Nozbe

- written by Michael Sliwinski, Nozbe CEO

A recent trip to Japan gave me a great opportunity to participate in an event with Nozbe customers in one of the coolest venues in town and one of the biggest Apple Stores in the world; the Apple Store Ginza in Tokyo. The event was a success and I had the pleasure of hosting a demo of the upcoming “Nozbe 2.0” to a full auditorium of Nozbe customers and to explain the three pillars that guide our future for Nozbe and productivity.

Mobility, Collaboration and Inspiration

My focus at the Japan event was to leave the audience with three key things to remember:

  • Mobility - productive people are mobile and use lots of different devices - the key is for Nozbe to be on all of them and we’re already doing great with our current lineup of apps. Now we’re going to take it to a completely new level with upcoming Nozbe 2.0 including bringing it to even more platforms!
  • Collaboration - we’ve always stressed the importance of collaboration. Especially peer support when you’re trying to learn and stick to “(GTD) Getting Things Done(R)” or other productivity techniques. We’ve been offering project sharing and comments on tasks for years and this year we took it to a whole new level with Nozbe 1.9 where we introduced project sharing with anyone, even if they didn’t have a Nozbe account. Well, with Nozbe 2.0 we’ll bring you even more improvements and new tools. Are you ready to break your reliance on using email for collaboration? This can be a big leap in productivity perception – and Nozbe 2.0 can chart the course!
  • Inspiration - we gave you Productive! Magazine, we gave you “10 Steps to Ultimate Productivity Course” and we’re now bringing local Productive! Magazines to Japanese-, Polish- and Spanish- speaking folks and a lot more down the line. We continue to bring the best ideas in productivity to inspire you to get even more things done.

That’s it, three things: Mobility, Collaboration and Inspiration. This is what we’re all about.

Nozbe 2.0 is actually a 4th version of Nozbe, but it’s a radical shift

Quick view on Nozbe history:

  • 2007 - I personally wrote (as in: “wrote the code for”) the first version of Nozbe that was publicly available.
  • 2009 - led by me, and Tomasz - Nozbe CTO together with an external design firm led by Maciek and Mike, wrote and designed what you still know as “Classic Nozbe”. A much faster and modern version of Nozbe.
  • 2010 - thanks to a collaboration effort with [“Macoscope”][mac] company, we introduced 3rd party iPhone and iPad apps as our official mobile apps
  • 2011 - Tomasz, our CTO, with a bigger development team started shipping the newest version of Nozbe with Nozbe for Mac and Windows.
  • 2012 - we developed our own iPad, iPhone and Android apps as well as the newest web app. Again, faster than ever.
  • 2013 - we kept polishing our apps and started working on our biggest re-write ever.
  • 2014 - we’re going to introduce the fourth version of Nozbe to you, which we call “Nozbe 2.0” because it will be a “mobile-first app” bringing you our new philosophy about mobility - collaboration and inspiration. It’s a radical shift - we’re building the all-new mobile app that thanks to responsiveness will morph to a desktop sized app depending on the screen real estate available. You’ll love it!

Nozbe 2.0 is code-named “One Nozbe” to reflect the similar user experience on all of the devices

We call Nozbe 2.0 “OneNozbe” because it’s going to be the same Nozbe on all devices especially referring to:

  • speed,
  • navigation,
  • and user experience.

All of the above will bring totally new meaning to the Nozbe user experience. The app will be of course different in the sense of taking advantage of the screen real estate.

To make a long story short: Nozbe on the iPhone or Android phone will be as powerful as Nozbe on the Mac or Windows PC. The mobile Nozbe will not be a “lesser” version of Nozbe. All of these apps will be designed to take advantage of screen size as well as pointing device (touch vs mouse) but to the user, they’ll feel as the same app. That’s important! The buttons will be in the same place. You’ll have all the power you’ll need (even on the small iPhone screen) to have the same experience with using Nozbe and achieving your goals. Moreover, thanks to a much simpler and more focused design, you’ll never feel overwhelmed with options and features, even though you’ll have so much power at your fingertips.

And boy it’ll be fast! A lot faster than now. One of my close friends who’s been testing the alpha version of Nozbe 2.0 said it’s currently the fastest app on his iPhone. Sweet, right?

One Nozbe to rule them all - we’re building all the Nozbe versions at the same time so we’ll have Nozbe 2.0 available for you as a web app as well as on the Mac, Windows PC, iPhone, iPad and Android phones and tablets. Soon afterwards we’ll develop Windows Phone 8 version and Windows “metro/new UI” version, so brace yourselves :-)

Nozbe 2.0 provides the groundwork for future productivity-boosting ideas

Nozbe 2.0 is just the beginning. o It’ll already include some of the most requested features you’ve been asking for like multi-edit of tasks, more powerful filtering and sorting, etc. However, we’ve got several new productivity-boosting enhancements planned for you that we cannot introduce without having Nozbe 2.0 on your devices. We’ve got a great roadmap for 2015 and beyond based on the work we’ll deliver to you this year. Stay tuned, it’s going to be a great ride!

Nozbe 2.0 is the future - and we can’t wait to show it to you

“When?” is the question you’re asking yourself, right? Well, very soon. I have Nozbe 2.0 on my iPhone as my main Nozbe app right now. Our plan is to extend the beta-testing phase of the app in May and launch a public beta this June.

We’ll have a long beta phase of the app to make sure it really works great for all of you… as we’ll replace the current range of apps with Nozbe 2.0 - and we’ll deliver it later this summer.

With “OneNozbe” 2.0 we’re going to re-invent personal and business productivity and we think you’ll love it - stay tuned!

Follow OneNozbe 2.0 on Instagram

We’re posting regular updates of our Nozbe 2.0 development on our new Instagram chanel - if you’re curious and want to be up-to-date with all the updates, tune in to follow “@nozbe” on Instagram and let us know what you think!