Copy, Paste, Click
Xobni users rejoice! One of the top user-requested features has been implemented. You can now select text, copy, and paste text in the Xobni display. You can also click on links that appear in emails viewed in the Xobni sidebar.

We are approaching a point where you can do almost everything you need to do with email in the Xobni pane. Did you know you can resize the Xobni pane? Might as well slide it over to the left a bit further

Jump to conversation
Thanks, Aamir, for adding this!. I didn’t even realize how much I wanted this feature until I had it working on my Xobni. Now when you find an email using Xobni search you can view the existing email or view the entire conversation. This is HUGE! You can now find a message using Xobni search and quickly view the individual email or the entire threaded conversation.

Message box
Some of you are reading this blog entry thanks to this new feature. The Xobni message box is a really easy way for us to communicate with our users within the Xobni sidebar. A small box pops up with a message like, “check out this blog post about our newest features.” We just like to be able to say hi.

Right click menus
We’ve added a lot of quick functionality in right click menus all across the Xobni UI. You’ll probably find a few that I won’t even mention here. Here are a few of my favorites:

• Copy Bryan’s info
You can now quickly grab a contact’s name, phone number, and email address by clicking anywhere in the top section of the Xobni sidebar (above “people connected to bryan”).

This is super useful for introducing people or sharing your contact’s info with a trusted coworker or friend. Notice: if you have multiple email addresses for a contact Xobni shows the email addresses in the order of most used, with the most used address at the top. Try this feature next time you need to share someone’s contact info with a coworker.

• Copy availability
Users like how easy we make it to share your availability. Now you can copy your availability to the clipboard and paste it into a reply message.

• Copy email address/compose email
If you need to quickly get the email addresses of a bunch of people in Xobni’s list of connected people you’ll like this new right click menu. Our new right click menu allows you to copy any contact’s email address into the clipboard.

• Open email containing attachment
Xobni makes it extremely easy to find old attachments. However, sometimes it is nice to be able to open the conversation that contained the attachment. Now you can easily do that with our new right click menu.

Over the past week we have shipped invites to more than 1,700 people who have signed up for the Xobni beta. Our software is getting better day by day, so the speed at which our invitations are given out will only accelerate in the coming weeks. . If you haven’t signed up yet, please do so here.

Learning from beta users
We are continuing to work closely with our early beta users, many of which have been using Xobni since our 12 hour open download three months ago. Thank you so much for your help! Our whole team thanks you!

Working with our users over the past three months has helped us to make our features more intuitive, our UI simpler, and our performance better. And with such a diverse user base, we’ve been able to validate Xobni’s compatibility with multiple configurations of Windows and Office.

Getting priority access
We continue to have a very active priority badge program. Our priority badge users put the Xobni beta badge on their blog or web site in exchange for faster access to the Xobni beta. We are now sending priority invites within a few days of receiving a request. Get quick beta access by signing up here.

Inviting friends
A lot of users are asking us how they can share Xobni with their coworkers and friends. We will make this very easy from within the Xobni application soon. For now you can invite friends to join the beta by entering their email addresses in the grey box on the Xobni Download page.

We will continue to roll out Xobni Insight to new users over the next several weeks. If you haven’t signed up but want to try it, do so now – email happiness awaits.

One morning after some deep meditation, the Xobni team woke up and realized that not everyone uses Xobni on the same Dell Inspirons and IBM ThinkPads that we all use.  Matt’s head almost exploded from this realization.  True story.

We knew that testing had to be done on the machines our users were actually using.  This involves more than simply doing testing on virtual machines, which we have used since day 1 (for non-techies: virtual machines are software simulations of computers commonly used in quality assurance engineering). Instead we needed computers that have all the pre-configured bloatware, special packs of Microsoft Office, extra restore partitions, and all of the rest of that great stuff that slows down your computer to a crawl.

With this goal in mind, we searched Craigslist for machines that were 1-2 years old, and better represented the types of machines that our users were using.  Behold, I present the Pirate Lab!  Or Ninja Lab, depending on which group you’d rather fall into.

What is that bizarre thing in the corner?

Oh yes friends, we go get hungry here in the Xobni office.  While the kitchen is stocked with goodies to eat, sometimes the kitchen is just too far away.  Brownies, anyone?

If any users out there have extra old laptops that they’d like to donate to our lab please send them to 211 Sutter St. Suite 300, San Francisco, CA 94108 c/o Pirate QA Lab.  We’ll send you a free Xobni shirt in exchange!  You’ll also maintain the honor of knowing that you had a small part in changing the world of email.