ok so it’s about time for an android upgrade.
This is a good one. goes to show you can still coax some excellent user behaviour stuff out of it – if you think about what you’re doing and go the extra mile.

so…now LIVE on android market – echoecho 1.5

A quick list of new features – see details and screenshots below.

• new notification system – in addition to the cool push style popups described in this blog before you now get proper usage of Android tray notifications.
• the map pushpins for your friends are now clickable – so you can quickly text or call your friends directly from the map
• faster and more stable – as usual more stability, better error treatment and overall faster performance

new notification system
ok so here’s a typical starting screen. (these screenshots were taken from a Nexus 1). Notice the pretty high resolution icon ;)

So you’re doing your thing – and an echo comes in. Due to our fancy push notification system (described elsewhere) you see something like this on your screen:

What was that? Oh I see. Now you understand why we call this one-click location sharing. Think about this –
SIMPLICITY – you’re one click away from seeing your friend’s location on a map
PRIVACY – There are no settings to worry about. The privacy here is automatic and by design
Try doing that with foursquare, gowalla, brightkite or anything else for that matter.

But let’s suppose you don’t see this notification after your phone beeps/vibrates – well 30 seconds later the following happens:

And that icon will stay there – as a notification/reminder of new echoes – until you launch the application again.
Of course if you expand the taskbar drawer the screen will look like this:

Of course the same stuff happens when you ask somebody their location – the responses just look a little different – for example:

or – in tray notification form:

Now let’s assume you actually launch the app by clicking on the icon or on one of the notifications and then see your friends on a map (after all you can’t just stare at notifications all day)

You do know that you can click on the imperial units at the bottom and they’ll flip to metric? You didn’t. Ok well you do now.

Also you can now click on your friend’s pushpin. This way you can quickly call or text your friend directly from the echoecho application. Of course the idea is to integrate this directly into an O/S so it would all be even more streamlined – but we’ll get it there (just you wait)

ok that’s it. For the 1.5 release. Lots of other tweaks as I said (mostly under the hood – friendlier and more useful error messages etc etc)

Enjoy and keep echoing ;)

UPDATE – (some of you have pointed out already that the market calls this version 2.5. long story…they’re the same)