Onolog

Build Week/Launch Party Roundup

It was such as great week, last week, that it’s taken us this long to fully recover!

Huge thanks to everyone who came by our stand at Build. We had a chance to show off Onotate to some of the best web masters and designers in the world and got some great feedback!

We also handed out some promo codes with extended free trials, with the chance to win a free account for a year and provided some free accounts for prizes at awesome Standardistas’ Open Book Exam.

After the fantastic Build conference and associated carnage (drink, fr00tball), we just about managed to hold it together long enough to host the Onotate Launch Party, last Thursday night, after An Evening With Threadless.

It was, by necessity, a fairly chilled affair in 21 Social (Thanks Stephen for looking after us!) and despite the mad weather and bomb scare in Belfast, causing mayhem with the traffic, we still managed to get a great turn out of Web Designers, Internet Celebrities and local Rock Stars.

One of the highlights of the night were the awesome Onotate cupcakes.  There were even some Internet Celebrity lookalike cupcakes…all kindly baked by @digitalmoomin. 

We thought it would be fun to print some websites to stick up on the wall for onotating with our beloved stickies and asked people to “leave us a message”. Perfect craic after a few drinks…you’d think!  See for yourself (We had to sensor some of it in the end).

Now it’s back to porridge. Non-alcoholic porridge!  Based on the feedback from our users, we’ve been tightening up some of the interface.  We’ll put a post together with updates on the app itself within the next week.

Thanks again to everyone who came along to our stand at Build and to our party. Hope to see you all again at Build next year.

We will leave you with this flattering portrait of Build Conf organiser Andy Good, inked at the Onotate Launch Party by the lovely Jessica Hische!

Onotate Launch Party at Build

This week, will see the best web designers in the world congregate in Belfast for Build Conference.  Thus, it seems a fitting time and place to launch Onotate, the best web app in the world for web designers :)

We have joined some big names and are proud to be sponsoring Build this year. We have also (along with many other Jeebols) donated some Onotate Team accounts as prizes for the Open Book Exam, being held by the Standardistas, on Tuesday (9th) night (18:30 @ at 21 Social, Cathedral Quarter, Belfast).

It should be noted that we will be taking part and intend to win the Open Book Exam!

The Party

On Thursday (11th) night, after Fr00tball earlier in the day, and An Evening with: Threadless, we are officially launching Onotate with a bit of a get together.

We have booked the Cigarette Girl - the top floor of 21 Social (The floor above where the Standardistas Open Book Exam is being held) from 21:00 onwards.

There will be great music, nibbles, cupcakes and a free bar.  The party is open to Build pass holders, invite only VIPs and press.

So it’s going to be a busy week!  There may even be a few more surprises.  Listen out for announcements and keep an eye on @onotate on Twitter. If you see us at Build, come and say hi!

Here we go!

It’s been a long time in the making, but last week we opened Onotate to the public.  This was done with the help of our awesome new website, onotate.com, where you can sign up right away. A beta invite is no longer required!

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the hundreds of beta testers who have been using Onotate for the last few months, and providing us with invaluable feedback. Without you, Onotate wouldn’t be half the app it is now. Hopefully we will continue to receive great feedback from all of our users, as we evolve the application around their needs.

Onotate is free for 30 days, followed by a small monthly subscription.  During this period you will discover a great new way to manage your design process. To show our appreciation to all our super helpful beta testers, we have extended this trial quite a bit.

For the next couple of weeks we will fine tune and tighten up the UX as much as possible. We really want everyone on Onotate providing feedback to help us develop the app into the perfect concept sharing tool.

Check out the new site now, sign up for free and let us know what you think!

Beta Testers are Gooooo!

We would like to begin by apologising for the lack of progress updates for Onotate. It’s been a busy few months of tinkering, hard thinking & coffee abuse but we are finally rolling out our private beta release. Anyone who signed up to be notified of updates will soon find an invite waiting for them in their inbox!

To date we haven’t released much information about what exactly Onotate does so now would be a good time to divulge a little bit about how it works and why we created it.

The creative process for a design project is never simple, most projects go through numerous stages and iterations before completion. Feedback or approval is often sought at various times throughout the process from many different sources. After a while it begins to become tedious and challenging to effectively manage the creation and iteration of several stages of design concepts. Most designers will also have more than one project on going at any given time, making it essential for them to stay on top of their workload, but still distribute and collaborate as necessary.

This is when the real challenge begins: Emailing off a concept to one person, presenting a print out to another. Idea’s get thrown around, changes are suggested, the design you worked so hard on could be rejected in mere seconds and then it’s back to the drawing board. Keeping on top of all these things can be a challenge at the best of times. Interpreting someone’s vague critique even more so. How do you deal with these misinterpretations, and expectancies not being met?

As a web design company ourselves we struggled with this and kept thinking, surely there must be a better way? We looked around the web and despite the plethora of annotation apps, none did it the way WE wanted, so we took it upon ourselves to create a solution for our own problem.

From this Onotate was born… an app created by designers for designers.

Built to help us manage the stages of the creative process, present our work and most importantly add in-line annotations & moods to help express opinions and emotions in relation to specific design elements. Furthermore we have developed a system which allows the upload and presentation of multiple pages to be quick and painless.

Onotate does all this and more, we really love the application we created, it’s solved our problem and hopefully it will solve yours too. If you are one of the lucky few to have already received a beta invite then we would appreciate any feedback or bug reports to help us get everything just right.

If you are still refreshing your inbox in anticipation then we have included a sneaky peek to wet your appetite!

And the Winner Is….

It’s been two and a half month’s since we launched the Onotate the World competition. Our little sticky notes have travelled the globe and popped up in some of the most unexpected of places! It’s been great fun watching them come in and we thank you all for taking some time to join in with the fun. We took into account a number of factors to decide which onotation should win the iPad.

So without further ado, the winner is….

@leemunroe - Verzasca Valley, Switzerland.

Congratulations to Lee Munroe! You will soon be the proud owner of a shiny new iPad. Lee took it upon himself to attach an Onotate sticky to his chest and bungee jump off the famous Verzasca Dam, as made famous in the James Bond film Goldeneye. He also uploaded a video of the jump to prove he didn’t chicken out at the last minute. We’re considering asking Guinness World Records to induct Lee into their record books for the world’s highest Onotate sticky/human tandem bungee jump.

At the beginning of the competition Lee managed to score a special Onotate moment with the Godfather of Web Design Jeffrey Zeldman at SXSW. Hopefully the Onotate app will excite Mr. Zeldman a little bit more than it seems our sticky notes did!

The ten runners up are listed below in no particular order, if you are one of the lucky few; Keep an eye on your inbox for your reward.

@haakon_d - Oslo, Norway.

@problogdesign - Belfast, Northern Ireland.

@clarksynergie - Belfast, Northern Ireland.

@jeffburg - Munich, Germany.

@akrabat - Worcester, England.

@carolinepixels - Belfast, Northern Ireland.

@benbuchan - Aberdeen, Scotland.

@himynameisciara - Belfast, Northern Ireland.

@kylesaric - Aberdeen, Scotland.

@iwsayers - Ballywalter, Northern Ireland.

Even though the competition is over we will be leaving the map up so you can keep Onotating the World. It’s now time for us to focus are attention on the release of the Onotate application for which their will be progress updates in the very near future!

Your Real World Onotations & Extended Competition Deadline.

It’s been over a month since we asked you to set about onotating the real world and be in with a chance of winning an iPad. Since then we have had some great onotations popping up around the globe.

Here are a few of your onotations so far.

@akrabat - Worcester, England.

@clarksynergie - Belfast, Northern Ireland.

@leemunroe - Austin, Texas, USA.

@haakon_d - Oslo, Norway.

@adammachin - Aberdeen, Scotland.

@catty_ - Gibraltar

@cimota - Belfast, Northern Ireland.

@dhkirk - New York, USA.

We want to thank everyone for all the fantastic entries so far, but remember the competition isn’t over yet. There is now even more time to Onotate the real world as we are extending the competition closing date from 2nd May 2010 to 2nd June 2010 due to the delayed release of the Apple iPad in the UK.

Have you onotated yet?

If not request your sticky notes now or make your own and start Onotating the world!

Onotate the world

Whilst designing and building Onotate we often go off on tangents and this was one…

Why not onotate the real world, rather than just our design mockups?

Imagine we could express our mood or feelings about things we see in the real world, whether it be liking that morning coffee or disliking your boring desk at work (obviously you will think of more exciting things) slap a coloured sticky on it and proclaim your feeling towards it - Onotate it!

We thought this was such a great idea, we actually went and got some coloured sticky’s printed, just like our logo!

We decided to create a competition out of it and offer a prize for the most memorable & creative real world onotations. 

Here’s how it works

1. Follow and tweet @onotate to get some onotate sticky notes or make your own!
2. Snap a photo of a sticky in the real world, make it creative!
3. Post a geotagged tweet @onotate with one of our hastags (#like #meh #dislike) depending on the note, so you choose the note which reflects the mood towards your onotation.

All tweets will be shown on http://onotate.com/world/. Also geotagged tweets will appear on the map. Fun eh?!

And that’s it! You can enter as many times as you like.

So… now you’re curious, you’re probably thinking ‘well what’s in it for me?’

The Prize - an iPad

The best submission will win a 16GB iPad with Wi-Fi.

Ten runners up will also receive Onotate related prizes.

Give me some stickies NOW!

OKAY!

Some of our friends are at SXSW. If you see them, ask nicely and they might give you some stickies to use. Otherwise tweet @onotate and we will send some your direction!

What are you waiting for? Start Onotating the world! and HAVE FUN!

We will soon be launching a fun competition to win a much sought after handheld device. Stay tuned for more details.

Using Comic Sans again…. (via @shylands)

Sadly we cant go to #SXSW #:( But we have friends who are going with some @onotate goodness that you won’t want to miss this. Stay tuned!