This morning we shipped a new version of Simple In/Out Desktop. In version 1.2 we added a number of new features to make updating your status quicker from anywhere on your computer.

Simple In/Out in your System Tray or Menubar

The most popular feedback we received was allowing users to update their status quickly from anywhere in the app, a behavior that existed in our old desktop apps. Today we’re exceeding that request by placing Simple In/Out right in your Windows system tray or Mac menubar.

A single click from anywhere on your computer now displays your current status, allows for quickly launching the app, and allows updating your status using your Quick Picks.

This new feature unlocks a handful of other new features as well. Users can now launch Simple In/Out Desktop on startup, in a hidden state, so it’s ready to go. The system tray/menubar will be available for your immediate use.

If you’re using Desktop Presence, launching the app on startup can also begin automatically updating your Simple In/Out status. Because a lot more users will be running Simple In/Out all the time in the background, we’ve brought our Active Time feature to Simple In/Out Desktop. You’re in control of when Simple In/Out Desktop automatically performs status updates.

Right Click to Save Time

We’ve gone further in this release to save managers time by adding right-click menus to the Simple In/Out board.

Managers can quickly update another user’s status or scheduled statuses without having to click to view the user’s profile first. This shortcut saves a number of clicks, and gives us a place to add more time-saving features in the future.

Update today to the new Simple In/Out Desktop

A reminder that the old Simple In/Out Desktop apps are “end of life” and will no longer allow users to remain logged in consistently starting June 1st. Now is the best time to head to simpleinout.com/desktop and download the new app for Windows/Mac.

With the changing calendar, it’s time for us to look back at 2021. We’re thrilled to welcome a new year and new possibilities to expand on the best digital in/out board. Many people around the globe are returning to work onsite, and many are embracing new ways to work. Regardless of how you operate, Simple In/Out has you covered.

Here are a few highlighted features we shipped in 2021.

New Simple In/Out Desktop

We began 2021 by allowing users to see the new Simple In/Out Desktop app for Windows/Mac. A complete rewrite/rethink, the new Simple In/Out Desktop may be the best board we’ve built to date. More features, more customizability, more power. Our new Desktop Presence feature is both more powerful and more predictable regarding automatic status updates than the previous desktop activity system.

This year, support for our old apps for Windows/Mac will end. We’ll announce the official “end of life” date in the future. Now is the time to have your team transition to the new Simple In/Out Desktop.

Schedule Simple In/Out Status Updates from Calendars

Simple In/Out calendar integration was one of the most popular feature requests we’ve had in our history. By integrating your calendar, Simple In/Out can now automatically schedule status updates based on the events of your day.

This feature joins Geofences, Beacons, Networks, and the new Desktop Presence as ways to keep your in/out board up-to-date without manual intervention. It’s yet another way Simple In/Out maintains our lead as the most accurate in/out board around.

New User Interface for Simple In/Out on Android phones

Our phone apps are beginning a transition to a new user interface. In 2021, we started this transition with our Android app. Our new Android app has clearer meaning, fewer tabs, and places the things you need closer to where you spend your time. You can read more about the changes here.

We also ushered in an upgrade to Quick Picks by introducing Favorites and Recents. Instead of combining these two concepts, the new Simple In/Out for Android separates them for more simplicity and control. All of our apps and simpleinout.com will transition to this paradigm in the coming months.

Here are some other updates from 2021.

iOS 15 Broke Geofences and Beacons for developers everywhere

When Apple introduced iOS 15, they introduced several bugs that have broken Geofence and Beacon reliability across Apple’s entire platform. All developers, including us, have been affected. We’ve been working with Apple for months, and unfortunately, they still haven’t resolved all the issues.

With our latest release of Simple In/Out for iPhone, we’ve shipped a workaround for Apple’s bugs. We appreciate everyone’s patience as we’ve been working through Apple’s issues.

We Hired a New iOS Team

We hired two new iOS developers in 2021. This will translate into more features and bug fixes coming to all our iOS apps in 2022.

From our team at Simply Made Apps, we wish everyone out there a happy new year. We cannot wait to show you the new features we have coming to Simple In/Out.

A few updates from your friends at Simple In/Out.

iOS 15 Geofence/Beacon Reliability

As we’ve noted, Apple introduced a bug in iOS 15 preventing apps from always being notified about Geofence/Beacon updates. This week iOS 15.2 launched with the hopes of a fix. But to our disappointment, the bug is still present.

We’ve been working diligently for the past several months attempting everything under the sun to help Apple diagnose and fix this issue. We’ve sent them gigabytes of logs, built separate apps to demonstrate their bug, and wore out our shoes walking through Geofences.

We have a theory explaining the iOS 15’s bug, and we’ve concocted a workaround to stop Apple from launching the Simple In/Out app in a broken state. We have launched a new Public Beta to test this with our workaround and additional logging. If you’re interested in helping us diagnose Apple’s bug, head to our Public Beta page and click to join.

The Internet Security Issue, No Impact on Simple In/Out

Last week it came to light that there is a critical bug in a popular Java library that affects a lot of sites on the internet. Simple In/Out was never affected by this issue. We do not run Java for our web services.

The new Simple In/Out Desktop

A reminder that the new Simple In/Out Desktop is ready for download for Windows and Mac from our website. The older apps are considered “End of Life” and will be decommissioned in the future. We’ll announce the exact date these older apps stop working at another time.

Now is a great time to download the new Simple In/Out Desktop or prepare your team for the changes in the new desktop app.

Happy holidays from all of us at Simply Made Apps.

Over the past few months, we’ve been working on a new status update user interface for Simple In/Out on Android phones. After a Public Beta period, the app update is now available to everyone. We’re excited to talk more about one of the most significant user interface changes we’ve made for our phone users.

We started with a core question: how could we make it easier to see your status and perform status updates while inside our app? Historically, we’ve always had a Status tab. This tab displayed your current status, scheduled statuses, and all the interface elements to perform updates like Quick Picks. But this interface suffered from usability issues. Primarily, new users would often confuse the list of Quick Picks with their status history. Because Quick Picks would automatically populate with recent activity, this wasn’t unreasonable. Even new employees of Simply Made Apps would make this mistake.

Now in Simple In/Out for Android, we’ve reorganized the user interface to simplify the experience.

New tabs with clear meaning

The Status and Settings tabs have been replaced by the new Profile tab. The Profile tab is a better Status tab. It displays clear access to your Scheduled Statuses and your settings. We’ve also elevated the user’s status history to a first-class citizen on this tab. Users no longer need to find themselves on the board to view their past status updates.

We’ve maintained the QR code (if you’re using TimeClock) and an Update Status button to ease the transition away from the old Status tab.

More places to update your status

Updating your status has never been easier with our new status flyup. Visible on all tabs, the new status flyup displays your current status at all times. With a tap or swipe up, you can perform status updates from inside the flyup. You can tap once to update your status, utilize Quick Picks, or type a custom comment. When completed, we’ll slide the status flyup away so you can get back to work.

When it comes to typing a new status comment, we’ve done away with the words “in” and “out” in a “tabbed” UI element which was difficult to understand which status was selected. Instead, there’s a dropdown menu complete with our in/out symbols and color. This will look familiar to any users of the new Simple In/Out Desktop.

Improved Quick Picks

To make Quick Picks useful, Simple In/Out has always automatically populated them with status updates you’ve made recently. If you don’t want to curate your Quick Picks, this saves a lot of work. If you do wish to curate your list, however, this was tricky. We allowed for favoriting a Quick Pick so it remained at the top of the list, and we allowed for deleting a Quick Pick so it would disappear. Deleting a Quick Pick was always a cop-out on our part. If you update your status with the same comment again, it will just come back.

The new My Quick Picks is 100% curated by the user. No more favorite Quick Picks, instead we provide a list that only you control. We can do this because we’ve added a separate list of Quick Picks called Recents. Recents is our non-curated list of status updates that you can reuse to update your status. It’s the best of both worlds. Now your curated Quick Picks can be managed without Simple In/Out automatically adding to it. If you don’t want to manage Quick Picks, Recents provides what users have always had: a list of likely-popular status updates to reuse.

Summary

All of these changes combine to make Simple In/Out easier to use, especially for new users. We now offer more interface labels/hints, more places to perform status updates, and more control over behavior all while displaying less to the user. We hope to bring these changes soon to the iPhone, Desktop, and simpleinout.com.

As always, we’d love your feedback and welcome your questions. Send us an email anytime.

Apple’s latest phone operating system, iOS 15, has been out for several weeks. A few days after its release, we began receiving reports from customers indicating Geofences and Beacons were not always updating statuses automatically. We started experiencing the same issue around our office and immediately began investigating.

It became clear early on that this was likely a bug in iOS itself. Our assumptions were bolstered by other apps suffering from similar issues. We escalated our bug reports to Apple themselves and have sent them gigabytes of diagnostic data proving the problem. We now have word from Apple that this is officially a known issue.

Unfortunately, this means there’s not much we at Simple In/Out can do to improve Geofences/Beacons until Apple resolves their bug. We have noticed that the more you launch the Simple In/Out app on your phone, the more Geofences/Beacons tend to work as expected. When the Simple In/Out app is in memory, we likely avoid whatever bug is inside iOS 15 that is causing troubles.

We will continue to work directly with Apple and update our customers on their progress. In the meantime, we recommend launching the Simple In/Out app on your phone once a day if you use Geofences or Beacons. We also recommend having the latest version of iOS 15 (currently 15.0.2) in the hopes that Apple solves its problem before we’re officially notified.

We apologize that Apple’s bug is causing Simple In/Out to work unreliably in the background. We hope Apple can fix this bug quickly for our customers and everyone.

Starting on September 30th, 2021, our new Simple In/Out Desktop app for Windows and Mac experienced problems with loading the board and performing status updates. We have a new update that should be downloaded immediately (version 1.0.5). You can download directly from our website or update within our Desktop app from the Settings tab.

What Happened

Simple In/Out’s website and API utilize SSL certificates provided by Let’s Encrypt. This service’s root certificate, one many services like ours stem from, has just expired. For devices released in the last few years, that’s a nothing-burger. A new SSL certificate handles everything from here on out.

In our case, this should have been a non-event. Our new Desktop app relies on other technologies, and unfortunately, one of those was affected by the expired certificate.

If you’re using Simple In/Out Desktop, please upgrade to the latest version. Downloading version 1.0.5 will restore functionality, and you’ll be up and running in no time.

We apologize for our mistake.

Today is a day we’ve been working towards for almost two years. After eight months of public betas, we’re proud to launch the new Simple In/Out Desktop for Windows and Mac.

We believe it’s the best in/out board we’ve ever built, with more power and customization options than ever before. For the first time, we’ve delivered a list view in our native desktop app. Like our web board, the list view on Desktop displays loads of user information in a small space. We’ve also reimagined our grid view, with more options for window sizes large and small. Both of these boards look right at home on your computer because we fully support Dark Mode.

Simple In/Out Desktop continues automatic status updates via your computer’s activity. We found the old automatic update system was too sensitive on Windows and too hard to understand on Mac. We’ve built the new automatic update system to work consistently across operating systems for the first time. We handle a multitude of circumstances much better, whether it’s putting your computer to sleep, closing the lid of your laptop, or even losing power altogether. We’ve also given administrators more control over comments, similar to Geofences.

Of course, we support our Notifications as first-class citizens on Windows and Mac. Whether you’re following users, receiving reminders, or utilizing safety notifications, Simple In/Out Desktop has you covered.

We’re offering the new Simple In/Out Desktop as a direct download from our website, simpleinout.com. No more app stores for our desktop downloads! Using enterprise device management software to mass-install Simple In/Out Desktop on your computers is easier than ever.

We’ve removed our old Windows and Mac apps from their respective stores. If you’re already using one of our old apps, nows the time to upgrade. In the future, we’ll be decommissioning the old apps.

We hope everyone loves Simple In/Out Desktop as much as we enjoyed building it. We can’t wait to add more first-class desktop features in the future.

We’re happy to announce that Josh Slebodnik has joined Simply Made Apps as an iOS developer.

Josh graduated with an Associates in Applied Science from my alma mater in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota. He honed his skills on projects both for employers and in the freelance space, which translates to learning on-the-fly (a skill we covet here at Simply Made Apps). He’s a familiar face in the Fargo development scene.

As a member of our iOS team, Josh Slebodnik with be joining Josh Glover in developing the next wave of features for our suite of Simple In/Out iOS apps.

We’re thrilled to welcome another member to the Simply Made Apps team.

The Simple In/Out Public Beta program has just received two amazing new app updates and we want to tell you about them. We’re very excited for feedback, both good and bad, about the latest changes we have planned for Simple In/Out Desktop and Phone.

Simple In/Out Desktop

Our new desktop app for Windows and Mac has been available in public beta since January. Today, we’ve launched our “release candidate”. Barring any late bugs, this is close to the final version that we hope to put out as 1.0 in the coming weeks.

The big new feature is automatic updates based on your desktop activity. We’ve built a brand new updating system to offer more control and predictability than ever before. Previous, Windows would check users in/out too frequently. Now, we have a consistent system in place that doesn’t rely so heavily on Microsoft’s definition of activity. We also allow administrators to control the comments left behind when using automatic updates, similar to our phone apps.

We’ve also added all three of our Notifications to the Simple In/Out Desktop beta for the first time. Now users can follow users and utilize safety notifications along with reminders.

We’re close to sunsetting our existing Windows and Mac apps, so feedback now is more important than ever.

Simple In/Out Android’s new user interface

For quite a while, we’ve been dreaming of ways to make updating your status within the Simple In/Out app on your phone more intuitive. We’ve always had a Status tab that users interact with, but this led to a few confusing situations. Some new users would mistake Quick Picks with their status history. They wouldn’t realize that tapping would perform a status update. Favorite Quick Picks were also easily lost because they were combined under the “Recents” list.

After considerable thought, we think we’ve cracked it. Today, we’re inviting our Android beta testers to try a new design. If our beta users like it as much as we do, it will become the new layout for all our phone apps on Android and iOS.

The big change is the elimination of our old tabs. Gone are the Status and Settings tab, replaced by one My Account tab. This new tab houses your status history, settings, scheduled statuses, barcode (if using TimeClock), and a way to update your current status. On both this new tab and the Board tab, we make updating your status easy. It’s a big change, but one we believe will make it easier to see your current status and perform status updates from the places you spend the most time.

We’re thrilled to give you a peek at what we’ve been working on over these past few months. We invite all our customers to join our Public Beta program and try our new apps today.

Today we’re launching one of the biggest feature requests in Simple In/Out history. Fresh out of our Public Beta program, we’re adding the ability to schedule status updates based on your calendar! This new automatic way to update your status joins Geofences, Beacons, Networks, and Desktop Activity as ways to always keep your board up-to-date.

With an industry-standard iCal URL from your provider (like Outlook, Google Calendar, etc), Simple In/Out can schedule status updates for you, which appear in your Scheduled Statuses for other users with permission to see. When the time comes, your current status will be updated on the in/out board.

Historically, the challenge has always been knowing which status to schedule appropriately. Simple In/Out’s calendar integration solves this by intelligently scanning the event’s summary looking for the magic words in or out. If found, the status is scheduled appropriately. If not, you choose which status is presumed when setting up your calendar.

You can see a video on the new calendar sync here.

To begin, head over to Simple In/Out’s website. If you need help finding your calendar provider’s iCal URL, we have instructions for some popular providers on our Help Center.

We’re excited to release this new feature for our Simple In/Out customers worldwide. We’re also excited for the other new developments we have in store this Summer.