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!
19 Oct 2012
Last month has been truly electrifying! We joined our friends at
Yakaz in their office space, we participated in many
events... and most exciting of all, we spent days and nights reworking the
product! Today we are really proud to present you the result of this time well
spent!
I know I told some of you beta3 would be the last, but we could not ignore
your excellent feedback. So here comes Algolia Search beta4, a true revolution
(I hope this is not trademarked!) in mobile search!
Here come the major improvements:
- A completely reworked API that we just love to use everywhere. The time to fully understand the library has been reduced to nearly nothing thanks to all your feedback. We are proud to have the easiest to use search library ever made!
- A completely rewritten documentation with detailed API and step-by-step tutorials. You should be able to make your first queries in a matter of minutes!
- Easy highlight for multiple fields queries. A bit cryptic? Stay with me... just imagine a Contact application where you can search for your contact by any field, i.e., name, company, address or even notes. Algolia Search now provides easy-to-use highlighting of any matching words. It is even able to generate a snippet when the text is too long. Check out the tutorials to learn more! Highlighting relevant results just became child's play!
- A greatly improved out-of-the-box relevance. Our mission is to simplify search: we want the best possible relevance by default so you can forget these long hours of tuning :)
But that's not all, many smaller improvements were also included in this
release:
- Support of advanced queries. Take again our tutorial contact application, wouldn't it be great to be able to search by initials? You can now implement this cool feature in a couple of minutes without any headache on relevance tuning.
- Support for ARC and no ARC. In the previous beta we added an iOS version for people that do not use Automatic Reference Counting (ARC). We now have only one version that supports projects with and without ARC. If you do not use ARC, all objects received from Algolia Search are autoreleased.
- Support for user objects backward compatibility. As the index is also an objects store, you can modify your object members and still read older indexes! It is very easy to implement, just check the tutorials.
- The release also fixes a few bugs that we discovered during your and our intensive testing.
It would not have been possible without the help of our many beta testers,
thank you all! Special thanks to Kris,
Hoa and
Thomas whose guidance has been priceless.
So... what's next? Many things! This time I really believe this is the last
beta. The final release is just around the corner. Of course, we appreciate
your feedback nonetheless and always will! You can also expect a new website
and a few apps in the app store! Who said a contact app?
Stay tuned!
