Widget: Note2Watch

Hi all,

I wanted to announce my new widget Note2Watch, available here https://apps.garmin.com/en-US/apps/af66ba54-9f6e-441b-91ab-e842a56ce9c4

It let's you sync notes that you create on your phone, computer, or via email onto your watch where they'll remain available even when your phone isn't nearby.

I started the project because I wanted a simple Grocery list app, but as I've developed it, it's grown some more powerful features (like IFTTT support via email), so it now does a lot more than I first imagined.

It's available in two flavors, a FREE version which is still very useful, and a PRO version ($4.99/year) with all of the bells-and-whistles. I'm hoping to add even more down the road!

I consider still very much in beta, though I've been happily using for over a month now.

I look forward to your feedback, which you can leave here, or if you choose, drop an email to [email][email protected][/email].

Thanks!

jim_m_58 over 9 years ago

I'm fairly sure that the "Garmin Terms of Service" do not allow you to charge ANYTHING for a CIQ app, so your $4.99/year is a violation of that.

You can ask for donations (as is the case in other things), but an actual fee in the app store gets Garmin involved LEGALLY!

If you want to charge for it, do it on your own site and figure out how to handle updates and multiple device....

rconradharris over 9 years ago

Jim thanks for your comment.

Just to clarify, the app itself is, and will always be, completely free.

The app, however, is complemented by a hosted service which handles sync'ing and storage of notes. This uses a freemium subscription model inline with what's mentioned on the Monetization page[1]. This makes sense: there are all sorts of costs associated with running a service like this: bandwidth, electricity, gear, SSL certs, etc, etc. It makes sense for Garmin to provide a way for more complex services to recoup some of their costs. We can't charge for an app itself, but we can (and of course should be), able to charge for resources consumed so that we can keep the service running.

To emphasize the separateness of the Garmin app from the hosted service, plans are underway to bring additional apps to other kinds of watches (think Pebble, Android Wear, etc). Garmin will be one of the many supported devices. The coolest of course (that's why I bought one!), but we'd like to make sync'ing notes onto wearables as easy as possible for as many people as possible.

But before any of that can happen, the first step is to make the Garmin app as good as it can possibly be. So we're looking forward to people playing around with the free version of the service, collecting some great feedback, and if people like it and want to support the site -- and keep the lights on -- we'd appreciate anyone who'd like to upgrade to the PRO plan.

-----
[1] http://developer.garmin.com/connect-iq/monetization/

Nikeow over 9 years ago

Where do you see that we can't charge for the app? (or basically that's just a thinking as there is no payment infrastructure with the Garmin App Store?)

rconradharris over 9 years ago

NIKEOW, I haven't seen anything specifically, maybe Jim has (?)

The point I was trying to clarify -- hopefully not beating a dead horse here -- is that in the case of Note2Watch, whether Garmin allows developers, conceptually, the right/ability to charge for an app is not really applicable to us since we're a hosted-service (think: Evernote), and are charging purely for the use of resources consumed on the remote service.

If you'd like, you can even use Note2Watch without the use of the app at all; it can serve as a message store, for example. Not terribly useful, but goes to the point of it being a more general, non-Garmin-specific business.

Nikeow over 9 years ago

I am in agreement w/ you based on my limited understanding as well,
from Garmin's monetisation page - there is a scenario which I beleive does provide that one can do "in-app" purchases or such for an EXISTINg business model - evernote.

eg: Evernote can build a FREE CIQ App - link it with the IOS app / the web interface and charge for that.

That's my interpretation.

i wrote more in the other thread that jim started.

Former Member over 9 years ago

I try to bring this thread back on track and congratulate you for the idea and effort. This app and the underlying service shows the potential of the IQ niche. I have no problems to pay for a good service and will certainly test the app and follow its development.

The free version is, in my opinion, too much crippled to show the potential and get people hooked into it. 64 characters is not even half a tweet or barely more than 1/3 of a text message...

For future improvements: what about sending small bitmaps (to be scaled down on the server) like weather radar images or sketched maps, for example?

rconradharris over 9 years ago

Planetscooter, thanks for the feedback!

You're absolutely right that 64 characters sounds minuscule when compared to something like a Tweet or an Evernote.

The thing to remember though is that the screens we're targeting are exceptionally tiny, so 64 characters at a medium size font is actually pretty much the entire screen, and there's quite a lot of useful information that can be stored on a single page: see our screenshots for some examples.

That's why 64 characters was chosen, to give FREE users basically a full page of glance-able information. 512 characters for the PRO version also sounds small-ish at first sight, but when you see it on a watch, it's actually more like a tome!

The app is still in beta and nothing is set in stone, so as more feedback comes in, we'd be happy to make adjustments to the pricing model to maximize utility across all our users while still keeping this a sustainable model. Let's be honest, we're not going to get rich off this or anything, but we do want the service to be revenue neutral at least :-).

Btw, those future improvements are already on our TODO list. Some other ideas we've been tossing around is a minimal markup-language that allows you to format a simple table and add colorization. Your IFTTT stock recipe could then colorize the negative stocks in red and positive stocks in green for example.

There's a lot of really awesome stuff coming down the pike, stay tuned!

deanerh over 9 years ago

FYI. Your link works fine, but when I go and look for your widget under the Vivoactive Connect IQ page, it doesn't show up under either of the 2 pages that supposed list all the available items. It does show if you do a search. Weird. Wonder if there are other apps/widgets out there that are available but not displaying on the app/widget lists.

rconradharris over 9 years ago

DEANERH,

Thanks for pointing that out. It's brand new to the app store, e.g. uploaded the initial version yesterday. I think it takes a while for new apps to get added to those lists (there's probably a cron job running somewhere to do that :-). Hopefully it'll show up in a few hours.

Former Member over 9 years ago

As far as I understand it, one can either create and edit notes on the website, or mail them in. I very much prefer the second option, and I tried it. Apparently, only notes sent from the email address that I used to associate it with the account are accepted and show up in my list. Consistently, all users send their notes to the same email address.

This would mean that I am forced to send emails from one particular account only. And this would block in particular mails that are sent "automatically" or by 3rd party apps and services or by my wife.

Is this true? I consider this a quite limiting decision, and I hope it can be changed. Other services with a mail-in option (Kindle, evernote, readlater,...) create a unique and account-specific email address for each user, but accept mails from any address (or at least from a list of approved sources).