The modern office large office is pretty bad in this respect. Really not uncommon to see things like
• Need to have Slack open
• Need to keep an eye on Basecamp/pm software
• Need to have Outlook open / check in on for email and calendar invites
• Need Skype open because not everyone uses Slack
• GitLab is open in another tab
I've started counting the minutes that I use in a day just logging in to things with our SSO, because it has started to actually add up, haha. It has gotten silly.
If you need to log in more than once, can you really call it SSO? =)
I don't have that many open, and it still takes me around 5 minutes every day to open them back up.
Imagine having about 7 tabs open. By the time I'm finished with the last tab, something new has come up on the first tab I checked. Huge waste of time. I'm trying to wean myself from all these services, but it's not easy.
This or that project is on GitHub, but join the developers on Slack. And I hate Slack.
If it really can't wait <25 minutes, they can call me or come to my desk. It's amazing how many things aren't "immediate" if you create a slight cost with requesting attention.
Your users and their clients are still going to be using Slack and email, but it seems like you're giving me one more thing to log into. You write:
> Schedule your time spent and group distracting reminders and notifications in one place
If this "one place" is a separate silo from Slack, Outlook, Basecamp, Skype, SMS, Discord, Hipchat, IRC, and Github...it's not the one place I'll need to check. It's the n+1th place.
Now, if I can put my credentials into Calmbird (securely would be nice, but you can have the plaintext if you can make this insanity stop) and have it do the API connection to - or, if necessary, the nasty DOM-manipulation, Windows message hacking, and client-impersonating - to put all these services and their notifications in one place, that would be a solution to the proliferation problem.
Also:
> schedule automatic emails to your clients with updates
My clients don't want automatic emails, especially from templates/digests. They want me to hand-craft them as if it was the most important thing in my life. And while they can understand a curt update message or a missed daily status notification, the real point of these updates are to confirm that I'm still on the project. If a message accidentally went out with a placeholder like "I'm still working on {todo-insert-task-here}", and I didn't know about it, that would be...bad.
- Your users and their clients are still going to be using Slack and email, but it seems like you're giving me one more thing to log into
That is not the aim, the real goal here is exactly what you state next i.e you'll be able to (securely via OAuth, so you can also revoke access anytime) log into your Slack, Basecamp etc. and Calmbird will be the one 'dashboard' where you log into, kind of like having a social network client that supports Twitter, Facebook etc.
> My clients don't want automatic emails, especially from templates/digests. They want me to hand-craft them as if it was the most important thing in my life.
That is very true from personal experience, this is a feature where you'll craft a sort of an 'emergency' email yourself in advance and when you indicate in calmbird that you're working, it'll send if off to your client if there's an email from them, optionally with the latest updates. It's not a 'machine-generated' email in the traditional sense and this feature is in my current version entirely optional, which is how it will stay at launch, (if it stays at all, I'll certainly be thinking a lot about how can this be improved, there's no point if it's not going to be useful.)
This isn't possible for web services due to the state of U.S. law. Speaking to a server without the consent of the server's owner is both a crime and a tort under the CFAA. There is also liability for copyright infringement, among other things.
IANAL
At least in Europe, news organizations pushed this kind of argument in their campaign against adblockers and failed in front of the courts. US law may differ, of course.
The implied access and license is probably valid as long as you're abiding the ToS. If you're violating the ToS after agreeing to it ("agreeing" means that proper notice is given to make the ToS binding, etc.), the implied license would probably not work. If you've been specifically asked to stop, either directly or indirectly (e.g., through an IP ban), any implied license or access privileges would almost definitely be revoked at that point.
>At least in Europe, news organizations pushed this kind of argument in their campaign against adblockers and failed in front of the courts. US law may differ, of course.
Ad blockers differ because they alter the payload after receiving it under legitimate terms (though this could still probably be considered copyright infringement under the argument that the license is for viewing only, not alteration). The CFAA would not be applicable because when the adblocker comes into play, you're not accessing someone's network (which is what the the CFAA addresses).
If a site clearly disallowed AdBlock users in their ToS and adequate notice was given to users that they were to be bound by these terms, it would be "unauthorized access" to the server, which is not allowed under the CFAA.
I don't have a need for the product myself, but I do like the name for it.
I have a similar setup, and I don't waste any time logging into all of them because I simply always have them running. Why would you need to login every day? Are you shutting them down at the end of every day... if so, why?
My favorite application is Microsoft Outlook, which consistently takes up ~50% of my CPU on my 2015 maxed out Mac.
That said, I wonder what's Discord's official stance on such things. Their bread and butter is voice chat, and they seem to be fairly open minded. Maybe they will eventually provide a public API for basic text messages.
I don't mind Gitter though, because it has a useful feature (code snippets) and it is available through a web app as opposed to a separate install.
Are they using some API? Or do they ask you for your username/password for each service and "helpfully" login for you?
Seems to be wrapping them all.
I know groups that (for business or pleasure) use Slack, Discord, Skype, Google Hangouts, IRC, etc.
All of these clients are a bit more obstrusive than they need to be in terms of pop-up notifications, software updates, cpu, memory, transfer, etc. They all screw up enough that there's always a little apprehension that something will go wrong when you get a number of people together for a meeting.
It is one thing to deal with one of these things, but when you have to install ten to get your work done you have a problem. I have a high performance computer and I want to keep it that way.