Notabli Books. Now with Captions.

Just a few weeks ago we announced Notabli Books — our automatic photo book service. Our goal with this service is to take the hassle out of printing photo books of kids for the parents and families who use Notabli.

It’s easy to get started. First, pick which kids to include, select your favorite book color, and enable automatic printing. We’ll ship you a book every 50 photos. No Sunday afternoons required.

“Our intention was to create simple, beautiful, books that focused on one great photo per page.”

In an effort create simple books with a focus on photos — and streamline development — we opted to leave captions out of the first version of the service. This aligned with our intention of creating simple, beautiful, books with the primary focus on one great photo per page.

Though after getting early feedback from Notabli users and book purchasers, and our own usage of the service, we decided to bump up the timeline on implementing captions (and emoji 🎉)!

We thought implementing captions would be pretty straightforward. But there were a number of hidden technical and design challenges (surprise!).

“We determined that less than 1% of Notabli captions were longer than 280 characters.”

Caption Length

With one large photo per page, there is limited space to print captions. And until recently, there was no length limit for captions in Notabli. After a bit of analysis, we determined that less than 1% of Notabli captions were longer than 280 characters, and those that were more than 280 characters were typically much longer. So we omit all captions from print that are longer than 280 characters.

Emoji Support

Next up, emoji support needed to be 💯✨, and initially it was anything but…

In order to standardize in the wild world of emojiland, we chose to use the amazing Emoji One library.

With these hurdles cleared, captions are now live in Notabli Books!

This is just the beginning of our plans for Books. They’re a fantastic addition to Notabli — already the best place you can save, organize, and privately share photos of your kids.

More to come!

Notabli for Android: 1.1.0 Release Notes

Newly added:

  • Share extensions! You can now share your favorite kiddo photos & videos directly to Notabli from other apps.
  • Moment type tabs now auto-refresh as you're swiping through.
  • The crashes we saw, the crashes we fixed.

Previously added:

  • Prevented keyboard from automatically popping up when tapping “View all comments”
  • More responsive hearts
  • When you filter by “Your Kids”, the feed is sorted chronologically (instead of by date posted) and this was confusing. Now we show a notification that tells you how things are being sorted.
  • Image rotation bug fixed for Samsung devices
  • Most crashes & connectivity issues were crushed

 

Download Notabli from the Google Play Store

Notabli for iOS: 2.3.1 Release Notes

Lots of optimizations and bug fixes in this one, but most importantly: our friends with iOS 8 devices can now open the app again. So what happened? We added some 3D Touch features for iPhone 6s devices and this confused the iPhones and iPads with older software. Sorry about that! Fixed.

Updates from previous version (2.3.0):

We heard you loud and clear. Even though purple is the color of royalty, magic, and mystery, y'all like blue. So our designers slid the color sliders around so you'll see more blue in the Notabli app icon.

  • Speaking of app icons, you can now press ours to reveal 3D Touch Quick Actions, if you have an iPhone 6s.
  • New: Improved background upload support
  • Fixed: More reliable video uploads
  • Fixed: Moments occasionally posting more than once

 

Download Notabli from the App Store

Notabli + Android

Last March was a great month. As the rest of the world began to thaw, Burlington (and the team at Notabli HQ) was still running on hot coffee, dreams of summer, and lots of baselayers. The winter was long, but it was mighty productive. By the time March rolled in, we’d launched a fully-featured web app and were already getting ready for the next member of the family — Notabli for Android.

It was chance to try some new things — to see what was working (and not) and move a little furniture around. We started clearing a lot of space — table space, whiteboard space, floor space and made room to imagine how Notabli could look and behave in a pair of Android overalls. So, with our laptops, sketchpads, and some swim goggles we splashed headfirst into Google’s Material world. Summer had come early.

One thing we wanted to focus on was how folks experience their moments, both individually, and as a collection. It’s as important to relive your moments as it is to stay up to date with new ones. With that, we made three changes: it’s now easier to see more moments at once, to filter them by type, and to view them fullscreen.

The ability to see 'more moments at once' was a big one. It’s fun to go back through your feed, but it can also be tedious — especially when you’re looking for something in particular (How long must I scroll to see that sandcastle video from last summer?) The solution was to introduce a ‘grid view’ toggle in the app bar, so folks can switch between an overview of moment thumbnails or the classic 1-by-1 view.

Secondly, we’ve historically used a lot of dropdowns and toggles when it comes to filtering. Well, we changed that too! (We love using the Android tab bar). It’s built so you can swipe the feed from left to right and tab between 'everything', photos, videos, quotes, sounds, notes — even milestones. Thumb on over to the ‘Sound’ tab, and you get a feed of ocean noises, birthday songs, and campfire stories, all in one spot.

 

Finally, onto the moments themselves — we made it easier to view them nice ’n big. When you tap a moment, it opens full screen. Photos are fun this way — swipe it around, pinch it — you could count grains of sand if you wanted to. We didn’t leave anyone out; this view is great for all moment-types (notes deserve a nice reading space too).

These are just thin slices of the fun stuff we tried. There were a lot good ideas. Some we shipped, some we archived for later, and a few might’ve gotten shuffled into a pile somewhere. The best part about having so many ideas, will be watching them spill over into our web and iPhone apps. It’s sure great watching everybody grow up.

Anyway, it’s another day! And the job is never done (and we’re terribly happy about that).

- The Notabli Team

 
 

Notabli for iOS: 2.2 Release Notes

What's new in Version 2.2: 

This is a required update. (Previous versions won't function any more!)

There are a number of exciting things on the horizon for Notabli. In order to prepare for them, we've done a lot of under-the-hood adjustments so that everyone can stay in sync across all platforms (iOS, web, and Android).

We've also made a few overall improvements:

- A streamlined invitation process.
- Support for time-lapse video.
- A few squashed bugs.
- And last, but not least, the Notabli app icon is now purple.

Need help with anything Notabli related (or maybe otherwise, but no guarantees), email us at hello@notabli.com

Changes to the Blog

If you've frequented the Notabli blog in the past, you found a place with content focused on the parenting, irreverent humor, and the Notabli app updates. We loved posting, but were often so heads down in improving Notabli that we couldn't give it the proper attention. So, we decided to make a change.

Our new blog will always contain the latest updates to our iOS (and upcoming Android) apps, as well as the occasional look into our design process.

Still interested in parenting content and irreverent humor? Well, you're in luck. Head on over to our Parent.co Magazine.


Why Notabli?

There's lots of discussion these days about how much we should post of our children on the internet. Be it for either levels of safety or keeping "friends" from deleting post-happy parents out of their newsfeeds, everyone has an opinion. I personally have my own set of (admittedly arbitrary) rules. I don't post photos of my kids naked or on the toilet in case they want to grow up to have a career in politics or choose my nursing home. I only post a photo or two a day and try to make them good ones. (Some people may find even that excessive, but some people go on selfie binges or photograph their lunch. Live and let live, I say.) I share the minutia only if it's going to make someone laugh. It's not set in stone, but more a general set of guidelines I've given myself.

Over the years of documenting my children's lives, I've kept notebooks of hilarious quotes, uploaded hundreds of photos to facebook and instagram, emailed recounts of particularly memory worthy moments to grandparents. All of which would now take ANOTHER lifetime to assemble in one easy to access location.  

Notabli offers the perfect solution to both of these new and age old problems. I actually filter everything through Notabli. Anything that feels like it needs to be remembered gets uploaded there first. The close friends and relatives that have connected to my account can check in and see or hear the latest. At the time of posting it's easy to share to facebook, twitter, and tumblr to cast it wider if desired. I can also decide after the fact and push it to those networks or send it as an email. 

It's an amazing thing to be able to share the lives of our children with the people who care about them. Especially those that aren't present for the day to day. (Let's be honest. Your brother-in-law's cousin's husband probably isn't all that interested. At least not daily.) And that's what Notabli is all about.

Notabli, Notably, Notable

What's in a name?

The naming process for Notabli was similar to coming up with baby names. We wanted our product to have a name that was unique and had meaning, but didn't want a name that was too difficult for people to remember or mentally grasp.

When we settled on the name Notabli (pronounced just like "notably"), here are some of the things we took into account:

  • Meaning
  • Length
  • Uniqueness; we wanted to "own" our name
  • Available domain names (and a short URL for shared public moments: notab.li)

The biggest challenge for us is the way we spell Notabli. When the name is spoken, people naturally assume Notabli is spelled "notably". We are certainly not the first company to purposefully misspell our name, a la Flickr or Tumblr, but there are some branding pains in the early stages.

You can download Notabli for iOS in the App Store.

If you found us while looking for one of the other products/services named notably or notable, we'll make it easy for you and link to them below. We have no affiliation with these products, services, or companies.

Notably app for iPad: Tool for writers.

Notable App: Interface design feedback service.

Notability: Note taking app.

“One place where the app does truly innovate, however, is in the way that it handles invites and child privacy. Only the user who created the child’s account can give permission for other people to see or interact with the timeline. This one-way system gives the parent(s) total control over who can see their content at any one time – for example, you could invite a teacher to follow one child’s moments, but not another. There’s a lot of flexibility here, which is incredibly useful for those who care about their data and privacy.”
— A great Notabli review from The Next Web.
 

Childhood doesn't last forever. Great moments will.