Kiko

Last Post!

2006-09-15T11:03:27.336044-08:00

Hey folks,

Ross from Tucows here. Just a quick note to let you know that we've moved the Kiko blog to here. This is the last post you'll see at this URL, but certainly not the last post you'll see from us.

I've saved some important information for the click-through about the migration and upgrade activities that we're implementing. Be sure to check out the new blog for full details.

The Buyer of Kiko

2006-09-05T20:13:30.897082-08:00

We're very happy to announce we were bought by Tucows. We think this will be a great home for Kiko Calendar, and we're looking forward to a smooth transition for our users.

Kiko Auction Ends

2006-08-28T12:01:16.694798-08:00

The auction was a success! I can't reveal the identity of the buyer quite yet, but I can say that I think it will be a great home for Kiko Calendar. They plan to keep improving the software and to keep the site open, so don't worry about that.

I think this venture has proven that auctioning off intellectual property assets is a legitimate revenue route for a company to take. Hopefully others will follow us in this, because so many valuable pieces of software wind up simply abandoned instead.

Emmett

Our final post

2006-08-16T15:08:15.546949-08:00

As you might have noticed, we haven't been actively working on the site for a few weeks. We have been busy brainstorming directions that we could possibly take Kiko, and have come up short. As a development team, we've decided we aren't able to support Kiko the way it and its users deserve to be supported, and have decided to find Kiko a new owner, by selling the site through an auction.

To our users, thanks for sticking with us through this whole journey. We've finally gotten around to writing export and delete account features, for those of you with privacy concerns through the transition. We will be sticking around through the transition to make sure Kiko stays up.

Justin

I just wanted to chime in with my own eulogy. - Rich

The original auction was taken down by eBay (see Justin's post) but Kiko has been relisted and the link above updated.

More Maintenance & Reminder Fixes

2006-07-07T05:43:20.001440-08:00

I've just put a number of fixes into production including some major ones for reminders. So if you had some problems with reminders not going out, give them a whirl again.

These fixes are up and running on the new Kiko.com server. I just repointed the DNS to it from the current server, but it could be a couple hours before that change propagates down to your local DNS. The current Kiko.com server will remain online through the weekend. The only hiccup you might see is if your DNS server updates while you are logged into Kiko since sessions aren't shared between servers. I figured its better to do that than to shut down the old Kiko.com server while we wait for the propagation.

This move is one of the steps we are taking to address some of our performance issues over the last few weeks. We'll be monitoring performance carefully and have even planned another server move if necessary. Thanks for your patience.

Rich

Scheduled Maintenance - July 1st

2006-06-29T22:43:17.390144-08:00

Kiko will be down for some server maintenance this Saturday, July 1st from approximately 18:00 - 23:00 GMT. The changes we are making on the server should hopefully alleviate some of the performance issues we have been having lately. I'll post progress updates here on the blog. Thanks for your patience.

23:00 GMT I've been able to do most of my work without taking the site down and when I do I assume it will be less than 30 minutes. I am however running behind schedule and I also screwed up my original GMT math (I meant it to be 1:00 July 2). It will probably be another couple hours but I'll keep you posted.

04:00 GMT The server is back up. There are still a few issues that I will patch up tomorrow, so expect the server to go down around the same time tomorrow. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Rich

New Updates, Bug Fixes

2006-06-22T17:49:27.351777-08:00

We just pushed a new update to the site that fixes Remember Me, as well as several problems with the Event Roll and RSS feeds. Cheers,

Justin

Announcing Kiko Events

2006-05-15T00:49:04.116734-08:00

I'm proud to announce the launch of a new, Kiko-based service, Kiko Events. Kiko Events allows anyone to easily create a public event and share it on their blog, MySpace, Friendster, Hi5, or Xanga via a nifty customizable Flash badge.

Here's an example of what the event badge is like. You can also go to my MySpace profile to see it in action live:

Events created on Kiko Events will appear on your Kiko Calendar. So go out there and publicize your events with Kiko Events!

Justin

Welcome, World

2006-05-02T21:09:27.706445-08:00

Sorry if you were disrupted by the brief Kiko outage this evening. We added German and Italian translations, updated our other translations, and added almost 20 cell carriers. We now support Hutch and Airtel in India, as well as a bunch of smaller carriers in other parts of the world.

Ryan

Reminders Down in IE

2006-04-27T18:27:19.100406-08:00

You may have noticed that you can't set reminders right now in Internet Explorer. That's a bug with our last update, sorry, and we'll have it fixed as soon as we can. I'll let you know here when things are functioning normally again.

[EDIT: This has been fixed for quite a while, sorry I forgot to mention it.]

Ryan

Indian SMS Carriers

2006-04-27T01:54:36.625344-08:00

As a complement to our content internationalization, we've extended our SMS reminder services to more European carriers, a few South American carriers, and our first Indian carriers. As always, if you can't find your carrier on our list or you've tried to validate and it didn't work, drop us some feedback. We'd love to support every carrier who will have us!

EDIT: Now including Hutch!

Ryan

n.b. Those of you in Denmark and The Netherlands are out of luck at the moment; your carriers have banded together to close off their SMS networks from the internet. If you want Kiko reminders and you live in one of those countries--call your carrier!

Localization, translation, tooltip, and event roll

2006-04-26T23:34:07.052931-08:00

We just released a new build of Kiko that we're pretty excited about. Here are the things we've added:

Localization. We've added the functionality to choose the an arbitrary day to start the week on (Monday week starts for non-americans!), as well as the option to express times in 24hr format, and dates in Date/Month/Year format.
Translations. We've added a bunch of languages thanks to the efforts of many volunteers. Because we constantly add text to the interface along with new features, we've decided to make our translation system a wiki, so that our users can add the appropriate text strings to help fill out incomplete translations. Click here for more information on translations.
Tooltip on appointments. There is now a mouseover tooltip on appointments, which should make it a lot easier to find basic information at a glance. We actively decided against having a delay on the tooltip, so that you don't have to wait to get information on an appointment.
Event roll for blogs. You can find it on the sharing tab, the event roll shows your next five upcoming appointments.

Hopefully you'll all find these additions as useful as I do. Cheers,

Justin

Reminders Back Up

2006-04-26T15:04:40.923100-08:00

We'd like to apologize to everyone who didn't get a reminder as promised yesterday or this morning. Our reminder system went down yesterday and we didn't catch it until late this morning. Everything has been fixed for a while now and we're extremely sorry for the inconvenience.

Ryan

Kiko Hacks

2006-04-15T19:26:24.864069-08:00

I'm sure you all look forward to the day when O'Reilly releases a book entitled Kiko Hacks and sells it in bookstores across the country (or at least we do). If you're not familiar with this sense of the term "hacks" don't worry, just check out O'Reilly's justly famous book Google Hacks which explains how to get the most out of the famous search engine. In the meantime, however, here are a couple of "hacks" for Kiko which you will hopefully find useful.

Add events to your calendar automatically, like national or religious holidays, or sporting events.

Click on the "manage feeds" button in the left sidebar, then "add feed"
Open another tab or window, and browse to iCal Share, then search for your country's holidays, religious holidays, academic calendars for your university, sporting events, or whatever you're looking for.
Right click on "subscribe" and choose "copy link location"
Go back to the tab or window that holds your Kiko calendar, and paste the link into the "feed url" box. Then give the feed an identifying name, e.g. "RedSox games" or "National Holidays". Click save.
Repeat as desired. When you go back to your calendar view, after the feed finishes downloading (visible by the spinning icon next to its name), the events from that feed will appear in your calendar. You can toggle visibility by clicking the feed's name or assign them colors, just like labels.

View your desktop iCal calendar from Kiko when you're on the road.

Publish your calendar from iCal to the iCal Exchange
Add the feed to your Kiko calendar as described above

View your Kiko calendar on your Google, Yahoo!, or Netvibes personalized homepage

Click on the "sharing" tab from within Kiko, then on "RSS Feeds"
Right click on the upper right orange icon (for all upcoming appointments), and choose "copy link location"
Navigate to the start page of your choice (Google, Yahoo, etc), choose "add new content" then choose the "RSS feed" option if one is available. Paste the Kiko RSS feed URL into the box.
Choose how many elements you want to be displayed (the number of upcoming appointments you will see). Then hit save and you should see your upcoming appointments appear on your startpage.

Import a calendar from Yahoo! or Outlook to Kiko

Export your calendar to CSV format. If you're unsure how to do that, check out Emmett's directions with screenshots
Use the CSV to iCal converter
Click the "import" link in the upper black bar of Kiko, and upload your iCal file

Get reminders for appointments via email, AIM, or on your mobile phone

Click the "profile" link in the upper black bar in Kiko
Add your contact method and hit "validate"
Go to the validation link which arrives in your email, AIM client, or mobile phone
In the right side of the "profile" tab, choose the medium in which you would like to be reminded of your appointments
When you create an appointment, click the "reminder" button on the right-hand side of the appointment tab, and choose the number of minutes before the appointment at which you would like to be reminded. You may enter values up to several days worth of minutes
Recieve your reminder on your device of choice at the time you specified!

Send visitors to a particular view (month, week, day, or upcoming) of your public calendar

Go to the sharing tab of your calendar while logged in, right click on the public URL icon, and select "copy"
Paste the URL into the email or webpage where you'll be announcing your calendar
At the end of that URL, add "?view=#". Replace the # symbol with 0 for week view, 1 for month view, 2 for day view and 3 for upcoming view
Visitors to your public calendar will see the view you desire

That's all for now, but I will add to this list as the number of Kiko features grows.

Ryan

Love Kiko? Tell the World

2006-04-13T17:08:53.824652-08:00

Our traffic has been through the roof today. We'd like to keep it that way. This is our call to all users who love Kiko to share Kiko with their friends and family, write about Kiko on their blogs, and write their senators about Kiko and how great Kiko is. Ok, I'm kidding about your senators, representatives are fine. But seriously, add your friends as contacts and invite them. Add a badge to your blog to your public calendar. And if you're reading a post on the web about another calendar, feel free to let them know how great Kiko is in the comments.

Justin

Want some feeds for your calendar?

2006-04-13T16:03:23.447860-08:00

Apple has a nice list of iCal feeds that you can use to put your sports team schedules, holidays, etc, into your calendar. They have holiday calendars for a large number of countries, but the sports is mostly limited to the U.S. Still, check it out.

[edit: a lot of the official Apple feeds seem to be out of date, which is sad, plus they obviously cover a fairly limited amount of material. The largest iCal swap site on the web seems to be iCal Share, which is nicely searchable and contains a fantastic amount of material. Although obviously you still have to be careful to load a feed for the current year. We'll try to integrate all of this into Kiko soon so it won't be such a hassle.]

Ryan

supporting more carriers

2006-04-13T15:09:13.416851-08:00

Just wanted to let everyone know that Vodafone Germany has been added in the codebase and will be pushed with our next release, hopefully tomorrow. We'd love to support other carriers, but except for Indian carriers (which we're working on), we need information from you in order to do so. If you would like us to add your carrier, please either send an SMS from your phone to admin [at] kiko [dot] com or call up your carrier/visit their website and let us know the email2sms form for your carrier, which is eg 10digphnum@vtext.com for Verizon customers. Be aware that even if you can't send SMS to email addresses from your phone, there's still a good chance that you can recieve them, so do try the second method. Of course, some carriers unfortunately don't offer this service at all, or make you pay more for it, or don't offer it on prepaid plans, but there's little we can do about that, since it's entirely under their control. We have information, however, which suggests that Vodafone, Tele2, and T-Mobile support this across their networks, so if you are on one of these carriers but in a country we don't currently support, please check your carrier's website or call them and then let us know via the contact/feedback form what you've discovered. We would love to support your carriers as soon as possible.

Ryan

New Mobile Carriers

2006-04-13T13:11:23.435989-08:00

Just wanted to let everyone know that we added a lot more mobile carriers in our last release. The complete list is now:

Alltel
Amena
AT&T
Bell Mobility (Canada)
Boost Mobile
Cingular
Comviq
Metrocall
MTN South Africa
Netcom Norway
Nextel
O2
Orange
Rogers Canada
SFR France
Sprint
SunCom
Sunrise
T-Mobile Austria
T-Mobile Germany
T-Mobile UK
T-Mobile US
Tele2 Latvia
Tele2 Sweden
Telefonica Movistar
Telenor
Telus Mobility
TIM Brasil
TIM Italy
Ukraine Mobile Communications
Verizon
Virgin Mobile
Vodafone Italy
Vodafone Japan
Vodafone South Africa
Vodafone Spain
Vodafone UK

Of course, you have to be able to recieve SMS from the internet in order to get reminders from us. We'll be adding more carriers today and tomorrow, especially Indian carriers but also Vodafone German, and keep the requests coming.

Ryan

Feeds and Sharing tab

2006-04-12T16:57:58.414347-08:00

We've just released a bunch of new features to the site that we've been hacking on for the past week. Here's the list with what's new:

RSS and WebCal (iCal) feed consumption! To add a feed to your calendar, just click Manage Feeds link on the Feeds box. Click Add Feed and enter a title and URL for your feed. The feed will start appearing on your calendar, you can toggle it on and off like a label. Try it with upcoming.org's appointment feeds for your own web 2.0 mashup!
We added a Sharing tab. The Sharing tab contains code for badges for your blog, your RSS feeds, and links for your public and private views on your calendar. We'll be adding more things soon, including an eventroll to display your upcoming appointments on your blog, and a link generator to produce RSS feeds of arbitrary label and permission combinations.
The client is now caching much more data than it was previously, which means a shorter loading time when moving around on your calendar!

Hopefully everyone will find the new features useful. We've only tested feeds on a couple different types of RSS feeds, so let us know if you're trying to consume a feed and doesn't seem to show up on your calendar.

Justin

Improvements Coming Soon

2006-04-10T00:06:48.494603-08:00

Just wanted to let you all know that while we haven't pushed any major changes to the site this past week, we're hard at work on a bunch of new features. In the next patch, which should come out this week, we'll have support for consuming RSS feeds and webcal feeds, and a new sharing tab with all sorts of badges and other goodies.

In the next few weeks we should also be rolling out tasks, and a new sub-site to handle group invitations better, kvite.com.

Justin

Drag & Drop and UI improvements

2006-04-03T16:49:25.959904-08:00

We've just pushed out a new release with a number of major improvements:

Dragging appointments now "snaps to grid". Now you'll always know where the appointment will land when you release the mouse button. As an added bonus dragging appointments should now be MUCH faster.
Labels, contacts and appointments can now be dragged to a trash can in the upper right of the page to be deleted.
A simple version of the calendar interface that hides all the sidebars and just shows you your calendar. You'll can toggle this mode by clicking sidebars on/off in the upper right hand corner
I've tweaked the interface to hopefully make it a bit cleaner. All the links that were previously to the right of the quick create, along with the help on/off toggle, and the aforementioned sidebars toggle have been moved to a black ribbon across the top. I hope this will make things less cluttered as we continue to add more features.

That's about it, enjoy.

Rich

The Night's Work

2006-04-01T03:58:07.716740-08:00

You can all thank Emmett for fixing the awful bug where all appointments entered in quick-create for April would show up on the same day in May. If you clicked that link you'd see that we have a new bug reports system set up on the new Rails app 16 Bugs which lets you see what bugs we have open and what we're working on at any given time. After we get the kinks worked out, we'll probably let you file bugs directly, too. For now, let us know via the feedback form if you know of anything that isn't there but should be.

Ryan

Kiko on MacOS

2006-03-30T16:25:39.652218-08:00

If you have tried to access Kiko in Safari, you probably realized that much of the functionality, including proper internationalization, is not present. We're working on Safari support, but right now we only fully support Internet Explorer 6.0+ and Firefox 1.0+. If you're a Mac user, however, and you want to stick with the pretty Mac widget set, or you bought a new MacBookPro and Firefox isn't available as a universal binary yet, there is a solution: a Mozilla project which uses the same Gecko rendering engine as Firefox but with Mac-native widgets. It's called Camino, and it's available today in its new 1.0 release as a universal binary. Try it out today, and enjoy the rendering support of Firefox with the speed and beauty of Safari, for a better experience on Kiko and the web in general.

Ryan

Month View

2006-03-30T15:26:05.747247-08:00

If you've noticed that month-view doesn't have labels or drag-and-drop right now, you need not worry. We temporarily disabled that functionality in our last patch in order to keep speed up, but we're presently optimizing the code and we'll have them back in the next day or two.

And keep those international SMS forms coming, we'd love to support every carrier on the planet :-).

Ryan

International SMS Reminders

2006-03-30T02:36:40.316756-08:00

Due to the overwhelming response we've had from European users, we've changed our SMS system to accomodate carriers all over the world. You can now input a mobile phone and pick a carrier (tell us if yours isn't listed), and you should be able to receive SMS on that phone.

We've also rolled out a bunch of optimizations for IE and FF, which should drastically improve the speed of the calendar, as well as a few more bug fixes. And now, since it's 2:30AM here in Boston, I'm going to a well earned sleep...

Justin