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Weird things sometimes happen. There has been a mobile Zootool version for iPhone from early on and it worked pretty well. I never had a chance to develop something for Android or any other smartphone though, because I simply don’t own any other phone and so I assumed that it won’t work on them. Quite a few users asked for an Android version and I always had to tell them that there is none until today I found this post on GetSatisfaction.

So fortunately there is a working mobile version of Zootool for Android (and probably any other smartphone with a decent browser) since today the beginning :) Go and check it out: http://zootool.com/mobile

For those who signed up later or just didn’t realized, I really messed this one up! I added email notifications for comments and likes a few weeks ago and it failed completely. The comment notifications actually were a cool thing, but you couldn’t turn them off and the like notifications turned out to be super annoying. Here’s some more background on the whole thing.

Email notifications are pretty standard at the moment. You get notified about each and every move from your friends on Facebook, you get notified about new followers on Twitter, new checkins on Gowalla and there are countless more examples from other services and social networks. Some people like them, some people hate them, but after all they are a great way to engage people and build a nice and vital community.

We actually had notifications on Zootool right from the start whenever some user follows some other user and vice versa. This worked great! I then planned to add notifications for our comment system, because a lot of people complained that they never get to know when somebody else posts a comment on an item in their zoo. When I added that feature it really helped to get into conversation and a lot more comments got posted. I then became a little too enthusiastic and added notifications for whenever someone adds an item to their zoo. In this case all of the users who also had that item in their zoo got notified, which meant that up to 80 or 90 mails were being sent whenever someone added a very popular item to their zoo. Not great at all! I quickly added notification settings to the settings window, where you could turn off each type of notifications but I messed this up as well and it didn’t work at all. Being a one-man design/development team sometimes means that the only beta tester for small new features is, hmm, well, you :) and sometimes this just is not enough.

All I can say is that I will be much more careful with new features in the future to avoid stuff like this and I hope that most of you aren’t too annoyed by this after all.

To make a long story short: notifications are back in all their glory and they should at least work the way now they should have right from the beginning. Only the first user who adds an item to their zoo will be notified whenever somebody else likes that item as well and all the email settings will work now, so you can switch that stuff off if you don’t like it.

Alfred is a great quicklaunch application for Mac OS X, which is ultra fast and offers great features to extend its search. It’s pretty easy to add a personal Zootool search to Alfred, so this is how to do it:

Get Alfred
It’s free and in a public beta at the moment.
http://www.alfredapp.com/

Go to “Preferences” > “Features” > “Custom Searches”

Add a new custom search with the following values

Here’s the search URL you just need to copy and paste:

http://zootool.com/zoo/search:{query}

This will allow you to directly jump to your Zoo and search for a given searchword from Alfred.

Add another custom search

Here’s the second search URL:

http://zootool.com/user/{query}

This will allow you to jump to Zootool user profiles.

Try it out
Hit your Alfred keyboard shortcut (the default is alt+space) to bring up the Alfred console. Simply type in the Zootool shortcuts you just entered (zt for search, zu for user profiles) followed by the search word or username you choose.

Since Apple finally released their shiny new Safari Extensions at the WWDC, it was clear that we need such a thingy for Zootool. Fortunately developing extensions for Safari really is a pleasure and so I am very happy to introduce our new Zootool Extension today!!

This has also been a very good chance to clean up the browser section of the “Tools” page, which has been an absolute mess.

I’d like to thank Elliott Pogue, who came up with a great solution to migrate the bookmarklet and the brilliant idea to link the Zootool button to the Zoo when you click it and hold down shift.

I also want to thank the awesome alpha tester crew which helped me to debug the first versions.

There’s still the plan to include the Aquarium into that extension, but after a first try, which failed completely because of the popup blocker, I want to come up with something better later.

I hope you like the extension!!

It’s is like a drug for me to check all the new stuff on Zootool every day, because it just feels great that more and more people seem to get some use out of it. There couldn’t be a better push to keep on improving and developing the whole thing.

It gets even better when I see people writing about it or adding the Zootool Batch to their blogs and it’s amazing to see more and more developers playing with the API. So I wanted to take the chance to build a list of of great stuff people did so far. If you’ve got anything which is missing here, please just drop a comment.

APPS

Zootool Offline – Backup all your images, videos, documents and links on your harddrive or your Dropbox

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MyTinyCloud – A nice web app for the iPhone which makes it easy to access all your favorite online accounts and sites.

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ZOOTOOL BADGE

Jon Hicks’ Journal – The Hicksdesign Journal is especially well known for the awesome articles about icon design. The Zootool Badge has a perfect place in the sidebar together with a great implementation of last.fm’s badge.

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Project 1809 – new German blog with a slick implementation of the badge and an awesome blog theme.

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Lars Igl – Lars has built his own badge with the API to get some more information about his entries and added a nice zoom effect from Matt Bango.

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ICON SETS

Social Media Icons – a nice icon set from Paul Robert Lloyd

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Addictive Flavour – famous icon set by Oliver Twardowski. Beside the included Zootool icon he also did a special wooden icon, which is really, really nice!

I slowly try to improve the API and make it more powerful, so today I added a tag filter for all user items and a new method to get a list of external profiles.

To filter the user item list by tag, simply add a new key/value pair to your query string (i.e. tag=design) and the list will be filtered. It should work for public entries as well as for private stuff.

To request a list of external user profiles is super straight forward:

http://zootool.com/api/users/profiles/?username={username}&apikey={apikey}

and you will get an array like this:

Array
(

[0] => Array
(
[slug] => brightkite
[url] => http://brightkite.com/people/bastian
[title] => Brightkite
)

[1] => Array
(
[slug] => dribbble
[url] => http://dribbble.com/players/bastianallgeier
[title] => Dribbble
)

[2] => Array
(
[slug] => flavors
[url] => http://flavors.me/bastianallgeier
[title] => Flavors.me
)
…

)

Read more about it in the docs

Public entries from users can already be filtered by type or you can search through them, but from today on you can also filter them by tag with new smarter urls:

Show all my entries with the tag “design”
zootool.com/user/bastian/tag:design

Show all my images with the tag “iphone”
zootool.com/user/bastian/images/tag:iphone

Show all my videos with the tag “iphone” and the searchword “game”
zootool.com/user/bastian/videos/tag:iphone/search:game

To use the new URLs with your profile simply replace my stupid username with yours :)

i.e.: zootool.com/user/yourusername/tag:iphone

All those URLs can easily be made into tiny URLs:

zoo.tl/bastian/tag:design
zoo.tl/bastian/images/tag:iphone
zoo.tl/bastian/videos/tag:iphone/search:game

This opens up a lot of new possibilities to share stuff with your friends and to use your profile as a social media hub. This also makes room for further improvements to the profile pages, which I hope to add soon.

For years, ads on the web have been something evil to me – ugly, annoying waste of space which you should avoid to click. When I saw Fusion ads the first time, it was kind of a revelation. I don’t remember the page where I saw them first, but I remember that I refreshed the page about 30 times, just to see and click on each ad. I liked the design, I liked the tiny little banners and most important: I liked the products.

I knew that if we ever wanted to put ads on Zootool they should be Fusion ads. You maybe saw the little rhino placeholder in the sidebar over the last weeks. We are so proud to tell you today that this placeholder is filling up with fresh Fusion ads from now on. We hope you like them as much as we do and check out some of those awesome products.

Today is a very special day, because the first app using our API has been released by Imprbbble and best of all it’s damn useful. “Zootool Offline” downloads and backups your Zoo so you can access your images and grab the links to your pages, documents and videos wherever you are. It’s only available for Mac, so sorry to all the Windows or Linux users out there, but for all the Mac aficionados this is an awesome way to backup your Zoo and to get offline access to your precious images and links. You should definitely go and check that out: http://imprbbble.com/zootool/mac/

As you might have noticed there are a lot of missing screenshots on Zootool lately. To be honest this whole screenshot generation thing is so much harder as it seems. We got all the screenshots from Websnapr before last month. Their monthly price was fair, but their quality and speed was weak. They even used IE7 to render the screenshots. (isn’t it ironic to lock out all IE users with Zootool and to have screenshots generated with this crappy browser?)

I then found http://webthumb.bluga.net. Their service is really, really good, ultra fast and they at least use Firefox 3 on Linux to render the shots. But on the negative side they are very expensive. When we introduced the import feature, about 80,000 bookmarks got imported within 3 days. That was far beyond our expectations. I won’t talk about any numbers here, but believe me that the bill for those screenshots did hurt. I was even forced to take the import down until there’s a better solution. This is really bad, because I thought I I finally found an appropriate service in webthumb to handle that stuff. To introduce a much requested feature and to take it offline a few days later is not exactly the way things should be either.

But there’s light at the end of the tunnel. We are finally working on our own solution, which probably is the only way to go. It gives us the chance to build a really great screenshot service, which will keep up with the speed, even when people import 80,000 bookmarks and which is tailored to our needs without costing the world.

I hope for your patience in the meantime and promise that all missing screenshots will be regenerated as soon as possible!!