Comics on Glassboard Part Deux. Dexter strikes back!
Glassboard has been essential to the Sepia Labs team to get work done. It has also been used by members of the team to keep in close contact with family despite their geographical location. But sometimes we just want to use the app for fun things, and Nick Bradbury’s Dexter board is one of them.
To give you a little background, our Android developer, Nick Bradbury, drew a fairly popular comic strip during college called Dexter. Unfortunately he had to eventually give up this pursuit (software development is much better at paying the bills!), but we can look back on his old comics as he posts them to the Dexter board on Glassboard.
Folks are more than welcome to join the board. In fact, it’s a good way to use Glassboard if you’re not very familiar with it and you don’t yet have others you know using the app. The invite code is ‘dexter’.
Posted by Jenny Blumberg
Do NOT mess around in Bloomingdale’s: Sharing comics in Glassboard
[Sam Davies, comic book enthusiast, was kind enough to contribute the following post on how he uses Glassboard to share and discuss comics. Enjoy!]
The perfect storm has led me to spending way too much time (and money) on reading comic books lately. First, my nearly-six-year-old daughter has graduated from Owly to X-Men (she likes Storm the best) and I wouldn’t be a good father if I didn’t know if the Phoenix was presently alive or dead. Second, Comixology on the iPad has made purchasing comic books instant gratification without taking up any shared bookshelf space.
I’ve found a group of friendly comic book reading grown-ups locally. Rather than clutter up our Twitter feed with discussion of the Marvel Universe, I set up a Glassboard to share what we are reading and enjoying (or not enjoying). It allows us to post reviews, comment easily, bookmark ideas of books to read later, and even attach excerpts of the comics to a post. Most importantly, I can read, post, and comment all without leaving the iPad.
When I get a new comic, I’ll start reading it in Comixology. If I find a particular page I like, I’ll take a screenshot of it by pressing the “On/Off” Switch and the Home button on my iPad simultaneously. Then I continue reading. After I’m done, I open the Photos app and sort through the screenshots for the best one to post.
For example, reading through the classic X-Men “Mutant Massacre” storyline, I find particularly anachronistic page of Rogue visiting Bloomingdales (click for big):
I don’t want to share the whole page, just the top left panel, so I crop it and hit save.
I launch Glassboard from the convenient “Save to Home Screen” icon and type up a quick review.
Even though this is not a native iPad application, the image attachment functionality works just like you’d expect it to. Tap on the camera icon, pick your photo from the iPad’s Photo Library, hit send, and you are done.
It even looks great on the Glassboard app for iPhone.
Adding this image makes all the difference. Often a single panel chosen by a friend is all the “review” you need to decide if a comic is worth reading.
If I had to go to a different device to share my thoughts, I’d never do it. The combination of Comixology and Glassboard on my iPad allows me share my thoughts before I forget to, directly to the people who would enjoy reading them the most.
Posted by Jenny Blumberg
Some insights into how people use Glassboard
It’s no surprise that people love to share photos. It’s a feature that powers many social networks and keeps them thriving, and Glassboard is no exception. We did some analysis on how people use Glassboard (keep in mind everything is encrypted and we can’t read anything you post: but we can deduce some factors like the following) and 1 out of every 5 messages has an attachment which is almost always a photo.
Looking over the Sepia Labs board this holds true despite the primary purpose of the board being for work discussion. Like any other group we still share pictures of our kids/pets/food just like anyone else.
Out of everything posted to Glassboard, 8% of messages include location. This was a big surprise to us since we assumed it would be more around 2%.
For every new message, there are 1.61 comments on it. There are many many messages without comments, and somewhere out there there’s a message with something like 100 comments on it.
Finally, people have gone back and deleted .39% of posts to Glassboard. I’m glad to see this oft-asked for feature used so much!
Posted by Jenny Blumberg
Happy Halloween from the Glassboard team!
At one point we tried to add phone support for Glassboard, but we made a poor hiring decision that has led to substandard customer service. Guess we’ll have to stick with email!
Posted by Jenny Blumberg
When was your “Aha!” moment?
It’s not always necessarily intuitive what an app’s exact purpose is right away, especially when it comes to an app like Glassboard. We built the app with the intention of not just small business teams using the app, but also families and friends: anyone who would want to communicate in a small, private group. Because there is a broad audience, it’s not obvious on the first run of the app what you’re supposed to do with it.
It’s often that I’ll read (via Twitter, or our support channel) people commenting that they’ve downloaded the app and created an account. Now what? It looks nice and all, they can upload photos and send messages out into the ether, but unlike Twitter or Facebook, who sees any of it? Where are all my friends?
In our Sepia Labs board, Brent Simmons pointed out that for a lot of people he’s talked to about Glassboard, they didn’t quite understand what it was really for until they used it at a conference. These folks had been invited to a board dedicated to the conference, and in there they saw ongoing discussions of sessions people attended. They could also see people making plans for things to do once the conference had ended for the day. The app suddenly became useful to them. They began to see how they could use it outside the conference with their families or colleagues. That was their “Aha!” moment.
Even though I’m on the Sepia Labs team and I’ve used the app since the very beginning, I didn’t have my “Aha!” moment until a couple months later, when I created a board devoted to live music with my friends. It’s one thing to work on an app where you can tout its utility because of this or that feature, it’s another thing entirely when you arrive at seeing how beneficial the app is in your real life. Once I experienced that moment, I came to trust that Glassboard could accommodate many different people and situations. Honestly I can’t go a day without using it!
Posted by Jenny Blumberg
Class (board) is in session!
We were first alerted to Glassboard’s utility in the classroom when I had a conversation with Micah Humphrey’s, college professor. He used the app with his Agroecology (soil and crop science) class to take attendance and make announcements, among other things.
Now we’re seeing more educators making it clear that Glassboard is a great tool for teaching. This history blog touts Glassboard as useful for small groups of students to have discussions and study together. This teacher is using Glassboard as a means to gather feedback from students for an assignment.
There are a few reasons, as I see it, that are driving this education-focused adoption of Glassboard:
1. The privacy aspect.
Glassboard in inherently private and always has been. For educators and parents, this is a critical feature for keeping students safe and focused.
2. Glassboard isn’t just another social network, it’s a resource so teams can get things done more effectively.
Can you think of many students who would want to friend their teachers on Facebook? I sure can’t. Since Glassboard is so easy to sign up for, teachers can get their students on to a class board in a matter of minutes and the discussion can continue to take place outside of the other networks that everyone uses for social pursuits.
3. Educators, as chairperson of a board, are empowered as moderators.
Since a chairperson can control who has access to the board, as well as the ability to delete posts made by others, Glassboard is easily moderated by the teacher. Also, once a class or a project is complete they can choose to delete a board and start over fresh with a new crop of students.
4. Technology is infiltrating the classroom!
More and more, students are gaining access to iPads and other technologies to enhance learning. As this approach grows in popularity, so too will apps that enable learning. With Glassboard as a discussion tool in the classroom, students are better able to communicate with educators and their peers.
Our Android developer, Nick Bradbury, shares his thoughts on this trend:
“It’s definitely been a boost for both my kids (my daughter started at the same school this year). My kids are exposed to a *much* more visual way of learning, which I think is far better than the way I learned. Instead of staring at static text books, they’re able to learn from interactive examples. In class, teachers project their iPads onto a SmartBoard, which enables them to display online video without the hassle of the projectors we grew up with. Most of their assignments are completed and submitted on their iPads.
They’re using Pages, iMovie and similar apps to create documents and multimedia presentations that are easily shared with other classmates. Some of these projects are team-based, but quite often they don’t need to get together to complete their work – they just do it online from home. One of the coolest things was my son’s Spanish class, where the teacher had “tagged” dozens of objects around the room. The kids aimed their iPhone cameras at the objects, and the Spanish name of the objects appeared on-screen (aim it at a chair, and see the Spanish word for chair).”
Viva la silla!
Posted by Jenny Blumberg
Glassboard for iPhone 5 and Kindle
I don’t need to tell you how awesome our team of developers are (I’ll show you!).
With the iPhone 5 being released last Friday, our iOS developer Brent Simmons had a new version of Glassboard for the larger screen ready and in the iTunes store on Monday. That was fast!
Our Android developer, Nick Bradbury, has now ensured that Kindle users can enjoy the Glassboard experience. Glassboard is now available in the Amazon app store.
Thanks guys!
Posted by Jenny Blumberg
Glassboard 2.3: Now with deletion!
Finally! The most asked for feature is now available in Glassboard: you can delete your messages and comments from the mobile apps. If you are a board chair, you can delete messages and comments from others as well.
For any comment or message that you would like to retract, simply long-press and the pop-up menu will give you the option to delete. Its easy.
Nick Bradbury, our Android dev, goes into some background behind our reasoning (including why we didn’t include deletion in the first place.
There are other additions to the app in this version, of course, including performance enhancements, but message/comment deletion is what we’re most excited about!
Download Glassboard for iPhone
Download Glassboard for Android
Posted by Jenny Blumberg
Simplicity as a feature
What makes a mobile app easy to use, intuitive, and delightful? In a word, simplicity. When we were in the planning stages of Glassboard, our goal was to make it as easy as possible to communicate with small groups.
The Glassboard team has always agreed on one thing: make the app simple. In fact, this philosophy has been touted by both our iPhone and Android developers in years past, what with this interview with Brent Simmons on learning to be “ruthless about simplicity” and Nick Bradbury on his blog sharing his experience with implementing simplicity in his software.
Which is why when it came down to what features to include in 1.0, and subsequently 2.0, we did a lot of cutting. In fact our biggest priorities for major releases has been to make the app better looking and faster. Adding features at times was an afterthought. A lot of mobile collaboration apps have some great features such as lists, calendaring, and polling. I’m not saying we won’t ever include anything like those in Glassboard, I’m just saying it’s more important to us to give you a simple way to communicate. All the bells and whistles are nice, but we’d like to have a solid base to build those on.
Another factor that we’ve often mentioned is the privacy settings in Glassboard. There aren’t any because it is always private. Although Facebook and Google+ provide a way to collaborate as a group privately, there are a number of steps to be taken to do so. In fact, this post about bringing G+ to the workplace inspired me to write this: although G+ is loaded with features for collaboration, one has to take an extra step to ensure privacy within a group.
If you find Glassboard to be wonderfully simple, yet effective and screaming fast, we’ve done our job. If you’d like to see more out of Glassboard, that’s great! We like to hear suggestions for what features to add. As long as we know what’s most important to you, that’s what we’ll look towards adding next.
Posted by Jenny Blumberg
Our lives in pictures
Photo sharing is essential for any social network to thrive. Facebook apparently has 90 billion total photos. 90 BILLION!
Why is that?
Simply put, our lives are told with pictures now. We can summarize our daily activities within the constrains of 160 characters, we can blog or post to Facebook, or we can share photographs.
Which is why social networks want to highlight photo sharing as a prominent feature. It’s the easiest way to tell stories, to share our thoughts and current events, and to engage people we know. Not only that, but with things like filters, tagging, and adding location, photo sharing has become streamlined and a lot more fun.
From the most mundane activities, like what you ate for dinner,
or pictures of your pup
to something spectacular that you’d like to share,
to something tender,
to something silly.
It’s not even a matter of saving these moments for later. Photo sharing has changed the way we experience events as they occur. It’s become very common that for every holiday, every concert, and every meal, people are constantly whipping out their phones to carefully document all that goes on in their lives. Which isn’t to say that’s a bad thing, it’s simply another way social networking has impacted our lives.
Posted by Jenny Blumberg
Glassboard is a private group sharing app for iPhone, Android, and now on the web. It’s free. Get it:
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