13 Dec 2012
After going back and forth a few times with Apple, we are really happy to
announce the availibility of our Smart
Contacts
application on the App Store! Even if we built it to demonstrate the amazing
features of our search technology SDK, it can be used as an in-place
replacement of the traditional iPhone Contacts app. Check it up!
Outstanding Search Features
It plugs directly into your iPhone contacts and classically allows you to
update them or create new ones. What’s more interesting is the Search
integration! It features:
- Instant search with autocompletion and visual feedback as you type
- Search on all contacts attributes (name, company, notes, etc.)
- Typo tolerance to account for smartphone small keyboards
- And even search by initials!
iOS API Limitations
There are a few of features we would have loved to integrate that were not
possible due to limitations in iOS APIs: group management, in place
replacement of contacts in the phone app (that’s maybe a lot to ask!), and
ranking based on contact popularity.
Free your Imagination!
If you ever wanted to see Algolia Search in action, now is the time. Check it
up with your own data and imagine what Algolia can do for the application you
develop!
And don’t forget your 5 stars ranking ;)
30 Nov 2012
Hey, we are thrilled to announce our nomination among the Seedcamp Paris
finalists! The event will take place next week on Monday,
just before LeWeb 2012 (by the way we’ll be there,
feel free to ping us if you’d like to meet).
From what we learned from all over the place, the day’s mentorship alone is
worth it. We’re now fully committed to the event preparation! I’ll try to
write a followup post with our impressions.
[Edit 15-Jan-2013] Here it is with some tips and
advice
[/Edit]
29 Nov 2012
Autocomplete is so
intuitive,that it seems like it would be easy to implement. However, most
mobile apps that offer it provide a pretty poor user experience. Let’s look at
the Twitter mobile app as an example.
Twitter proposes autocompletion when you create a new tweet. The idea is to
make suggestions after the ‘#’ and ‘@’ characters. It’s actually very nice to
gain time, especially when you’re tweeting with a small virtual keyboard…
but it sucks!
Avoid Roundtrips to Server for Autocompletion
The first reason is that when you’re on the go, latency is often too high on
mobile, leading to unusable autocomplete - except if you’re very slow to
type. Twitter developers chose to develop this functionality server-side,
probably with lucene, and to expose it via APIs to their mobile app. That’s
good for reusability but not so much for usability…
Beware of the Suggestions Ranking
The second reason is the ranking is just obscure. Yesterday I sent a tweet to
@cocoanetics and the screenshot on the left shows the suggestions I got when
typing “@c”. I would greatly prefer to see Twitter handles before names and it
would never come to my mind to look for “Marie Cecile” with “@c”!
Explain the Matches
Last but not least there is no visual feedback to show me why the app proposes
a given user. So ok let me think… the ‘c’ was reffering to “Cécile” in
“Marie-Cécile”! A bit far fetched!
Now let’s imagine the Twitter mobile app with instant autocompletion even
offline, intuitive ranking, and visual feedback… Appealing, isn’t it?
Twitter if you listen, check it up, I’m sure you’ll love Algolia
Search!
21 Nov 2012
After 4 betas and much priceless feedback, we
are really excited to announce the release of Algolia Search! We launched it
Monday during the 60th edition of Mobile Monday Paris! If you don’t know what Algolia Search can do for your app, take a
look at its amazing features or just watch
the video!
This release also means that you can now integrate it directly into your apps
and publish them! We wanted to have a simple and clear pricing plan: You can
have all the benefits of Algolia Search in one Android or iOS App for only
$590! Think about it, that’s less than the day-rate of a mobile developer in
many countries. Compare it to the many days you would need to integrate SQL
Lite FTS for poor features.
Try Algolia Search for free for 30-days!
We are also very excited to introduce our new
website alongside this launch. You’ll be able to
access up-to-date documentation easily, to try and
download Algolia Search in a few clicks and, of
course, to order the product! Check it out and let us know what you think!
Thanks again to our beloved beta testers. Stay tuned for more news!
12 Nov 2012
I recently had a pretty bad user experience when I upgraded my personal Apple
developer account into a professional one.
To sum things up, we officially created Algolia in early October and I decided
to convert my personal Apple Developer Account in order to have our
applications published under the “Algolia” name. This process is not available
online, but after a quick call, people at Apple sent me the link for the
process. It is actually pretty simple: They just need you to fill some
information about your company and to accept their EULA.
Well, actually some of this information was pretty obscure. They needed our
D-U-N-S® number… Some time ago, Apple was doing the job of checking that
your company is a real one, but they decided to delegate this job to an
external company (D&B). It looks like a good idea, doesn’t it? After all this
is not their core competency and D&B may be doing a really good job for this
task…
The short answer is no, it wasn’t a good idea at all! I started to check how
to get this famous D-U-N-S® and after some time to understand the antiquated
website of D&B, I finally found the contact address. One week later I finally
received our D-U-N-S®. But that’s not all, Apple then asked us to wait for the
synchronization between D&B and Apple… which can take up to 14days!
Hey guys, I don’t know if you realize how this is ridiculous to wait 14 days
for a simple database synchronization! You have just no idea what 14 days
means for a young startup :)
As you can imagine, I was already quite frustrated… but this was just the
beginning. After the 14 days, Apple recognized the DUNS number… but a field
was missing. They didn’t have the legal type of our company. They then asked
me to contact D&B and a new nightmare started at this level: D&B was saying
that the entry was correct while Apple was asking me to contact D&B to correct
the entry! There’s nothing worst than to stand be between two big companies
who pass the buck to each other.
Hopefully Apple was far smarter than D&B and they finally accepted to bypass
the missing field if I sent them directly our legal documents.
It is crucial to pay attention to all your users’ problems and solve them as
soon as possible. They may sometimes look like details to you, but that’s what
your customers will remember about your company. Of course, we try to apply
this lesson to ourselves. Feel free to tell us if something’s going wrong!
