ThumbJot

Dear jotters - sorry, but we have had a problem with the mailer program on our server. Some emails have been delayed in getting through. You might also get old copies of emails sent to you. We apologize for this and will do our best to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.

This post on Business of Software blog about writing business plans is an interesting read. It talks of the value of writing a biz plan versus the value of the finished document. Writing is a means to frame thinking. That’s what we advocate and is why we created ThumbJot - get your ideas down fast - there and then! The longer you leave an idea, the more likely you are to forget it and never act upon it. Don’t believe all the mumbo jumbo that ideas are easy, blah blah blah. Ideas are precious. They are the fuel of human existence. We need ideas. You need ideas. Every useful outcome in the human experience started out as … yep, you’ve got it … an idea!

Start by capturing your ideas early. Get them down on paper, or, better still, go directly to digital! Get in the habit of texting your ideas into ThumbJot. Then they’re captured for processing later. We’re working on the next phase of ThumbJot, which is all about the ‘bump into effect.’ Wanna know more? Stay tuned…

Thanks to all of you who have given us feedback so far on the beta release of ThumbJot. We’ve focussed thus far on just getting it out there, up and running, stable and useful. We’ve made it simple and aim to keep it that way. However, the real goodies are yet to come. We don’t hide the fact that where we’re headed with this is to offer the best possible jotting experience for the serious thinkers and innovators out there who rely heavily on ‘real-time’ jotting as a real aid to productivity. Used properly, jotting can be a hugely useful aid to productivity, especially if you’re business and income relies heavily upon your ideas.

We deliberately focussed our efforts on the iPhone user, not only because it’s a cool device and all the usual kudos of doing something for the iPhone, but because it is part of the Mac OS X approach to life, which, when harnessed properly, provides a definite boost to productivity and creativity. We shall continue to exploit this ethos by optimising the experience for the iPhone. However, some of the experimental features we are working on will appear first on the desktop, which is, after all, where a lot of our creative and innovative users spend a lot of their time. We will then reflect these back into the mobile service.

After the release of iPhone 2.0 software and our efforts to slimline some of the iPhone page overhead (in the Javascript, for those interested) - you should find that the pages load quicker in the iPhone. Don’t forget though, that for quick and easy entry of those ’spur of the moment’ jots, you can send a text message to your TJot account. See the account profile settings for more details and to set this up on your device.

If you love reading books, then TJ can come in handy for keeping your reading habits on track. When browsing magazines or bookstores, you might see a book that you think would be great to read. It’s easy to add a note to TJ. Send a text message to the TJ number and its done! TIP: add the word “book” so that you can find it later via search - you might forget the title and author and then lose track of the note. Or, if you want to add a note via the iPhone Web interface, then why not add a “book” tag.

For those of you with longish jots who are having difficulties with seeing all the note, you might want to try the not so well known 2-finger scrolling technique.

Thanks to all our beta users, who now number more than 1000 and still growing strong. Thanks for the feedback and patience with various issues, which are to be expected in these early phases. We’re addressing things as they get noticed and getting ready to add requested features. We want a solid jotting app first and then we hope to show you some very innovative features that are bubbling away in the cauldron.

To do this, go into your account settings and enter your mobile number in usual long format (country code + number, without a + at the start) and then store the Thumbjot number (447624809969) in your address book. Sending a text to this number will create a new note with the text contents. Currently we only support this UK number, but it can receive texts from most networks globally. US users may need to put 011 in front.

We’re happy that Apple today chose ThumbJot as staff pick for iPhone web apps.

http://www.apple.com/webapps/productivity/thumbjot.html

Our data host already backs up your data every day, in case, on the off chance, that something goes wrong. We’re improving this to add another back-up service using another host to store the back-ups. Of course, all this is still subject to our terms and conditions, but we hope that you’ll be happier to know how we treat your data. In due course, we shall offer you a data export service to allow you to regularly pull down your own data for personal back-ups and peace of mind, or if you ever wanted to leave us (please don’t - there are lots of goodies on the horizon).