March 14, 2006

The Importance of Being Mac…

Today we released
a new beta of Plaxo for the Mac ("Maxo", as we affectionately call
it here). Woohoo! And, of course we’re all very excited about releasing a new
product and finishing something that we’ve been working on for three friggin’
years. There’s a deeper meaning to this release, but I will get to that later…


Maxo team: Dru Nelson, Drew Colace, Jie Chen, Wendy
Johnson (w/ Rosco), Mark Jen, Christian Bohland

Why did it take
so damn long?

Plaxo has been around for four years (yikes!), and at our core, we’ve always
felt that rather than inventing yet-another-address-book (or calendar), we wanted
to bring Plaxo features to your existing address book. So, as a small
startup in 2002, it made sense to start with Outlook and Outlook Express, since
it clearly had the largest user base. And, like many young startups in their
honeymoon phase, we had grand plans to quickly integrate with lots of other
platforms, such as Mac, Act!, Lotus, Y!, Hotmail, and so on. This same question—"when
do we do the Mac port?"—has happened at practically every job I’ve
had (and in most cases, it never happened).

Well, as you can
imagine, 2002 faded into 2003, and 2003 faded into 2004, and so on, and we still
were putting huge effort into Outlook and Outlook Express. To be really honest,
we didn’t realize what we had bitten off when we started down the Outlook path—the
stuff we’ve done to make Outlook and Outlook Express support Plaxo is a combination
of creative engineering and voodoo incantations—but the good news is that
we’ve finally figured it out and now have time to integrate with other platforms
(no more dead chickens!).


Outlook Voodoo
priest

[btw: Believe it
or not, we started our very first Mac project back in 2002. We asked a few of
our Mac friends to work in parallel with our Windows team and to try to stay
up-to-date (source-wise). Unfortunately, this was a classic case of starting
too early. The architecture was changing so rapidly that the Mac team was constantly
out of date and eventually fell too far behind. The good news is that we finally
got our APIs down and now have a base to start lots of new integration projects
from.]

So, about a year
ago we met Drew Colace. He impressed us with his Mac dev knowledge and captivating
personality, and after changing our minds another ten times, we hired Drew to
get us back on the Mac train. Drew jumped in with both hands typing and launched
our first beta of Mac Plaxo in November 2005. Today’s release is a major revision
and was motivated by a lot of great feedback that we received from the first
beta (thanks to everyone that helped!).

Why not
do the Mac?

There are many
great reasons for a developer or product manager to choose not
to do the Mac version. In our case, there are definitely larger online address
book user bases out there (e.g. Yahoo! and Hotmail) and Mac OSX is a completely
unfamiliar operating system and development environment (and therefore expensive,
risky, and complicated). And, a new platform introduces all kinds of new quality
assurance and customer support issues. The list goes on, so I’m sure you get
the idea. Inevitably it comes down to "is it worth the effort?" This
is a question that thousands of product managers and engineering teams ask themselves
(and most say "no" for reasons similar to above).


Why do the Mac?

So, why did we
do the Mac? In most cases, the answer is because someone inside the company
is a Mac zealot and begs enough to eventually get a programmer to hack out a
demo and if they are really, really lucky, it actually ships for a few weeks
(but gets little support or nurturing). It’s rarely done for the right reasons
and thus eventually peters out. But in our case, no one was a Mac zealot—although,
we now have several Mac lovers at Plaxo—and we had no programmers with
Mac dev experience. So, two things influenced us: 1) a Mac version of Plaxo
was clearly the most requested feature we received; 2) the Mac community is
rabid about products and embrace new things (if done well) with passion and
enthusiasm; and 3) we firmly believed that we are not an Outlook-only shop.
So, we saw a great opportunity to grow a small segment of extremely active users
and force us to develop APIs that encouraged integration with Plaxo across a
broad set of platforms.

API is the key

So, the story-within-the-story
is that Plaxo is developing a platform to enable widespread integration. And,
we wanted to eat our own dog food before others used our API. So, Maxo was the
perfect choice to test this out since it was so different from the development
environments that we were used to. We figured that if the APIs worked for a
Mac programmer, they will work for anyone. :-) And, the only reason that it
took us so long to release Maxo was because it was the guinea pig for future
API users. As you can guess, this slowed Drew and team down quite a bit, but
they persevered and shipped Maxo.

UI Evolution

Integrating Plaxo
into the Mac Address Book offered unique UI challenges to us since we were less
familiar with the Mac user experience and we recognized the importance of a
100% Mac experience. Anything less and we expected to be ignored by the Mac
community.

A few key things
drove our user experience design: 1) 100% Mac, 2) integrate into the
Mac Address Book, not compete with it, and 3) find the right visual balance
between "fits in" and "stands out."

Our first revision
looked like this. We created a separate Plaxo address book application that
synced with the Mac Address Book. This immediately felt weird and forced the
user to make a choice between the Mac Address Book and the Plaxo Address Book.

Screen
shot of Maxo first alpha release

In our second revision
(Beta 1), we tried to integrate the Plaxo features into the Mac Address
Book. We added the Plaxo widget at the bottom of the contact entry, but found
this to be problematic and often obscuring the contact details.

Screen
shot of Maxo first beta release

And, our current
Beta looks like this. We moved the Plaxo enhancements to the right side of the
contact details and enabled users to expand and contract the panel. This appears
to be the best choice, but we’re still looking for feedback.

Screen
shot of Maxo second beta release

You can download
the latest version at: http://www.plaxo.com/downloads/mac/

See the press release
at: http://www.plaxo.com/about/releases/release-20060314

 

–Rikk Carey,
EVP Engineering & Operations

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About the Author

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Redgee Capili

General Manager, Plaxo.com

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Comments
  • John B.

    Thanks for bringing Plaxo to OSX. The opportunity to keep my PC and Mac contact info synchronized was by far the largest reason that I recently began using Plaxo.
    Thanks!
    – John

  • http://andrew.ruess.us/ Andrew Ruess

    Yay for Plaxo Mac! Works wonderfully and syncs up well.
    How about that future then? =) Being able to setup multiple syncronizations between online folders into seperate Address Book groups would be wonderful. And of course integration with iCal would be pure icing.
    Thanks much Plaxo! =)

  • Torsten

    Same reason here for me. At work I use Plaxo to sync my work contacts, at home I use it (as I leraned: Maxo) for my private Contacts.
    I would like to hear from you about an integration of iCal :-)
    thanks,
    Torsten

  • http://xview.net Olivier Warin

    Thank you for bringing Plaxo to OSX, I used it to sync my contacts between my PDA (Windows Mobile 5.0 using WebIS client) & my laptop. It could be so great to get my calendar in sync too. Cannot wait for this feature, it appears I am not alone in this case :-D

  • Sohail Ahmed

    I’ve been using the Plaxo Contacts for Mac now, since I moved off Windows. I love it!
    I do really need to get an iCal sync going though. Work calendar at the client is Outlook 2003 and being able to sync with Plaxo on the Mac for calendaring is vitally important.
    The Mac user base is filled with thought leaders and an influential segment of the market. Please keep the good work for the Mac coming!

  • http://www.talesoftrueadventure.com Peter Crowell

    I just got Plaxo today and I love it. It’s better than .Mac in just about every practical way, and it looks better to boot. Thank you Plaxo. What about that synch with iCal?

  • Peter Crowell

    I just got Plaxo today and I love it. It’s better than .Mac in just about every practical way, and it looks better to boot. Thank you Plaxo. What about that synch with iCal?