The second eBuddy Mobile User Day is a fact. Last week, we welcomed a group of enthusiastic Dutch eBuddy Mobile users to our HQ in Amsterdam.

The reason why we organize our User Days on such a regular basis is because we believe that a product needs to be shaped at your needs and not the other way around…

Our recently released Mobile Messenger and our Mobile Internet version therefore became subject to some very critical testing. I can not give you specific details about the findings, but some interesting improvements and ideas for both versions have risen and can be expected in a matter of time

After an intense afternoon of testing, we took our test-crew for a cruise around the famous Canals of Amsterdam. Luckily, the weather was great for the first time in a while and the American style pizza’s and traditional Dutch Heineken beers were well deserved!

The next user day will take place on Thursday the 2nd of August at our HQ so if you are around and would like to join please leave us a note here.

If you want to see all the pictures taken that day, visit our Flickr account here.

Thanks for all the feedback we’re getting on the Beta Web version. By popular demand we have moved the display picture feature up the chart and made it part of our new release. Another thing we added in this release is receiving custom emoticons.

Display picture

We want to keep things nice and clean, so you can change your display picture right where you need it, in the chat tabs. You can simply change it by clicking on the picture.

Custom emoticons

Since we don’t want you to miss out on the fun with your buddies on MSN, we have implemented a feature which allows you to recieve the custom emoticons your friends are sending you from their MSN client.

Other improvements and fixes

Since we’re still in beta, we’re still cracking bugs and improving all around:

Improved remembering usernames when adding accounts

Offline messages for Yahoo has been improved, they now appear in a new tab per user

Improved the disconnection handling

We still have lots of good stuff up our sleeves, so watch out for more news. Please keep sending that feedback. Next up: Google Talk and ICQ support.

So surf to http://www.ebuddy.com/#ebuddy and try our new Multi-Network Beta!

We pride ourselves with our work on the multi network version of our application as well as our availability on 300+ mobile phone types. With the release of the iPhone we of course feel that it can not be left behind.Europe, The Netherlands in particular, still has no concrete dates as to when the iPhone is going to be released, so we had to resort to eBay and earlier this week we finally received our very own iPhone. After some creative engineering to get the unit working (no AT&T in europe ) our AJAX guys took it.After a lot of playing with it work we are happy to announce the availability of one of the most advanced web-based multi network chat clients for the iPhone. Just point your iPhone to eBuddy (http://www.ebuddy.com) and you will be sent to a special landing page from where you can enter our application in iPhone mode and chat using MSN, AIM or Yahoo.This version is marked as Alpha quality (or experimental if you will), so if you find any bugs or experience strange behavior, please let us know via feedback@ebuddy.com or press the feedback button in the application itself.

Alive and kicking for barely a month now, the eBuddy Mobile Messenger has already been downloaded times

We’ve been getting a lot of feedback from all the beta users, who already helped us in tackling some annoying issues. Apart from that, it has also become clear to us that you really like what we have done.

So thanks for all the positive feedback (and ok, let’s be honest, sometimes less positive…but hey, that’s why it’s a beta )!

For those that haven’t tried it yet:
check out our webpages or point your mobile browser to m.ebuddy.com.

We’re working hard to make it even better!

As some of you may have noticed, our Multi-Network Beta has just been updated. Armed with your feedback, we’ve used the previous period to improve on the Core functionality of the Beta. Our idea of quality over quantity if you may. Amongst numerous small bugfixes and glitches, here are some of the most noteworthy improvements:

No more getting disconnected
This was one of the largest feedback points you supplied us with. We have improved a lot - you should now be able to stay online for days on end

Automatic OS recognition for all Yes/No and Accept/Cancel buttons
After some internal Windows user vs. Mac user struggles, we came up with a brilliant solution: the client will automatically detect your Operating System and place the buttons accordingly. What does this mean? This means that on MacOSX all your Yes/Accept/OK buttons will be on the right side of the No/Cancel/Not OK buttons. And on Windows, you guessed it, it’s exactly the other way around.

Chat tab functionality improvements
We had some bugs involving the chat tabs not functioning properly. This included getting multiple chat tabs for the same buddy, getting blank chat tabs that didn’t render correctly, incorrect status icons in the tab and more.

Performance improvements
Although we’re not there yet, we’ve already solved quite a few performance issues. Annoying “Features” like 100% cpu usage after clicking certain OK buttons and while switching between tabs of the same account have been removed. More performance improvements to come in the next release.

Together with more bugfixes and improvements, we’re improving our Beta periodically. Next Up: Upload Avatar and receiving Custom emoticons. As you can see, your feedback definetely counts. So keep it coming!

So, surf to http://www.ebuddy.com/#ebuddy and try out our new Multi-Network Beta now!

Gizmodo wrote a post about using the mobile eBuddy AIM client on the iPhone. Not too shabby! But you know us, we’ve always got something cooking…

You’ve probably asked yourself the same question like I did: where is that darn debugger?? Where did the stack trace go??

Well, in fact, there ARE a few tricks you can apply to IE to make it more developer friendly! First of all, the IE developer toolbar is a must-have tool. But that’s not a debugger like, for instance, venkman is.

Debugbar is a nice effort of creating an actual debugging-, css- and DOM-inspection capable plugin for IE. It even lets you inspect your XMLHTTPRequests and it’s free for personal use. That’s also the reason why we chose not to use Debugbar.

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