Our sincere apologies for the confusion - our launch got jumped 48 hours by a press mixup and we've been working all night to get everything in place as quickly as possible.
Greplin search hasn't changed - it is still availalble as Cue Search - both in our app and on our website. Web access is hard to get to for the next few minutes - right now it's accessible at https://www.cueup.com/login (will be linked from cueup.com momentarily). In the iPhone app, the search functionality has been streamlined and is available as a tab.
We still care about search a lot. It's the foundation of all the new features, and it's critical to the long term goals of our service.
If you encounter any issues, as always, we're quick to respond at support@cueup.com
Robby, congrats on the new launch-- it looks great!
Zero-click search is really impressive when it works [edit: actually, this is zero-search search: you get results without searching, simply based on context]. I think greplin can make it work with heuristics + usage data over the last few years :-)
Showing not just what's next, but context (when, where is it? what emails are related?) makes this really cool-- something that can very quickly form a habit, perhaps.
PS: why show Sunrise and Sunset times?(first screenshot on landing screen) Do people actually search for that? Personally, I don't care-- the day starts when I wake up.
All I can say is - wow. It pulls in a lot more information than I thought it would, which makes this truly useful.
It pulled in an upcoming package delivery I have from Amazon, put in on my cue for the estimated date, and provided a link to the package tracker.
It showed me a friend's upcoming birthday from facebook, and provided a link to his phone number. And in related, it summarized every communication we've had together over email, and showed me his facebook and linkedin summaries.
Wow. This took Greplin's core indexing technology to a whole new level.
About sunrise and sunset: that's a more interesting subject that it sounds like at first. The sunrise and sunset times have a few purposes, mostly unrelated to telling you about the sun. First, they make it clear at a glance that you're looking at a visual representation of a single day's events. It's surprisingly non-obvious how to make a user interface's purpose obvious! Second, they give context to the timing of events by subtly matching them up with the day-night cycle; despite the advent of artificial lighting, our species is still instinctively diurnal, and this is a great source of intuitions about time. Third, they look really nice without being visually confusing or clashing with the color palette.
Oh, and they also tell you when the sun rises and sets. I guess that's cool, too.
Interesting. I've seen a few other apps do this too and always wondered. Well, I think shading the UI might be a better hint, but this is definitely not something I'd thought of before. Thank you.
Seems like "Greplin team scraps Greplin, launches new calendar app" would be a more meaningful title. As a side note, did they automatically unregister their application from my facebook, gmail, twitter, whatever, or do I have to do that myself?
UPDATE: Greplin still has access to my google account. http://screencast.com/t/c8mQiZMo wtf, greplin? I authorized for a specific purpose and you shut down the app; why are you still holding the keys to my google account?
Greplin is by no means scrapped. All of that search functionality still exists and is an integral part of the app and website. Think of it as adding a new feature ("What's next") and that being the default screen, with search only one tap away.
Also, in what circumstance would it ever make sense for a rational business to revoke your credentials and assume that because they've added functionality you just might not want to use the product anymore? They should just cut off all access and make you go through the whole process of re-enabling it?
That sounds like you're demanding seppuku, and I think you're overreacting quite significantly.
I went to greplin.com and was redirected to a cue splash page with no indication that greplin still existed (a link has since been added). Between this redirect away from of greplin.com and the link title "greplin becomes cue," it seemed clear that greplin was no more. It turns out greplin is not scrapped, they have added a link back to it, so you are right I was premature in expecting them to revoke permissions.
That said, if they had in fact replaced a web service with an iPhone app, that would be a fundamentally different product that I did not sign up for, and I would expect them to yield my permissions and start over, or send an email with "click to transfer permissions to the new product." What if they "pivot" to become an email marketer? Would my permissions ride along there? You are right in this case, however.
I definitely get where you're coming from. I don't know the full story, but it seems they had an embargo snafu (code for: one of the reporters that was under embargo conveniently forgot they weren't supposed to post until 2 days from now).
It's got to be an extremely stressful situation that was not of their own making, and I think we could all cut them some slack while they scramble to get everything ready 48 hours earlier than anticipated! :)
Some very interesting issues with iOS 6. Apple went and implemented a method in NSMutableArray with the same signature as one of my category methods. Hilarity ensued, but also a broken home screen.
I'm actually really thrilled that the try-catch was able to help the app recover correctly.
"Pivot and Expand" is a thing. A real thing real people do when they think they have great technology that needs to be represented to reach a larger audience.
Surprised nobody has mentioned CloudMagic as an alternative to Greplin. Searches are much faster than Greplin and it has native Android Apps and extensions.
The landing page looks nice, but it really doesn't tell me anything about the product.
Only if I pay close attention to the screenshots can I infer that it's a calendar that gets information from multiple sources, and that tries to bring up the relevant information.
But why would I need an app different from the default Calendar app? Sure you get the relevant info for my lunch from OpenTable and from my flight. But really, that doesn't happen very often that I have in the same day a lunch and a flight with info that just a calendar event wouldn't have. For the most part, I can just pull to get the notification center and most of the same info is there.
Side note: I find it more and more common to have that kind of beautiful landing page that are too much about the design and not enough about delivering information.
> The landing page looks nice, but it really doesn't tell me anything about the product.
Agreed. I'd never heard of Greplin or Cue and all I got from this site was 'just some sort of calendar app'. Still don't know what either one actually does.
Does anyone know why the original Greplin product didn't take off?
We have more of our data siloed in cloud services like Evernote. We need a way to search them and Google is too distracted with G+ to enter this space. So why weren't more of us using Greplin?
My guess is "location." How do you go to a separate app to search the content of your email, fb, etc... It is counter-intuitive. Greplin, IMO, should have a browser plugin and wherever you searched, be it Google, Email, FB it would give you its results on a sidebar. Heck,give me an additional search button right next to Google's: "SEARCH GREPLIN," or "GREP IT."
Color me disappointed. The blog makes some nebulous claim about Cue retaining Greplin's features, but makes no specific assertations about the future of search. If you're retaining those features, why have you made them inaccessible? The Greplin website redirects to Cue, so I can't search now. If search is indeed gone, so be it, but I can't help but wonder why you've cut me off from your service before the new UI is ready for me to use.
Search is still there and still a huge part of the product. I think they've come to the realization that the future of personal search is in making it so you don't have to use search in the first place -- 9 times out of ten the information will already be there in front of you when you open the app.
You might want to perform a search a few times a month, but you'll want to use the new "What's next" view a few times a day.
As someone who never used Greplin, I'll focus on what I do like: I found the layout quite creative. The top images of the iPhone remain fully scaled to your browser width, which means the menu below is only revealed when you scroll down. Thus, no matter what the browser size, you're always only focusing on the photos and features of the service, until you scroll down. Quite clever.
I can't comment on the product since I never used it, but the rebrand surprises me...
Greplin is novel, short, spellable (pick up grepplin.com and greppelin.com just in case), googleable, defensible, and clever. By most standards it's a great trademark.
Cue is common, heavily overloaded, unsearchable, ambiguously spelled ("like, the letter 'q'?), and you don't even have the domain name.
I haven't tried it yet, but this has amazing potential. It has become a service that not only searches all your stuff, but makes sense of it and displays it in an intelligent way.
Shame about Greplin - I didn't use it particularly regularly, but I loved that it was there if I ever wanted to delve back to something I half-remembered, like a long-lost tweet.
Greplin never worked right for me, couldn't find anything not in the inbox.
On the other hand, my copy of "ReMail", the first iPhone Gmail indexer (which got bought by Google, discontinued, and open sourced[1]), is still going strong on iOS 6 with a quarter million emails in its offline index.
It's all accessible, that's how Remail (not to mention iPhone, Apple Mail, etc) gets at it.
I interacted with Greplin support, they were aware searches weren't finding things that had been auto filed by Gmail rules into labels. I have been annoyed this "for pay" service didn't handle this.
(Note that I do not expose the "All Mail" virtual folder through IMAP because that ends up doubling mail.)
What happens to the people who were paying for the premium version of Greplin? Are you providing any refunds? At a minimum, are you unlinking their credit cards and ceasing to charge them?
"Greplin becomes Cue" so does that mean Greplin is shutting down? I thought it was really popular. This look like a totally different app. What about existing users/customers?
Saw a presentation by the greplin CTO last year (http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Distributed-Systems-What-...) - seemed like were ready to give search a "social side". Now all these millions (billions) of documents just to display "8.02pm sunset"? I'm a little surprised.
Edit: After reading the blog post, I'm less surprised and can imagine where they are headed.
The one thing that I think is really missing is the ability to pull iCloud calendars/ the calendar on the iPhone. I stopped using Google Calendar and don't have an exchange account so everything comes through there. As it is right now, Cue just tells me about my facebook friends' birthdays.
I would love to see Microsoft Exchange integration -- I know just I alone could pull in a couple hundred users for you with this feature. In terms of aggregation and presentation of data, this is 100x better than any previous offering for Exchange users.
It seems like their launch happened 48 hours earlier than expected due to one of the reporters breaking the embargo. I think they are currently scrambling to get everything fully functional, but it may be a bit slow for the time being.
What happens to the index of personal data they created when I gave them access to all my PII? I can go in and manually deauth Greplin from all my accounts (PAIN IN THE ASS) but that doesn't delete whatever data they stored on their end.
Greplin search hasn't changed - it is still availalble as Cue Search - both in our app and on our website. Web access is hard to get to for the next few minutes - right now it's accessible at https://www.cueup.com/login (will be linked from cueup.com momentarily). In the iPhone app, the search functionality has been streamlined and is available as a tab.
We still care about search a lot. It's the foundation of all the new features, and it's critical to the long term goals of our service.
If you encounter any issues, as always, we're quick to respond at support@cueup.com