Soshiku Blog

Soshiku 1.0.1 for webOS now available

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:34:00 -0800

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.

Soshiku Pro - not bad for an 18-year old

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:24:04 -0800

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

Introducing Soshiku Pro!

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 10:25:00 -0800

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.

Soshiku now available for the Palm Pre

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 10:47:31 -0800

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.

Soshiku for webOS source now on Github

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 03:33:00 -0800

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.

The Future

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 12:55:32 -0800

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!

Excellent walk-through of Soshiku by eduTecher!

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 11:36:15 -0800

Excellent walk-through of Soshiku by eduTecher!

Add assignments to courses with long names more easily via SMS

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 11:24:18 -0800

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.

New redesign, new business name

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 11:42:00 -0700

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!

Preview the new Soshiku redesign

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:21:00 -0700

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!

AcceptEdge

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 09:05:29 -0700

AcceptEdge:

AcceptEdge is a cool new startup that launched today to help find the right college for you.

Updated feature: Get email updates for discussions

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 12:55:00 -0700

We’ve just made it easier to receive email updates for discussions that are important to you. If you want to receive an email whenever someone adds a message to a discussion, just go to that assignment’s page and check “Get email updates” under the discussion section.

People have been able to get email updates for quite some time now, but it only worked if someone left a message on your assignment. For example, if a partner left a message on your assignment, you would get an email letting you know. But if you replied to that message on the same assignment, your partner(s) wouldn’t get any email. Now they can!

The email problem has been fixed. We’re sorry for the inconvenience!

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 18:05:54 -0700

The email problem has been fixed. We’re sorry for the inconvenience!

We have just discovered a problem in which no email is being sent at all. We are working to fix this...

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 16:45:21 -0700

We have just discovered a problem in which no email is being sent at all. We are working to fix this ASAP.

Scheduled Downtime

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 20:39:00 -0700

There will be scheduled downtime tonight at 12 AM PST. The downtime should only last a few minutes.

Ding. Time's up!

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 16:40:43 -0700

We have now completely switched over to our new SMS service. Thanks everyone for being such good sports about updating your info!

Reminder: you have two weeks left to update your phone number on Soshiku before it’s gone...

Sat, 30 May 2009 13:04:07 -0700

Reminder: you have two weeks left to update your phone number on Soshiku before it’s gone forevaaaaah! Please refer to this post for more info.

Important notice to everyone who uses their phone with Soshiku

Wed, 13 May 2009 18:37:00 -0700

We have a very important notice to everyone who uses their phone with Soshiku. Starting immediately, we are changing the way Soshiku handles text messaging. If you have already verified your phone number, please go to your profile and verify it again.

You have 30 days to change over (until June 12, 2009). If you have any assignments right now that will notify you via SMS, you’ll still get the notification; but in 30 days we can’t send you notifications unless you verify your number again.

What are the changes?

You now need to send text messages to 41411 instead of add@soshiku.com.
You now need to start your messages with the keyword “soshiku” for it to work. Example: “soshiku essay in english due in 3 days”
Any assignments, tasks, etc. you add from your phone will be added immediately instead of up to five minutes (which is the way it is now).
You will get confirmation messages saying that your assignment, etc. has been added. If it couldn’t add it, you will get a message explaining why.
We don’t need to know your carrier anymore. We automatically work with all major US carriers, including Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint, Virgin, Cricket, T-Mobile, Alltel, and more.

This is a huge and important update, no doubt for the better. It is way more reliable, and it is more robust in terms of parsing your text messages.

Again, please go to your profile and verify your number again (it’s very quick) to take advantage of these new changes. People who just use email are unaffected and still use add@soshiku.com. Thank you!

Awesome article about Soshiku on The How-To Geek

Wed, 13 May 2009 10:35:37 -0700

Awesome article about Soshiku on The How-To Geek

You don't have to be a student to utilize Soshiku...

Tue, 05 May 2009 19:49:54 -0700

You don't have to be a student to utilize Soshiku...