friday for Android

This is a 4 step guide to installing friday for your life.

  1.   Login Screen

If you've just installed friday and haven't signed up yet, tap theSignup button for your free account!

  2.  Signup Screen

Now, the signup process of friday consists of a first time sync of your android phone data namely, calls and texts to the friday secure cloud, so it is advised that you have ample battery charge and consistent internet connection on your phone.

On the signup screen, we give you the choice from the gmail accounts added in your android device to use as the friday login name. We use this account only as your username and do not sync anything automatically from this account. (Unless you add this account later for syncing). The password should be atleast 5 characters long and is your friday password. When you tap signup your user account is created on the friday cloud.

3. Settings Screen

After signup you are prompted to add your accounts to friday to sync. Here, one GMail/Google Apps account is mandatory. You can add more than one Google Apps/GMail accounts. You can also add your facebook, twitter and foursquare accounts. These help in creating a rich semantic map of your life and events.

You'll be prompted to complete the respective authentication pages of these services. Once added these accounts are displayed on the accounts fragment as shown in below.

* The General, Sync, and Services settings are loaded with optimized defaults for daily use. Only if you are really sure, go ahead and tweak these values. Make sure you have enabled all the services you want in the Services tab. 

4. Firstrun Sync

The signup concludes with firstrun sync. Here, your call and text message logs are synced to the friday cloud. This may take upto 15 minutes depending on the amount of your data and the speed of your network connection.

When finished you will see the blue continue button as shown in figure 3

(download)

Click here to download:

how-to-start-using-friday-JnhqCHAeizBEnAwtbjoH.zip (309 KB)

On tapping the continue button you can see the friday splash screen. This will be your default friday opening page (if you don't have password protection on).

After firstrun sync if your data still hasn't synced you may me prompted to sync it manually from menu as shown below otherwise....

...Go to dashboard and you're ready to go!

It’s been 2 years since dexetra actually started working on what we believed to be the gamechanger right from its concept stage. We now have Friday (in closed beta) !! Yes, the congeniality concept such as this obviously needs to be verified.  So, we decided to go for an Alpha release and it turned out to be a winner. Since then, we have taken more than a year to develop Friday beta from scratch taking into consideration the suggestions/feedback put forth by our Alpha testers; key differentiator being the server sync functionality, resulting in a really fast and scalable suite.

The crucial learning from the Alpha release was pertaining to the feature set of Friday. The Alpha users conveyed that the features were way too overwhelming and most of it unwanted. Friday Beta now has its feature list toned to what the users need most. With this post, my objective is to elaborate on all the functionalities of Friday.

After installing the Friday you need to sign up with your email address that you have configured on your device. This will be your user name. After signing up, you will be directed to initial settings screen.  The settings screen contains four fragments: General settings, Sync settings, Services settings, Accounts settings.  Below are the snapshots .

(download)

Click here to download:

how-to-use-friday-jEmdmrnuImcpJGAEdEAi.zip (440 KB)

General settings.

As you all know, Friday will be building a huge semantic map from the phone ranging from calls, texts, music and so on. The sync is initiated automatically. However, if you need to be notified of these syncs, you could have it done by enabling the ‘Sync Notification’ option. Thus, whenever Friday fetches data, the sync notification will be shown.

Next option is about sending error reports, this should be enabled to help us improvement of Friday. Only errors from your phone would be logged into the Friday servers. 

You could choose to have password protection so that no one else can view your personal data. In which case, Friday will ask for the password every time you open the App. The set password could be changed on the General Settings screen.

In the General settings page, the users have a choice of setting the active device. As of now Friday can sync data from only one device, but can view data accumulated from multiple devices. When a user signs up, that particular device is set as the active device and the data (calls, texts, image, location) will sync to the server from that device. What will happen when you sell your device or you decide to get a new one? Now, all you got to do is install and login to Friday on your new device, and then set the new device as your active device.

Sync.

This screen contains the sync settings of Friday. Depending on which the Friday syncing will happen. If you opt for battery efficient level, the sync frequency would be low. I would prefer the moderate level, which is set by default. 

Services settings

This is where you can disable the sensors on your device. You could enable/disable the sensors by tapping the icons. If you disable the call sensor, no calls will be logged during the disabled time.

PS: As of now Friday doesn’t access GPS directly, we have optimized the location sensor in such a way that it will not consume a lot of battery. In short, there is disabling the location sensor to conserve battery does not really make much of a difference (since it is already opimtimized a lot!).

Accounts settings

After signing up you must add at least one GMail/Google account to Friday for syncing contacts and the images. You could also add your facebook, twitter, foursquare accounts. The Friday experience would be much richer with feeds from the various accounts subsequently helping the user to relive the entire life with enhanced connect to the real world.

Menu screen

After you login to Friday, you are taken to your Home/timewarp screen. By clicking the menu button you can access the menu. I am placing the image of menu below.

Add Thought

The users can post thoughts on Friday. You can add images as well, which can be viewed in your timewarp.

Bump

If you met your Friend, you could let Friday know via bump. The people, in this case, have open bump on Friday in their device and… bump !

On the Login screen, you can view a different menu.

Delete user and Help

If you wish to delete your Friday account and its complete data, you could do so by the ‘delete user’ option. I would recommend you to read the help page before using Friday.

Note: Friday does not retain any cache or logs when you delete your account. So, once you delete your user, retreiving you data again would be impossible.

Push data to cloud.

By pressing this, all the data that was logged on the device will be sent to the cloud. Friday uses sync adapter for syncing data. If you need to make sure that all new data (like the call that just occurred) is reflected on the cloud, you could do so by this button. 

Read the rest of this post »

The concept of Friday was born around 2 years back, when it was not even called friday. From then to now, the product has taken a lot of makeovers. Some small, small really hubsch. When we launched our alpha version 10 months ago, it was quarter done. It was a standalone mobile app, which could index stuff for you and lets you ask about it later. But it was not scalable, it was not meant to be. After all it was just alpha. We wanted to see if whatever we've been dreaming for an year had any value. But we were really amazed at the feedback from the users. We started getting anxious too. 

Since then we have been working on our full release. For 10 months now, what we thought would be done in 6 months. In the meanwhile lot of interesting apps have come, like Path, facebook with timeline, siri (and of course iris), memolane etc. Many of which had elements of friday. Everytime we see such a product we go back to the drawing board and see how we are unique compared to each of these. I can write pages on that, but it is up to the users' to find that. 

We are almost nearing our release (less than 30 days!). Now, the most important feature that we have is search (asking!). Thanks to iris, we could iron out some of the issues there. Friday's core is asking. Asking naturally what do you want to know. "Who was with me for last Chistmas bash?" Friday just gives you the answer. How simple right? This is what puts friday in a different level from other social networks, journals and similar suites. And this is what we are putting most of our efforts on. And of course, we are so particular about the User Interface too. We want it to look jaw dropping.

Since we are closing in on our work, we will keep you posted with interesting news, inside stories and fun stuff. Hope you'll love them.

What is the use of building complex programs and apps, building huge and extensive databases and repositories if in the end it is not possible for you-the user to ask what you want. And by users I don't mean programmers and nerds, I mean every common man out there who haspocket space for a smartphone. Now, go back to search engines and boxes, how are you seeking information? Do you ask questions? No, you punch in a bunch of keywords, and browse through the results to find what you want. This is not the best way humans communicate. and so we use a better technique in newFriday. You won't be searching anymore, you would be asking and we will be giving you answers, not results.

When we launched alpha, we did an experiment on this, though the result only a moderate success, the experiment itself was a huge positive. When comparing natural languages to the languages machines understand, they are poles apart. Machines understand definitive unambiguous grammar, while languages that we speak are free flowing and rather too flexible. A majority of our research efforts was on bridging the two modes of communication. And we have taken rather a different route for that, we are not trying to teach our engines English language, nor are we trying to impose an unintuitive complex query language to you.

newFriday's answering engine works with Predisense™ box, which will help you ask questions very clearly, with bare minimum taps. It could be a question as simple as place where you met her, or more advanced ones like the photos you took just before your phone died while listening to your favorite track. Unlike search engines, Predisense™ won't guess what you're trying to search, but will identify exactly what you're asking, and hence will give you very definitive answers.

image courtesy: xkcd.com

I know you are as excited as we are to start using newFriday, we will soon come out with early builds.

It is all about moments, as the popular saying goes, "We remember moments, not days". We had such a moment when we were finally ready with our promo video for the new friday. I will stick with the name new friday, because I am not sure what we should call the next iteration. 

new Logo.

I also worked around the friday logo/titling a little bit. We have renamed Friday to friday, gives a sense of friendliness when it is an all small-case title. To augment that we have moved to lighter font weight. The previous logo was more authoritative and corporate like, we felt it would better to give friendly and cool look.

new Promo

A promo for new friday was being planned for months. To convey the essense of friday in 2 minutes still explaining all the features was a challenge. To visually represent that as a promo was tougher. We worked for weeks on the story board, thanks to Magikwand, we could get a fairly exact visualisation of the story board. And thanks to Brad for the voice over, Jonathan for the bgm. 

We believe the video has come out well, tell us what you think.

new Website

Well, that is also in the making. We will share with you when it is up, soon.

I was searching for a Google Reader client for the desktop. After a long search in the internet, posting a question to Quora, twitter etc, I am yet to find one, which has a beautiful user interface. Then I realized, using a lot of mobile/tablet applications has driven the User Experience (UX) expectation level a few bars higher. The "Windows Forms" like interface does not interest me anymore, and this is case of lot of other users around.

Why UX and UI are very important to a mobile application is that the attention span of a mobile user is very very less compared to a Desktop user. Most of the times, you are mentally prepared to use the PC when you are sitting in front of a PC, but a mobile screen is unlocked at any time, in the restroom, in the bus, during a TV commercial and even worser situations, where you just have a few moments to take off. The application UX has the big responsibility of engrossing you in the experience in this short span.

We believe Friday is a very unique application, which paints the tone of your life. The events, people, places, the context and the information in Friday should set the tone of the application. I didn't want to add any tone to the application ourselves, rather, the content in your timeline and dashboard should set the tone. A B/W photography enthusiast would have a Friday timeline which complements his photography and gray shades, or a music lover would have a timeline which is musical. What is important is that our own design should not add any overtone to these. The design should be invisible and should let the content take over. You might be thinking this is similar to Metro design, but though Metro gives importance to the content, it has a very strong design theming. Metro is more like a liquid design, which takes the shape of the content, but is visible as well. But, we want to take it a level further, a design which is invisible and content is the only thing that captures your eye, the design framework is in vapour form.

Was inspired a lot from the Helvetica typeface (font), it does not convey any meaning with its style, but lets the content of the text do it. You should watch this full feature film (Documentary) on Helvetica, if you are a typeface freak like me.

P.S. I would love to see your responses/opinions on this post.

I know it has been sometime since I have posted. We have been working on the post-alpha version of Friday. A completely different new Friday, the code re-written ground up, much faster and lighter than alpha. The new version makes the Friday Alpha look like a Neanderthal. And obviously, I am very excited. 

From the first alpha release to the last one (v3.0) we have made over a dozen releases, thanks to all your feedbacks, criticisms and comments, we could understand exactly what you want and what you don't. So rather than building on top of the Alpha code base, we thought we should do a full reset, both architecturally, design-wise and layout-wise. And that is exactly what we are doing. Hopefully, we could be showing you something tangible very soon. 

We have derived some inferences from your feedback and have built a new app-design based on that. We know some of the features were not used (the way we thought it would be) and some were loved (trivia?). We are taking all these learnings to create something that has more value and is more fun to use.

Hearing from you.

As you all know, we love talking to you and listening to your ideas, suggestions and feedback. And we have been interacting via facebook, twitter, forum and even email. Now, we are taking it a step further, and are planning to have a Google+ Hangout/ Google Wave session with you guys. We want to know what you would love to have in the shiney new Friday (without the Alpha badge). And I promise you that I will give you a sneak peak into the new Friday. We will announce the date and time soon, if we have enough crowd. Let us know via facebook, twitter, forum , email or in the comments below. 

Update.

You could just add yourself here to let us know that you want to be a part of Friday Rendezvous.

Except for two Fridays, every week we have been pushing some updates/bug fixes for Friday app. We want to keep the ball rolling all the time, though we know this is just in alpha. We've had a rollercoaster week lately, we were to take part in the Techcrunch Disrupt happening next week, but due to some unavoidable travel issues we wouldn't be able to make it to the event. In fact, we were preparing some real cool features to be unveiled at the occasion, which is why we didn't have updates last Friday. 

Though missing Disrupt would be a bad thing, that was eclipsed by yesterday's string of posts on several blogs, first Crunchgear reported about Friday, which was picked up by Gizmodo and they wrote their thoughts, only that both used some discolored screenshots of Friday. Both of this just spiked up the traffic to our website and increased the sign ups many folds. Previously Android Police had included Friday in the 40 must have apps for Android. 

All these opened up the internal debate on whether we should just open up the alpha to the public, since the last few builds have been stable and lot of people are wanting to try out Friday and we are shooing off lot of users with the boring sign up form. Though the debate continues even as I am writing this post, Friday as a full product has a few more important features to be added, and the question is whether we should open it up before these are in place.

Another point I noticed is that the newbies are unsure if Friday is safe. We request a lot of permissions when installing and this does scare a few people off. As I have told you before, we have a very clean and green roadmap for Friday and in no way we can even think of doing dirty things to malign the goodwill we have created. For the same reason, we have till date made sure that every we have responded to every email, tweet or wall post on Friday. Here are why we require these permissions while for Friday.

I believe as a user/customer you have the right to ask questions, and as a creator we are bound to give answers, the success of the relationship depends upon how good the questions & answers are. We'll make sure we do our part well!

Cheers

-Narayan

Hi Guys,

It's been over 50 days since we launched Friday Alpha, and the response has been overwhelming. Thanks a lot for your support and interest. Friday has come a long way through the Alpha. Thanks to your valuable feedbacks, the alpha has served its purpose. We have been able to stabilize the product, validate the idea and get some awesome fans.

We are slowly moving to building the next phase of Friday (Beta) which would be even more cool, with lot of interesting new features, which would make you glitter with joy. We have got a lot of suggestions and feature requests, I don't have to tell you that how serious we are about each of them. 

A lot of people were asking if there are any user guide or tutorial on how to use Friday. I agree that since we have tried to include a lot of features into the app, it has become a little sophisticated. The good thing is that we are getting a new Feedback system up and live, where you can shoot all your suggestions, issues, feedbacks and even thoughts. We will all be listening to you and responding to your thoughts. We are also working on a online user manual, which gives you a crash course on how-to get the best out of Friday.

Keeping bumping up with some tweets and poking us with some likes. This is the easter week and I think our devs deserve a break, hope you won't mind if we don't push an update this Friday. After all it is the Good Friday.

Happy Easter to all of you.

I wouldn't mind if you post a comment or two, suggestions, feedbacks, feature requests all are welcome :)

-Narayan