What’s new: 31th May 2013

This morning we deployed some fresh updates that bring you a few nice improvements to the user interface:

A new detail view for all objects

Everything in your feed now opens in a detail view, showing a focussed view of attached comments, tasks, and detailed information. You can access the link to the source app either from the detail view or directly from the feed with the “open in app” link showing up upon hovering over an update.

New file type icons

We worked on making the feed clearer by removing some unnecessary icons and reworking the remaining icons for a cleaner look.

We also worked on general usability of the app, improving the login/signup page, tasks list, and dialogs.

As always, we’re happy to hear your feedback on the latest changes. Just send us an email with your thoughts.

Hojoki will be at the Box Developer Meetup (Berlin)

Our partner, Box, has invited us and our users to join the Box Developer Meetup in Berlin. Our CEO, Martin, will be on stage and we’d be very happy to meet many of you guys there in one of Berlin’s hottest locations, the St. Oberholz.

Here’s the schedule for the evening from Box:

Join Box, one of Silicon Valley’s fastest growing businesses, to meet the team that’s built this successful tech company and hear our vision for the future of the Enterprise software space.

At the event, you’ll hear from:

• Stefan Apitz, VP Technical Operations, Box
• Dr. Martin Böhringer, CEO & Co-Founder, Hojoki, a Box OneCloud partner

Dinner and drinks will be served, and a networking session will follow the event. Please register at boxberlin.eventbrite.com or contact nick@box.com with any questions.

Event Schedule:
18:30 Arrival upstairs in the Ko-Working Space
19:00 Presentations by Box and Hojoki
19:45 Networking downstairs in the Cafe
21:00 Event ends

Thursday, 13th June, 18:30-21:00

St. Oberholz
Rosenthaler Straße 72a
10119 Berlin

Google Tasks and generic RSS/Atom integrations added

Whenever we ask our users what features they’d like to see in Hojoki, the most frequently heard answer by far is “please integrate X”. What we all love about the web is that there are so many tools available. However, that makes it pretty tough for us to integrate them all. That is the reason why today we bring you a generic integration for standard RSS and Atom feeds.

Many custom-hosted apps like Redmine or Trac offer feeds that can now be included in Hojoki. As with other apps, you can decide to connect the feed to workspaces. Embedded images will be imported as well and attached to the feed item.

The RSS/Atom integration is a first step towards a public API that will let you build your own integrations. Our major goal with it right now is to learn about how you’ll use this feature and what apps you’re going to integrate. For this purpose, the integration is limited to a 15 minutes interval and one feed right now. We’ll increase the number of feeds over time.

Our second new integration, Google Tasks, has long been on our todo list. It’s a nice and simple todo list app that many of us use for the daily madness of small personal todos that pop up from GMail. Now you can add your activity from there to Hojoki. If you want, you can even let your teammates know what you’re up to by adding your Tasks feed to a shared workspace.

Let us know how you want to use the RSS/Atom integration. As always, we’re happy to hear your feedback.

Task management for all your connected apps

We’ve added lots of cool new features to Hojoki recently. I’m going to walk you through them in this blog. You can try them out for yourself here and, as always, send any feedback you can think of to support@hojoki.com.

Task management

Task management is the newest big feature we’ve added to Hojoki. This brings tasks to all the items from your apps. You can assign tasks to you or your team on Dropbox files, Evernote notes, or whatever you’re working on, wherever you’re working.

Here’s an example for you. I’m working on a blog post. As I’m working on it, updates come into the Hojoki Marketing workspace where my colleagues and I work together.

When I feel like the text is ready, I assign the Google Drive file to Martin and ask him to add graphics to the post. You can see how this would look below.

He gets notified about this task and sees it in the workspace. He can jump right into Google Drive from Hojoki and complete the task. When finished, he can simply check it off. After that I can go ahead and publish the blog.

It’s as easy as that. You have all your content in one platform and now you can keep your workflow and tasks in that same platform.

Dashboard

We’ve added a dashboard of your workspaces to give you a better overview of what’s going on. From one look at your dashboard, you can see what’s been happening lately. You can jump into any of your workspaces from here to see exactly what’s been going on.

You can drag and drop the workspaces on the dashboard to change the order they’re arranged in.

@mentions

We’ve also made it easier for you to discuss updates with your team by adding @mentions. This includes auto-suggest to make including your team as simple as possible.

We hope this improvement makes messaging more familiar to what you’re used to in other communication tools.

We also recently released integrations for Astrid, Producteev, and Podio. You can read more about all that here.

New features walkthrough

We rolled out a new version of Hojoki over the last week, which includes three new integrations as well as a number of delicious new features. They’ll be highlighted in several blog posts over the next days.

For a first overview, we created a screencast for you to have a quick walkthrough of the new Hojoki. Our focus was on collaboration: it’s even easier now to create shared workspaces, we introduced a dashboard view to provide an overview on your workspaces, and there’s much more you can do in a workspace now: