The results are in: this is what you want us to develop next
We asked you to tell us what to develop next, and your feedback was phenomenal. So now, without any delay, here are the results!
The most requested feature to develop next
With over one hundred reactions, the results are definitely encouraging. Almost 20% of all votes indicate that you would love to see an Inbox feature added to start.me.
This way, you can quickly save a link to your inbox, and categorize it later. Bookmarking will be faster and more efficient.
And this is just what start.me is all about: we want to empower our users to navigate the internet more efficiently.
So that’s what we will work on next. And, as a little teaser of our new Extension dialog, this is what we came up with so far.
We expect to present the final version in July. What do you think?
Our roadmap to an improved start.me experience
The Inbox doesn’t mean that the other features we proposed to you will be discarded. On the contrary. We’re always trying to improve our service. So what’s next?
The Duplicate Link Checker managed to get almost 17% of all votes, so that’s planned for July too.
The Speed improvements have always had our attention, and we will continue to work on this item too. Expect to see some results in August.
As you can see in the graph, these three features cover our top three, and over 50% of the votes. So that’s where we’ll start.
Multiple mentions
All the features we’ve proposed in our feedback form were valuable to more than one user. So, we will take a hard look on all of them, to see if we can create them as well.
Some of them, like the popularity of an iOS app, were reason to prioritize them in our roadmap. iPhone users can expect some good news this August!
Other features, like the Activity Timeline, could cover more than one function at once, like an undo feature, a restore feature, as well as a timeline. We might just kill more birds with one stone (metaphorically speaking, of course, we love these little winged creatures!).
Surprising suggestions
And then, there are the surprising suggestions our users could enter under the option ‘Other.’ Here we’ll give these users some brief feedback, so you can tell that we’ve heard you:
- Make all widgets the same size – this is difficult to realize, as our widgets are not all created equal. RSS widgets are so different from the Calculator, or the Weather widgets, that it’s not easy to make their dimensions identical. We’ll probably have to shelve this one.
- Bug in Android App – please contact our support section (support@start.me) with more detailed information about the device, browser, and other details. We love to take a look at this!
- Extended Note-taking options – can you make this more concrete? Please leave a comment.
- Integrate with Google Keep – at the moment there is no Google Keep API available for third party developers.
Already available
Finally, several users let us know that they are interested in a feature we already offer.
- Import bookmarks from similar apps – we call this feature Import bookmarks & RSS.
- Automatic backups – all your information is automatically saved and backed up on our servers. This includes your Archived pages.
- Submenu on a page – you can create an index of your pages in a Bookmarks widget. Here’s an example OSINT page.
- Easier link icon integration – it’s possible to change a bookmark icon from the context menu.
- Deadlink checker for one-off payment – we call this payment our special Lifetime PRO subscription. GO PRO now!
35 Replies to “The results are in: this is what you want us to develop next”
Any updates on the duplicate link checker feature?
Thanks for asking, Joseph P. Yes, we’ve added the development of this feature to our product road map 2021. I can’t make any hard promises about the exact time this will be done, unfortunately, so stay tuned and keep following our blog. You’ll be the first to know!
Thank you Stefan for responding so quickly. Below are my suggestions:
1. Allow Yahoo Calendar to be added to the Calendar Widget and not just Google Calendar.
2. World Clock Widget to include “next day” or “previous day” or “same day” OR actual dates wrt times from other cities. Just looking at the time does not show if the times shown are from a day/night earlier than the current day/night or a day/night after the current time. For example…If one is in the US, and he is looking at the current time in the US and then he has time from other countries like the UK, China or Australia for that matter, some of the time differences are as much as 8-12 hours ahead or behind and this would cause confusion as to whether the time they are actually looking for is behind or ahead of the current time zone he is in. Hope you can understand what am trying to say.
3. Add a blog widget which enables the ability to add rich text, images and links. OR alternatively, allow images, rich text and links to be included in “My Notes”. Additionally allows folders to be made where notes can be stored as each time a separate note widget has to be created for a new note….and the result is all of these notes under each other all dealing with different matters.
4. To Do List to have a “future” tab for tasks in the future and not just ‘all’, ‘open’ and ‘completed’. Not all tasks in the ‘to do list’ have to be done immediately but by creating a future tab it allows people to plan when certain tasks need to be done in the future additionally as a reminder.
5. Tags to be added to notes and/or to do lists so that it makes it easier to search for stuff. Also good to ‘categorise’.
6. The ability to just move or change the order of cities in the World Clock Widget instead of having to rename cities all over again to get the order you really want.
7. Is it possible to add more colour themes for the Start Page instead of just a ‘light theme” or a ‘dark theme”?
Wonderful suggestions, Wayne, thank you! Just a few quick reactions:
1- Will pass this on.
2- I think I understand: right now, you can see the time, but not the date of the time you’re watching. And this really confusing. I’ve made a ticket to address this.
3- Our Notes widget offers an uncomplicated way to add a note to a page. We do support markdown, which includes links and rich text. Read more about this here: https://blog.start.me/how-to/markdown-bookmark-pages/ For images on your page, we offer the Image gallery, or a Profile widget. We currently don’t offer the possibility to organize notes in folders. I do think it’s worth investigating, though. I’ll pass it on.
4- The Future tab is a nice idea, but I’m not sure if we want to complicate the To-do widget with it. I think we’d prefer simplicity here.
5- Tags for separate widgets like the Notes or Todo-lists are not something we support now. You can search and find with CRTL-F (for notes) or in the search bar (for bookmarks).
6- I’ve added this improvement to the Clock ticket ad 2.
7- Have you tried the Change Background option? https://support.start.me/hc/en-us/articles/200542121 This changes the start page, but it doesn’t change the dialog color, though, so if you’re looking for something like this, it would be a new feature. Are you looking for that?
Again, Wayne, thanks for you suggestions. Let’s improve start.me together!
When can we vote again for the next feature or make a suggestion? Am a late subscriber as one of your PRO user clients.
Sure, Wayne! We had to close the polls for the next feature, but please respond to this reaction, and we’ll add your suggestion to the list. Looking forward to hearing from you!
yeah, pity… somehow i missed that voting… However it is great being asked and yes, duplicate finder makes sense, speed improvements are always and everywhere welcome.
iOS app … Is it time for it?the latest cases around Apple and it’s anti-competitive restrictions on it’s mobile device marketplaces and the action of tree prominent services Bluemail, Fortnite Epic and Spotify against the tech conglomerate, actions which pointing out the irregularities and the shameful behaviour of the company. There a many more cases known, smaller companies which were not able to protest against a tyrant on the risk getting blocked, losing the iOS market, reputation and investments …
This case now, nicely presented on the big silver tray, unmistakably visible for everyone must inevitably lead to ethics discussions and to a positioning on the part of service operators and consumers. Would it be better to invest the development costs in alternative projects or to fraternise with other sustainable projects / companies? And the same question applies to us , as consumer. Is this really what we want to pay 1000 bucks (or even more) for? It is since years and days the same old story. Not just with Apple. All those companies that act like bandits on the net, helping themselves just as if they were at home, steal and manipulate, poisoning and bringing the whole www infrastructure to ruin with the greedy exploitation campaign and the sniffling, all those I mean… (sorry, get going :)))
Lets talk about something nice then-….. At this point I would like to appreciate for the straightforward developing steps your team made in the past 12 months.. It became more and more a great bookmark solution and worth to store content at start.me. I was quite a time not as active as I wanted to be, but sometimes in life a link and bookmark collection and startpage optimisation can’t be on the top of the priority list and needs to quere :))))
Personally some additional content creator features and modular options would amaze me, tools to give pages a more individual touch. Without loosing anything of the current simplicity, user friendliness and speed of course…
Seemingly sharing pages becoming a big thing on start.me… Design and page illustration might become more of importance…
For instance, I’d LOVE to arrange the different content blocks in a more flexible way. Being able to change the size of the blocks would be extraordinarily outstanding, instead of setting columns the way it is possible right now … The column setting is fine, makes it sometimes a bit rigid as this 1 to 5 column frame is given for the whole page….
Another way which might be fancy: The possibility to add stripes to the page, one to another. With the option to set columns for every stripe in a different way…
Ok, that is all right for now …. Happy day P
Hi Pascal, thanks for your comment! We love it when our users take the time to write what they really think. It’s also great that you confirm for us, how important it is to listen to our users, through polling and other ways of communication. So, I’m sure we’ll put up a new poll someday soon. Regarding the iPhone app: I understand what you’re saying. It’s true that Apple has become a huge corporate conglomerate, almost like IBM once upon a time. Their power and reach are impressive, but not so much in our niche, fortunately. We’re proud to be available across all platforms and devices because we believe that’s what our users really want and need. And as we’re relying increasingly on subscriptions to keep our service in the air, we’re confident we will remain independent too. Free forever! And finally: I’ve relayed your other suggestions about resizing widgets and adding lines between columns to our Development Team. Keep following our blog to see if it pans out!
Most of the bookmarks I import don’t display site icons even though the website has a favicon file. Is there a certain size or format that’s required?
Hi Cory,
There is no minimum size requirement for favicons. Can you e-mail us us web address of your start.me page where these bookmarks are imported? Please e-mail us at support@start.me and we’ll investigate why these icons are not showing up correctly.
hi you mentioned:
Automatic backups – all your information is automatically saved and backed up on our servers. This includes your Archived pages.
does it meant now the webpage we bookmarked is cached in your server?
Thanks for asking! We only save your bookmarks to webpages, not the webpages themselves. We know this is a feature many users would appreciate, so it’s on our longlist. Stay tuned!
The best is yet to come.
Thanks for your work.
You’re welcome!
Widget request
My fav widget from the defunct igoogle days: Days Since
It’s a basic list where you enter an event, it’s added to your list and counts up the days since. Became a must have for me so I could keep track of mundane things like when I last replaced the furnace filter or how long since I last flipped the mattress.
Thanks for listening!
That’s a nice idea — there are many times when I’d like to now when I did something but can never remember. And isn’t something that would be very difficult to do.
One way you could do this currently would be to use the “Notes” widget — to may notes for yourself when you did something.
But a Widget just dedicated to this with prompts for date and the event would still be nice to have.
Noted!
Days since… this looks like a great new widget idea! You could use it for chores, but also to track subscriptions. I’ll put it on the list. Thanks for contributing!
Oh man, awesome!
I just want to say thanks for creating a great product but just as importantly interfacing with your users in a great professional /personal way. I don’t know that I have seen this done so well for anywhere else in the software world. Thanks.
Thanks a lot for your kind words, Myron. It’s great to be appreciated!
I would like to know if it would be possible to search for an icon. I have many icons and categories which makes it hard to find where the heck I put the icon I want. If that exists let me know. Thanks Bob Blocker
Hi Bob! Yes, it’s possible to search for icons. Go to any bookmark, right-click it to open the context menu, and click Change icon. In this sidebar, you can search our collection of icons, or click the tab ‘Your icons,’ to search the icons you’ve uploaded. Here’s the support article with some screenshots: https://support.start.me/hc/en-us/articles/360014703599 I hope this helps!
Regarding the Notes Widget — it would be much better to not make the change at the time any change in the notes is made but instead only make the change if the user does an “Update” or “Save” top the notes. So that changes that were not intended or a mistake do not have to be corrected for every little change that is made.
For example — a user might mistakenly highlight (select) a large portion of the notes and because just one character entered would replace the entire selected area the result is a significant ;portion of the notes have been removed (replaced by that one key stroke).
Clearly that change should ONLY take place if the user clicks the “Done” or “Save” option and so if this mistake had occurred by not clicking the “Done” or “Save” option the user doesn’t suffer the unintentional loss of a significant amount of data.
If you think about it — no changes should ever take place on-the-fly — clearly changes should always only occur if a “Save” is done — and this should be the case for the Notes Widget as well.
I use the “Notes” Widget to keep track of records — so because changes occur on-the-fly I have to be very careful not to select too much to change because I have no way of backing out of a change that is made since the change has occurred for any keystroke that is done.
It would be a huge improvement and obviously logical for any changes to only occur when the changes are actually “saved” by either clicking the “Done” button at the bottom of the Widget or by selecting the “Save” option at the top of the Widget. And if neither of these things are done then changes should NOT be made. If you want to add an “Are you sure” to protect users from making mistakes that would be fine too.
This is interesting! So, if I understand you correctly, the Notes widget saves your changes even without clicking the Done button? I don’t think this should be happening. When you put the Notes widget in the Edit function, it should only save changes after you’ve clicked Done. Could you please recheck it, and contact our support team if necessary? Thanks!
I did a poor job of explaining.
1) You have to use “Edit” to make changes (as we both know)
2) Once in “Edit” there is no other option than to click “Done” at the bottom to exit the “Edit” option.
3) If I made a change this will of course be done at that time.
I think there should be a way to “Exit” the “Edit” option without forcing the changes to be made — don’t you?
What if I made a lot of changes and realized I was wrong to do so — all those changes will have to occur and I’ll have to be able to recall all those changes to fix the problem the only option there is to do is to click the “Done” button at the bottom.
Now here is the scenario I mentioned that could be a disaster.
I selected a large portion of text by mistake and then keyed in one character.
All of what I just selected was then replaced by what I keyed in.
I essentially just lost a significant ;portion of my notes because I have no other option than to click the “Done” button to get out of the Edit function.
There should always be a way to Exit-Without-Saving at all times as exemplified by my example.
You might think there would be an “Exit” (for purposes of not making a change) available in the upper-right corner Context-menu you provide — but there is not. There is only these options available: 1) Save, 2) Copy, 3) Move, 4) Settings, 5) Delete, 6) Help.
There should at least be an option to “Exit without Saving” option here — that is if you don’t want to do the more difficult thing to provide two buttons at the bottom: 1) Save and 2) Exit (for purposes of not saving)
I hope this explains things in more detail. 🙂
Off-topic: I would suggest that these blogs should not continue to show the two boxes “Notify me of new comments” and/or “Notify me of new posts via email” — if in fact the user has already set these for the topic previously. By including this every time if gives the impression every post needs this done every time (which would be tedious because the user has to go through the additional steps to verify this — when I’m assuming once this is done once for a blog topic this remains in place unless changed. What I think should display once a user has selected either of these two choices is to display that the option has been selected: such as “You have requested to be notified for either “New comments” or “New posts” which ever might apply. This is fairly common practice if I’m not mistaken. (of course if one option is not selected then that option should still be prompted for to provide the opportunity for the user to do so.)
Hi Mike, thanks for explaining some more. What you mention is indeed on our radar, not specifically for the Notes widget, but in general. We’re aware that we currently don’t have an undo feature, or a timeline feature, to make it possible to return to a previous state or setting. Your solution, to exit without saving, could solve this problem for the Notes widget, so I’ll propose it to the Code Masters. The same goes for your off-topic suggestion: I’m not sure how to save notification settings, but I’ll make some inquiries. Again, thanks for your feedback!
Great job — I just noticed tonight that we now have two option buttons at the bottom of widget when in “Edit” mode: A) Save B) Cancel — thus providing a way to exit w/out forcing a save (only). Before the only option was “Done” (save) w/out an option not to save. So this provides a way to back-out of (reverse) changes in the event the changes were not wanted. Many thanks for the update!!
We’re glad you like it!
Hi Stefan,
I had posted a big THANK YOU! for fixing this issue of not being able to “Cancel” changes made in the “Edit” mode. That’s fantastic now that we have both a “Save” and a “Cancel” button available at the bottom of the “Edit” mode. Great job!!! I’m very pleased. 🙂 The “Cancel” function is not included in the “Edit” context menu — but that’s OK — I just have to keep in mind I can cancel via the bottoms at the bottom of the Edit mode window. (I don’t know what happened to my earlier post the day I discovered the change a few days ago — but I wanted to make sure to let you know my gratitude for you and others on the start.me staff for getting this done. 🙂 (I hope this time my comments take)
Hi Mike,
Thanks again for your feedback! We’re glad you like our changes, and we also love the way you help us improve the service! I discovered this comment in the automated spam folder – I’m glad I caught this one in time! Again, thanks for your support!
The “Save” and “Cancel” buttons at the bottom are great — now changes that are not desirable can be undone by using “Cancel” – big upgrade.
But — only problem is when this change was made the context menu “Save” (in the list when clicking on the three dots) — does not save changed anymore.
If I am at the top of the Notes Widget and instead of scrolling all the way down to click the “Save” button at the bottom of the Widget and instead click the “Save” option from the top of the Widget (listed in the context menu of options) – the “Save” is ignored. Changes made are lost after closing the browser as the next time anything that was changed and “Save” is selected from the context menu – the changes are not there.
All methods of “Save” should work of course – this should have been tested (users will be surprised to find their changes are not there the next time they use their browser. (I kept wondering if I had remembered wrong and didn’t make the changes when I found them not there but after doing a test change and exiting and returning to the start-page I then found out that the alternate “Save” in the Widget Contest Menu is no longer working (apparently since the “Cancel” button was added to the Widget.
I was a bit reluctant to bring this up in fear that any changes will mess the other “Cancel” or “Save” functions at the bottom — but decided to go ahead and report this since using “Save” should be expected to work no matter where that “Save” function is located.
Your software folks should be more diligent in testing everything out when changes are made. Back when I was programming (a long time ago) — if I kept doing this I probably wouldn’t have kept my job very long. Please – test thoroughly before releasing updates.
Thanks for your time.
P.S. If you think it best for me to enter a request ticket (that would include a screen-shot of the “Save” function I’m speaking of) — then let me know and I will do this.
Hi Mike! Thanks a lot for your feedback: it’s always welcome! I’ve been trying to reproduce the problem, but on my system there’s no issue. I’m not sure why. If you could make a request to our support team, we’ll find the underlying cause of this. Just email them at support@start.me. Also: we regret that we don’t catch every bug before releasing an update, but since we offer our service on every browser and device, that’s not always possible. Our time is limited, unfortunately. So, please don’t hold back: with your feedback we will make start.me even better!
Hi Stefan,
The problem was fixed by start.me support as of Sept 15 (see correspondence with your support team below).
There was no reply available in this blog directly under your comment on this subject – where you mentioned you could not reproduce the issue. You will find your comments below this reply (including the one I’m replying to which is the last one in the conversation stream). Perhaps each post should have it’s own reply as opposed to the only reply available is where the dialog stream starts.
Any way — your comment was dated September 17, 2020 at 11:20 stating you could not duplicate the problem — so if you had tested for this on or around that date then the issue was fixed by that time (refer to dates below).
Oh and thank you for followup up. 🙂
Here’s the correspondence on this between your support team and myself:
From: “start.me”
Date: Tue, 15 Sep 2020 16:16:44 +0000
Subject: Re: Notes Widget
Technical Support (start.me)
Sep 15, 2020, 18:16 GMT+2
Hi Mike,
This issue should now be solved on production.
Best regards,
Arjen
——————————————————————————–
Technical Support (start.me)
Sep 15, 2020, 15:11 GMT+2
Hi Mike
Got it. You are right. The changes are not kept. We are deploying a fix for this ASAP. I’ll let you know when this is done.
Thanks for pointing this out to us.
Best regards,
Arjen
Thanks again Stefan,
You very welcome! And thank you for the follow up, Mike, now it all makes sense! 😉