

Xobni takes in funding, exits beta - jmorin007
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10203613-2.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=Webware

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cake
I don't really get what's so great about Xobni. I use it at work, but except
for the contact search and attachment features it isn't very useful.

It's just as good as many addons developped without many resources for
Thunderbird, not worth a 10M funding in my opinion.

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adamsmith
Thanks for the feedback. What other features might you suggest?

Users have found people search to be very useful, as you mentioned. If you're
not on the latest version then you're also missing LinkedIn and Facebook,
including pulling photos from either of those services. We'll be auto-updating
old users to this version over the next couple of weeks. (If you want to get
on the latest version right away, just download the installer and it will
detect the existing installation and just update you instead of a fresh
reinstallation.)

EDIT: For the curious, I thought I'd take the opportunity to give more
background on what we've been up to from the engineering side.

Some might notice that the Linkedin / Facebook / Hoovers / Yahoo Mail / Skype
integrations I mentioned above were launched on 19-nov-08. So what have we
been up to over the past four months? Well, other than consuming ungodly
amounts of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, it's been two things -- performance and
stability.

Outlook is a hostile environment for a product like Xobni. It has several
different APIs, each with different quirky interfaces, side effects, and
threading models.

There's no way around having complex APIs for Outlook. They expose
programmatic access to the most complicated email application ever built. Just
like Excel and MS Word, it's really hard to underestimate how feature rich
this program is.

(As evidence, I submit to you: <http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=968009> .
Scroll down to the section titled "Individual bugs that are fixed." Wow!)

Let's run through one example of how complex these APIs are.

This one's my favorite!

Imagine you have an ID for a message, and you want to open a draft reply to
that message so the user can type in their reply and press send. It should
work just as if the user hit the Reply button, or pressed Ctrl-R.

Easy right? That's what I thought, too...

The first API I tried seemed to work, but when the user pressed send the icon
for the original message didn't change to the purple arrow to indicate that it
had been replied to.

I found a second approach that didn't have that bug, except it turned out to
save the draft of the message (if it is being composed for more than five
minutes, or the user explicitly presses Save) STRAIGHT INTO THE INBOX, instead
of the Drafts folder. It looked funky -- no sender name, no sent time, etc.
Ouch.

I found another API to use. It set the right icon -- good -- and seemed to
save drafts into the Drafts folder. Double check. Unfortunately as soon as the
user started typing it showed up in Times New Roman, 12pt, as the default
font. Doh.

One of these three approaches also wouldn't pre-populate the user's email
signature.

Fourth API was a charm!

I could really talk about the complexity of Outlook and the scenarios we've
ran into for days. Below are some example bugs I pulled from the Outlook
feb-09 cumulative update document linked above. Each of these can hide weird
race conditions, thread starvations, or just plain old corner cases that only
show up when the moon is in the seventh house.

    
    
      * Inefficient processing occurs in a loop during intermittent network connectivity.
      * If the store providers are disconnected early, the Outlook.exe process becomes unresponsive for a very long time.
      * When you right-click an item, the whole item is loaded into memory more frequently than necessary.
      * Unnecessary disk reads are performed for every time that a custom form icon is rendered.
    

One of the fun side effects of doing this work is that you end up seeing all
of the bugs you've come across in OTHER Outlook addins. I was using
TechSmith's Snag-It the other day and smiled when I saw a draft it had opened
save to the Inbox before I pressed send. They were using API #2. :-)

Not to mention that all of these other addins are accessing the same APIs,
sometimes with "interesting interactions."

And on top of these challenges there are several users who have giant
mailboxes. We've seen users with almost a million emails loaded into Outlook
at the same time.

Usually these are the people with 12" laptops, 2 GBs of RAM, and 5400 RPM hard
drives.

When this happens, all bets are off. Outlook takes a long time to load their
twelve PST files. If an addin is trying to load its stuff at the same time you
get heavy disk contention and "sequential" read throughputs plummet to 1 MB
per second. And god help you if Outlook needs to "repair" any of these PSTs.

..the list goes on and on. We've been on a four month odyssey.

It's been both tough and fun. I love my team. We've hit some high notes
together.

That said, I think we're all looking forward to working on the next generation
of features for our customers. It's going to be an exciting rest-of-2009
ahead.

~~~
cake
Thanks for the answer, spontaneously I would love Xobni to do one thing :
automatically integrate the contacts into Outlook's address book.

I might do it wrong but when I compose a new mail, the autocomplete function
of Outlook doesn't show me contacts from whom I have received a mail.

Xobni could add those contacts without having me to manually do it, it would
save me some time. By the way if you can make the autocomplete function work
better... (allow me to enter a last name instead of the begining of the email
or the first name).

~~~
adamsmith
Good idea! ;)

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dbul
xobni is awesome. I used it when I worked at a Fortune 500 company and kept
recommending it to people. I pretty much only used the attachment and contact
features though. Good luck to them!

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justin
congrats guys!

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_pius
Congrats Adam! :D

