The Idea Ether

indi Beta 3 Profiles

With Beta 3 of indi and indi Channels we introduced the ability for you to create and share profiles. Your profiles are what you push to others on your Direct and Group channels. Your profiles they are never seen by anyone else (i.e. we cannot see them on our servers because they are always encrypted).

In indi, the profiles that you publish can be edited in the Profile Editor utility. If you select one of these profiles and press the Edit button you will see two multi-line edit boxes. The top box contains your profile template, the bottom box contains the CSS style for that template. Flash allows us to use a limited number of css styles and we added a few of our own. The template side allows basic html tags (again limited by Flash to: a, b, br, font, img, i, li, p, span, textformat and u). The template also includes template entries. Those entries are surrounded by square brackets such as [firstName]. There are currently 30 template entries that you can choose from:

[prefix]	The prefix (Mr., Ms., etc.)
[firstName]	First name
[lastName]	Last name or surname
[suffix]	The suffix (Jr., Sr., etc.)
[workEmail]	Work email address
[homeEmail]	Home or personal email address
[mobilePhone]	Mobile telephone number
[indiAddress]	The indi address
[imAddress]	Fully qualified IM address
[workCompany]	Company name
[workJobTitle]	Work job title or role
[workAddressStreet]	Street number of work address
[workAddressStreet2]	Second line of street number of work address
[workAddressCity]	City name of work address
[workAddressState]	State or province of work address
[workAddressZip]	Zip or postal code of work address
[workAddressCountry]	Country name of work address
[workPhone]	Work telephone number
[workFax]	Work facsimile number
[workWebpage]	The web page (URL) for work
[homeAddressStreet]	Street number of home address
[homeAddressStreet2]	Second line of street number of home address
[homeAddressCity]	City name of home address
[homeAddressState]	State or province of home address
[homeAddressZip]	Zip or postal code of home address
[homeAddressCountry]	Country name of home address
[homePhone]	Home telephone number
[homeFax]	Home facsimile number
[homeWebpage]	The web page (URL) for work
[note]	Note about person

Template entries are merged in from your contact record which you can edit in the Address Book or right inside the Profile Editor (Contact Form button in the upper right). Doing this merge allows you to freeform type in whatever you want in a profile, while your contact data is kept in sync with your contact record. We will be adding more capability to this templating engine in the next beta release scheduled for the Spring. Also, we will be adding the ability to automatically extract these template entries from other's profiles to automatically fill in their contact record. So, in addition to all this sharing madness indi will provide a way to keep others up to date with your latest contact information!

indi Beta 3 is out!

We released indi Beta 3 yesterday.

Whew, its been a huge effort to build a distributed sharing solution (using Amazon's S3) enabling real privacy (using encryption) for consumers (yes, your Mom can use it) that runs across OS X and Windows (using Ruby and Flash) and soon Linux (Adobe released the Flash 9 player today).

indi is free to use and has NO ADS.

The new features in this release are many, and I will follow up with some detail on what we have added. The key thing for now is this: indi is the simplest way (drag & drop) to share with people on the Net. If you are tired of SPAM, get indi. Please provide us feedback...we value that most of all.

Now to get those screencasts recorded...