updates when someone adds a message to the discussion (Mark too, since he’s the owner of the assignment).

We decided to do this not only because it “slims down” Soshiku and makes it easier to use without compromise of features, but also because you most likely would want to receive important email updates for an assignment that has been shared with you.

A help article has been added regarding this change.

April 23, 2010
How to get SMS notifications if you’re not in the United States

I get plenty of emails from people in other countries asking if there is some way they can use the text message notification feature of Soshiku. I frown every time I have to say “sorry, you’re out of luck” since the text messaging service we use does not support carriers outside of the US at this time.

There is a workaround, however, but only if you don’t plan on having notifications sent to your email. You also have to be with a carrier that supports email gateways. An email gateway is an email address that, when an email is sent it, acts like a text message and it gets immediately sent to your phone. For example, if you use Bell in Canada, your email gateway address would be [your number]@txt.bell.ca. If I send an email to that address saying “hi! :)”, it would get sent to your phone as a text message.

To see if your carrier supports email gateways, go to this page and look up your carrier name. Replace the “n” with your number. When you have your address, go to your profile in Soshiku and type the address in the email field, like so:

Now whenever you add an assignment, just check the “email notification” box and the notifications will get sent to your phone as a text message!

April 22, 2010
Soshiku 1.1 for Palm Pre and Pixi now available (and in other countries, too!)

Soshiku 1.1 for the Palm Pre and the Palm Pixi has just been approved in the App Catalog! This update includes:

  • The ability to create recurring assignments (available to Pro users)
  • Amount of incomplete tasks are shown next to assignment names
  • A check mark is shown next to completed assignments
  • A recurring symbol is shown next to recurring assignments
  • The ability to edit and delete tasks (tap task to edit, swipe task off the screen to delete)
  • Redesigned assignment page (shown above)
  • Redesigned create and edit assignment forms
  • Redesigned profile page
  • Minor tweaks and bug fixes

The Soshiku app is also now available for Palm owners in Canada ($1.99 CAD), Ireland (€1.92), and the United Kingdom (£1.44)!

    These changes have been pushed to our Github repo. If you’re a webOS SDK developer (or a JavaScript developer wanting to learn the SDK), we’d love you to peruse over the code and change/add/delete anything you want. Fork to your heart’s content!

    April 19, 2010
    New in Soshiku: Share Assignments with Partners (for realz this time)

    We just released a big new feature: sharing assignments with partners. Yes, your partners have always been able to access, add tasks, and attach files to your assignments, but how would they get to them? Either you had to send them the link or they had to go to your profile and look in your activity feed for the assignment.

    Not anymore! Now, whenever you add or edit an assignment, you have the option to share it with selected partners.

    Then, when your partner(s) log in to their Soshiku account, your assignment is shown on their homepage as if it were their own. Here’s an example:

    You can tell “Project” is not really this user’s assignment, since it says “from Patrick” (the user who created the assignment) next to it.

    It is now easier than ever to access and collaborate on your partners’ assignments!

    Where are the privacy options?

    As you could probably tell, the privacy options have been replaced by the sharing options. We believe the privacy options were slightly flawed, since the very nature of assignments aren’t really meant to be “public” or “private.” Yes, public assignments were accessible by anyone, but no one (except partners) could add tasks or attach files, and they would have to have the specific ID of the assignment to get to it anyway. Also, we don’t think any homework will be so top secret that they should be marked as private. In the end, we believed the privacy options might have been confusing to most people. We like to think of this as a big upgrade to the privacy options.

    We have also created a new help article for this feature.

    April 1, 2010
    Add recurring assignments via SMS, email, and quick-add

    Pro users are now able to add recurring assignments via text messaging, email, and quick-add. We’ve added both an “every” and “recurring” keyword to make the assignment recurring, however they vary slightly. For example,

    Journal entry in english due every tuesday

    Sets the due date to next tuesday and makes it recur. But if you have a recurring assignment which is due at a later date, add “recurring” to the end of your query, like so:

    Journal entry in english due apr 18 recurring

    The help page has been updated to include this information.