We’re thrilled to announce today that we’ve been named a Webby Award Official Honoree. What’s especially exciting is that this is 2 years in a row for us! Last year we were honored by the Webby’s under the ‘Utilities & Services’ category and this year for ‘Experimental & Innovation’.

The Webby Awards is the Internet’s most respected symbol of success. The 17th Annual Webby Awards received 11,000 entries from all 50 US states and over 60 countries worldwide.

The awards are judged by the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences a global organization whose newest members include Tumblr founder David Karp, CEO of Rovio Mikael Hed, co-founder of Instagram Kevin Systrom, Huffington Post Media Group President Arianna Huffington, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, musician David Bowie, Internet co-creator Vint Cerf and Virgin Group Chairman Richard Branson.

Hailed as the “Internet’s Highest Honor” by The New York Times, we’re ‘honored’ to say the least.

In the early days of CloudMagic development, we realized that traditional log management techniques won’t work in the cloud. We were generating zillions of log entries across several servers and debugging was turning out to be a pain as information was scattered. There was no way to know when a server component encounters an error.

We put some thought on what goals our log management tool should meet and came out with the following list:

• Custom log patterns:

  Watching logs from all components in our stack and notifying any erratic behaviour. Our stack includes a number of third party applications each logging in it’s own format. Hence we required the capability of extracting information from custom log patterns.

• Manageable notifications:

  We wanted to have great control over alert notifications. The tool should decide whom to notify depending on which component has encountered with an error. We didn’t want the developers to be buried under an unmanageable pile of notifications. Notification should be sent only when something required action, eliminating false positives and duplicates.  And we wanted each alert to be tracked until closed.

• Ease of manageability:

  We didn’t want to spend time in managing the tool itself. It had to be easy with ability to version control the rules defined for log processing and alerting.

• Centralized and easily searchable:

  Debugging should not require access to multiple machines. All logs should be available at a central location in real time. Log transfer should be reliable and robust to network or machine failures. We should be able to search for logs at any point in time, efficiently.

• Minimal footprint at CM servers:

  CloudMagic has been designed to make optimum use of computing resources on every machine. Hence the solution had to be very lightweight on CloudMagic servers.

• Scalable architecture:

  The solution should scale as CloudMagic grows.

With the above goals in sight we tried a number of tools; SEC, Facebook Scribe, Logstash to name a few. None of these suited our requirements. SEC was resource intensive on our servers with no control over duplicate notifications. Facebook Scribe looked like a dead project with no activity in past couple of years. Although great for log aggregation, our other goals were not met. Logstash was underdeveloped and unreliable with limited features, no timely bug fixes and no support available.

The closest match we found was Splunk. Setting up Splunk wasn’t much of a challenge, it was up and running in no time. It could consume data regardless of format or location in real time. Once the data is in Splunk, its powerful search language lets us get right at the data with full control over it. We could monitor, analyze and generate advanced visual reports on our data, set up real-time alerts and receive notifications via email or RSS or by executing a custom script. Notifications could be throttled based on a variety of threshold, trend-based conditions and other complex searches. Splunk also scales quite well.

We were however not entirely satisfied with the level of control Splunk gave us on alert notifications in terms of content and throttling rules. We scripted our own notification module in order to have absolute control. We also have plans to integrate it with our own task management system IssueBurner which will enable us to track every notification till it’s closed.

Splunk is indeed the best log management tool you can ask for. The tedious job of log management is fun with Splunk on your side. Do you face challenges in handling your logs in the cloud? Share it in the comments section below.

Reading productivity blogs: where wasting time is actually time well spent!

Sometimes being productive is more of a frame of mind and not yet another metric to measure your efficiency. Here’s a list of the best productivity blogs (the ones actually worth wasting your time on)

And some interesting ones on Twitter:

Here’s a little productivity tip, instead of visiting these blogs each day, subscribe to them over email and have them delivered to your inbox.

And hey, there are many great blogs out there. Share your favorites. Drop your suggestions below.

Other examples – stitched leather, linen backgrounds, glass, paper textures, brushed metal, yellow legal pad design of Notepad etc. It’s not just objects, even their behavior has been ported. Did you like the way e-books peeled away like a real book when flipped? If you like skeuomorphic design, you’re in good company, Steve Jobs favored it too.

Steve Jobs and Scott Forstall (the ousted Apple SVP) mastered skeuomorphism and used it extensively on iOS. There was a reason behind why they introduced this design technique and tried to promote it extensively – familiarity. When iOS first arrived back in 2007 it was the magic of skeuomorphic design that made users get instantly familiar with the iOS.

While users have typecasted skeuomorphism with Apple, minimalism is gaining relevance especially by the competitors who have embraced it and made it their own.

Google for example – Jelly Bean is such a breath of fresh air. It seems to have found the perfect balance between skeuomorphism and flat design. Now that more Holo themed apps are coming to Android, you can see that Google surely has taken note:

Google Now’s flat and minimalistic design Vs. Siri’s linen, metal design

Microsoft’s Modern UI (Metro) is all about flat design too. They have embraced minimalism, flat colors, simple shapes and are heavily influenced by clever typography to find that sweet balance and make things look pretty.

Apple is synonymous with design innovation and gorgeous pixels. Maybe it’s the designer in me talking, but has Apple taken skeuomorphism too far? Sir Jonathan Ive, the legendary design guru feels so. Ive’s industrial design ethos has always been about removing the unnecessary. Knighted for his contributions to industrial design, all Apple products bear the stamp of his design vision. As an ode to minimalism, he stripped complexity to create elegant, intuitive Apple products and we know what he’s capable of. With him at the helm of things at the Human Interface (HI) group, expect things to change in iOS, probably with less skeuomorphism.

Apple could also go the Microsoft way of introducing a completely new design language. Microsoft did garner a lot of praise from critics and Windows loyalists for the Modern UI. If Apple were to do that, will there be a backlash from the Apple fanboys? Or will they accept anything from Apple, like they always do.

Does this mean it’s the end of skeuomorphic design? No, we probably just had an overdose of it and like any trend, it might make a comeback. Having said that,  flat design is probably going to be abused by designers and a day might come when we will all be sick and tired of minimalistic design and might want to switch to good old realism just like how retro designs made a comeback not so long ago.

I’m ending with an open question because we should wait and watch for the next chapter in design to unfold, which will be very interesting indeed. Until then, let the dribbblers have some fun!

Perception of speed is everything. Be it in showing search results in less than a second or the user experience while navigating.

Our universal search demanded an aggregation of different services, structuring and serving them in one uniform list, while having a myriad of layouts. Although ListView was our obvious choice, such a requirement demanded multiple layouts that could handle Facebook posts with an image, show contact profile images, display emails and much more.

But ListView is not known to be developer friendly especially for different layouts. Romain Guy in one of his talks at Google I/O 2010 mentions ListView as one of the most complex widget ever built in Android. Some have created issues asking ListView to be made more programmer friendly.

Instead of having different layouts for each service, we designed a flexible layout. We internally called it the “universal layout.” By moving a few icons and text elements around in the layout, we could display any type of search result, be it a Facebook post, an email, a tweet or anything else. This “universal layout” was complex but by using techniques like ViewHolder pattern and View recycling we made sure that the list behaved itself even while holding as much as 500 results.

We were set with how we wanted to display our results and it was working great but we then wanted full images on the results list (instead of just thumbnails). Fortunately, we did a test run and it was instantly clear that this is the way to go.

Bitmaps and OOMs

We also wanted to provide infinite scrolling on the results. Results for Twitter and Facebook are image intensive (Bitmap intensive). When it comes to Bitmaps, Android is notorious for OutOfMemoryError especially while dealing with Bitmaps which hog a lot of heap space. So how do you deal with it? It is important to understand the root of what you’re dealing with before you know how to deal with it.

Prior to Honeycomb (Android version 3.0), Bitmaps were stored in native heap rather than Java heap. They would eventually be garbage collected, but the timing was imperfect and unpredictable. Garbage collection is not as aggressive as it is for Java heap. The workaround is to call Bitmap.recycle() on the Bitmap when you’re sure that you’re never going to use it again.

But how do you make sure your app always stays within heap limits? For some devices this maximum heap usage could be as low as 16MB. Android provides a convenient function in ActivityManager class that helps you get the max heap size allowed for your app.

LruCache provides great flexibility in limiting the number of images that are in memory. It is also available in the Android’s support library package which makes it usable from Android versions as early as 1.6.

Another optimization we did was down-sampling the size of the image. If it is possible for you to download the exact size of image you want from the server, do it. For example, on an LDPI device, if you’re displaying a profile picture of 48×48, then there is no point in downloading an image of size 128×128. An added advantage is you end up saving heap space, avoiding unnecessary network traffic and most importantly, user experience. Users get frustrated when you make them wait for something to finish.

We are totally obsessed with speed. Since we don’t always download images from our server and at times when we don’t have control over the size of images we get from server, we down-sample it while storing it on our heap. Yet another convenient class from Android – BitmapFactory.Options to the rescue. It is very simple to use and Android has awesome documentation on how to use it.

So what are your Android development nightmares that you overcame? Try scrolling through CloudMagic’s search results page and tell us what you think. Drop a comment below or join the discussion on Hacker News.

Happy new year! Thank you for being with us. All CloudMagic users get a 10 GB free Box + sync account!

Click here to sign up to Box and claim your 10GB free.

Hotmail
Hotmail was the most used email service till few months ago and still has a whopping 450M users. We now support searching through email, contacts and calendar in Hotmail as well as other avatars, viz. MSN, Live and Outlook.com accounts.

Yahoo
Yahoo is one of highest requested services. Although we attempted to support it a while ago, we faced throttling issues from Yahoo’s servers and had to put it on the back burner. Now with those issues ironed out, we are delighted to let you search your Yahoo mails.

With the addition of Hotmail and Yahoo, we now support all major email service providers. No matter where your email is, it’s just a second away.

SkyDrive
We also saw a huge number of SkyDrive requests. Some even withheld their star ratings on the App Store, because we didn’t support SkyDrive! You asked, we delivered. You can now search through files and folders stored in your SkyDrive account.

Exchange ActiveSync
We are also rolling out complete Exchange ActiveSync support. Although we supported Exchange through EWS and IMAP, not all Exchange servers support them. Additionally, the fact that ActiveSync is the protocol of choice for mobile devices makes it very important. With this addition, we should now be able to index 100% of the Exchange mailboxes.

We are super excited about this release, tell us what you think. We also have lots more that we’re always working on, so keep telling us what you’d like to see next!

Cheers,
Team CloudMagic

We launched CloudMagic back in 2010. Since then, we’ve been continually adding support for more services and rolling out apps on different platforms to make universal-search a reality. CloudMagic has always been free but were often asked how we intend to make money. We didn’t really have an answer till date, now we do. We now charge a small fee for power users and yet have an awesome free plan that would work for most. Here’s what it looks like:

As a token of appreciation for being with us this far, we’re giving all our wonderful users 3 months of CloudMagic Pro for free.

• How do I claim the 3 month complimentary CloudMagic Pro subscription?

  Nothing. The complimentary subscription has already been added to your account. Navigate to ‘Plan Details or My Subscription’ section on the CloudMagic apps/extension/website to see the credit.

• What happens after my complimentary subscription expires?

  You can buy a CloudMagic Pro subscription or choose to continue with CloudMagic Free.

• Will you delete my indexed data after the complimentary subscription expires?

  No, you’ll be automatically switched to CloudMagic Free which will keep all your data intact.

• Is there any limitation on the number of accounts/services I can add in CloudMagic Free?

  No. CloudMagic Free only limits the number of previews to 50 in a month. There are no other restrictions.

Have more questions? Feel free to drop a comment below.

Cheers,

Team CloudMagic

Earlier today, we announced (the TechCrunch review here) the launch of our new browser extensions, which show CloudMagic results right next to Google search results. All you need to do is install the extension and a box will appear next to Google search results, showing matches from your personal cloud data. Links to the latest extensions:  Chrome | Firefox | Safari

It’s never been easier to search through all your data with CloudMagic. We hope you love it. It’s been an awesome 2012 and 2013 is already looking infinitely more awesome. Stay tuned.

Happy New Year, happy holidays and happy searching! As always, talk to us, we love it – feedback@cloudmagic.com or comment below.

Thank you once again.

All of us at CloudMagic

I realized today that one can upload more than 12 GB of data to various file sharing services and access them from a single interface across multiple devices for FREE. I thought it’s pretty creative and definitely worth sharing.

So here’s how it works. You can get free storage from various cloud service providers like Dropbox, Google Drive, Box etc. Their free plans get you a total of 12GB, here’s how, you just need to sign up to them:

Google Drive                        5 GB
Dropbox                                2 GB
Box                                         5 GB

Fairly simple so far, but now that you’ve signed up to multiple file storage services, you have a problem – when you try to locate a file, you don’t remember the service you had uploaded it to. How I solved that problem? Surely I used CloudMagic to locate any file within seconds. Upload anywhere you want and then forget about it. When you want the file, just type in few characters in CloudMagic, and it’s right there.

Up next – 29GB FREE and still use CloudMagic to manage them all!
CloudMagic search is coming soon for the following services, and then you can have more than 29 GB of free storage with a single point of access:.

SkyDrive                                7 GB
SugarSync                            5 GB
Amazon Cloud Drive         5 GB

Update: Now with the addition of SkyDrive in CloudMagic you get 19GB+ of cloud storage with a single point of access.