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Continuing with the UI changes we had started with our client, we have recently released the first batch of UI changes for our web service. In brief, the colors have changed, the the menu has been rearranged, the sidebars have been tweaked and the pages have been optimized to load faster.

Color Combination:

We have completely done away with the dark green background. It has been replaced with a white now. The main area of every page has a white background while the menu and sidebars are light green. The text is now black on all the pages.

Menu Changes:

The Call Record History page has been renamed to ‘Uploaded Records’. The support page has been removed. We have introduced help widgets on the sidebar to replace the functionality.

Uploaded Records:

This page lists all the records that have been uploaded from the Call Graph client. The listing is now identical to the one in the Client UI. The flash player has been replaced with a button which in turn launches the flash player when its clicked. A progress bar is now displayed before the flash player appears which makes the play function instant. Earlier there used to be a delay between the time when the play button was clicked and the file started playing.

The shared records listing has also been changed in a similar way.

Sidebar:

The sidebar also has undergone a revamp. On the uploaded records and shared records page, the Order By, Search and Filter options have been grouped into a single box. This is to indicate that these options can be combined with each other while trying to locate a particular record. The search earlier used to be at the top of the page.

Whats Next:

Tighter integration with the Client UI, sharing, transcribing directly from the client etc. Stay tuned.

Let us kwow that you think of the new color combination and the changes. Things should be much faster and responsive than earlier now.

We added a small new feature today: now you can specify a different association password than your account password. By default both the passwords are same. But there might be cases where you want it to be different eg. when your account is being used by several people for uploading. This password cannot be used for logging into the account, only to associate your machines with your account. So you can share this password with all of your team and be assured that noone will be able to mess around with the uploaded records. Very useful if you want to track and monitor your team.

To change the association password, go to the settings page and specify a new password. And then associate your clients with the account once more. If any client uses the old password, then the uploads will start failing. Note that this will happen only if the association password is different from the account password. So if you do not change it then you are okay.

A brief note on passwords by the way. There was this news article sometime back; a rouge admin changing the password of a user because he did not like it. The bigger mistake here is that the passwords are stored in plain text which enables the admin to see what the passwords are. But in our system, its hashed. Even if we want to know what your password is, we cannot. We see only the string of characters which cannot be decoded back. So you can be sure that your passwords are safe with us.

Please let us know what you think of this feature. Comments/feedback are welcome.

We recently added a small but very useful feature to CRIMS: Autosuggest. This feature provides you with automatic suggestions on possible value when you want to share a call record or when you are doing an advanced search. Here’s some screenshots of it in action.

Its a small change but it helps immensely and saves a lot of typing. Thanks to Pat for suggesting this feature.

We did a major revamp of the CRIMS UI. We had been working on this for sometime now and we spent time on it to make it more responsive, cleaner and intuitive. Here’s a short description of what has changed.

Popups:

The popups for Edit Tags, Rename, Share and Delete files have been removed. Instead of that we have introduced ‘Edit In Place’ dialog. When you click on these links, a small dialog opens up on the same page to take in the input. Much better than navigating to a different page. Here’s a screen shot of the ‘Share’ operation.

The functionality of removing each share individually has also been added.

The delete file brings up a modal dialog now. The batch operations also show you a modal dialogs instead of popups.

Widgets:

Two new widgets, help and support have been added. They are on all the pages now: Transcripts, Upgrade, Add Machines etc.

Clicking on the help option brings up the modal dialog now. The help text also has been revamped.

Icons:

Icons have been added to the main message bar on each of the pages. For any action they show the result there. If an error occurss during an operation, the text turns red to alert you.

What’s Next:

Autosuggest, color scheme change and more. Stay tuned.

Do let us know what you think of these changes. And thanks for using Call Graph once again.

As mentioned in the last post, the recent change to our UI had increased the clutter on the call record history page. So today we cleared it up. The result is this.

Only the flash player, name of the file and manage options are displayed initially and the details are hidden from the view. Clicking on the ‘Show Details’ reveals the details of the call record. The view can be toggled to show or hide.

Also the current record your cursor is on is highlighted as you move along the page.

Notice the two new items at the top of the page to expand/collapse the details of all the records in one shot. The select all/none has also been moved from the actions widget to here.

This small change has enabled us to do a lot more with the UI. So now you can also set the number of records that are displayed per page. The setting is on the settings page. The default value is 10 but it can be changed to any value you wish.

Another small change was control on the mail notifications that CRIMS sends. It can be turned on or off from the settings page. Here’s a screenshot.

So how does this look? We hope its better than before, but please let us know if it isnt.

The next thing in line is to remove the popup when managing your call records. So stay tuned.

We released a couple of changes to the UI that we had been working on recently and added a sidebar to the Call Record history page. This sidebar adds a table sorting, batch operations and advanced search functionality. Here’s an overview of these.

Sidebar:

The sidebar looks like the following on the ‘Call Record History’ page.

It has four widgets as of now: space usage monitor, batch operations sort table and advanced search. The space usage shows a graphical representation of the storage space used for your account, as the name suggests.

Batch Operations:

This widget allows you to select multiple call records and do things with them. Right now you can either share them with others or delete all the selected ones. We will add more options to this widget as we go along.

Sorting:

The call records view can be changed using this widget. Four options are available as of now: newest first, oldest first, ascending/descending order of duration and ascending/descending order of file sizes. Once you have sorted them you can use apply some batch file operations on them.

Advanced Search:

Advanced search can be used to filter the call records which match a specific criteria. The four filters available now are duration, filesize, recorded by and uploaded from. So if you want to list all the call records uploaded from a specific machine, then select the uploaded from filter and apply the name of the computer in the pattern part. That will list all the records uploaded from a specific machine. Similarly for recorded by. The patterns in the duration and filesize case can be something like ‘>10 MB’ or ’10 < seconds’ etc.

Once the results are displayed, you can apply either use batch operations or sort them using the sorting widget.

To illustrate the use of these widgets, suppose you want to list all the call records made to a certain person which are greater than 5 mins, oldest first. To do this, you first use simple search to list all the records with that persons name, then apply the the duration filter using the advanced search widget and finally apply the sort with oldest. The resulting page will have all files listed. Now if you want to share all of these at one shot, use the batch operations to select all of them and then select “Share All Selected” from the dropdown. Fill in the email address and call record will be shared!

New Storage Plans:

We also added four new plans: the 8 GB @ $5 p/m, 18 GB @ $10 pm and their yearly counterparts. The payment UI has also been changed and now you can check your status once you have subscribed to it, or cancel the subscription if you want to.

Transcription Rates:

The rates of our transcription service has also been changed to 50 cents per minutes instead of the per line. So for a call record of half an hour, the transcript price will be $15.

What’s Next:

As you would notice, the records table has become a bit cramped up because of the sidebar addition. So in the next iteration we are planning to change that. We are also planning to add a mail notification setting so that you can control how you receive mails from CG CRIMS. Watch this space for more.

Hope these changes are useful. Please do send us your feedback on it.

A big thanks to Jai Vikram at Desistartups for a comprehensive review of the Call Graph and our service CRIMS. Thank you so much guys. Do hop over and read the review.

Several of our users have asked us how to increase the current limit of 1 GB of storage. So today we released an initial version of our paid storage plans. To keep things simple we only have two plans right now: a 50 GB storage option for $25 per month and a corresponding yearly plan of 500 GB for $250 per year. They have been designed with enterprises in mind who are into lot of calling. Think support, teaching etc. and need to monitor their calls. CRIMS with easy storage, search and sharing is a perfect solution for such needs. So if you are internet business involved in lot of Skype calling, do have a look at our plans. We can add a lot of value to your business.

To upgrade, click log in to your account and click on the ‘Upgrade Plan’ menu item.  Choose any one of the plans and checkout with Paypal. As soon as the payment is processed, we’ll add more storage to your account.

Also, these prices are not the final one. We are still trying to optimize our premium pricing so as to make it as much useful as possible. We might change it in the future. So please send in your feedback if you think its too high. Or too low for that matter. Also, we’ll be adding more features to the payment process to make it smoother. So watch out for further updates.

For our regular users, the 1 GB free plan is still there. So you can still use our system without paying anything!

So what after the recording. You are obviously recording the call with some purpose. Our web service, CRIMS which stands for Call Recording Indexing and Management, provides you with several options once you are done with the recording. I’ll briefly go over the things you can do with CRIMS in this article.

Registering:

You need to register for our web service to use it. Registration is free and straightforward. Provide your mail id to us and we’ll send you a link. Click on the link and we’ll ask you to fill out a form. And you are done.

Several of our users have reported that they are not getting the mails at all. It happens because a lot of mail clients (especially Hotmail) treats such mails as spam. Hence check your spam folder if you do not get the mail. You can always request for a new mail from the register page as well.

Setting up the Account:

This web service works with our Skype call recorder only. So before you can do anything with it, you need to associate and verify your client installation. If you haven’t already installed the client, then its the right time to do so. Get it from here.

On your computer, right click on the Call Graph task bar icon, choose ‘Configuration’, go to the ‘Association’ page and enter your username and password that you used to create your account. Click on the ‘Associate’ button. You should get a notification saying that your machine has been added and it needs to be approved before calls can be uploaded. The approval has to be done from the Machines page.

If you want all your calls records to be automatically uploaded to your account then make sure that ‘Automatically upload a copy to my account’ option on the associations page. The upload happens independently of call recording in the background. So you can carry on with your work and record more calls if you want.

Uploading:

Now that your account is set up, you can start uploading calls. Start a call with ‘echo123′ and record it. If you have opted to upload calls manually, open the Call Graph history dialog (right click on the CG Task bar icon and choose ‘History’) and click on the upload link below the file name. Otherwise the upload starts as soon as the call recording completes.

The client will notify you when the upload finishes. After that login to your account. You should see something like this.

Call Recording History:

This is your call record history page. This is the first page you are shown when you log in to your account and is the starting point if you want to do something with your record. There are two parts to this page: the left hand menu and the history table. The menu lists down the other pages that you can go to. We’ll get to that in a short while.

In the call record history there are two main parts: the details column and the management column. The details column displays the details of your call record. When was it recorded, by whom, when was it uploaded, was it shared with someone and so on.  It also has an embedded flash player. Click on the play button and you should be able to listen to your record.

The management column gives you a set of actions that you can do with your record. Few of them are self explanatory. You can rename the file, edit the tags or delete it in the same way you can do in the client. You can also download it back if you want. Helpful if you are recording calls from several machines.

Note that when you delete the file its completely removed for our system. There is no way to get it back. You can do a ‘reupload’ if you still have it in your client though.

As with the client, this page also displays your call records in reverse chronological order, the latest one first.

Sharing:

If you want to share it with someone, maybe the person you recorded the call with, click on the share link. It will ask you for the email id and instructions of how to access the record will be sent to your contact.

Once you share a record, a new field will start appearing your your details column stating with whom was the record shared with. There will be a new option in the management column as well to unshare the call record. If you mistakenly shared your record, click on unshare and all the shares will be revoked.

Note that the contact you have shared your call with can only play it back. Since you are the owner of this record, only you have can delete, share, transcribe etc.

Transcribe:

If you want a text transcript for your call then click on the transcribe link. We provide transcripts for calls which pass our quality checks. The parameters for quality check include voice quality, your language setting (must be American English for now) and duration (> 5 minutes).

Once the screening is passed you will be notified of it. You can click on the transcribe link and place an order for the transcript from there.

As we go along we will add support for many more languages and accents. This post has a some details of our transcription process if you are interested to know more.

Search:

One of the most interesting feature of our web service is Search. We can do contextual searches. When your call records are being screened we generate a list of keywords which can be used to identify your call record. These keywords added to the tag list of your call record. So now you can actually search for a call with a word which might have occurred during the call itself.

A search bar is present at the top of the history page. Type in your search term and press enter. It should take you to a the ‘Search Results’ page where all records matching your search terms will be listed.

As with the client, we also add the your contact’s name by default to the tag list. So if you want to list all the call records with a particular contact of yours, just search for it and it will display the timeline.

The search is also very basic currently since we lack good language and grammar databases. But as we keep on improving the system, it should start getting more and more useful.

What Else:

You can add more machines to your account if you want from the machines page. As many as you want!

You can also mail us directly from the support page if you want to ask us something.

You can also change your password, or your language setting or delete your account from the settings page. if you click on delete, we delete all the records and personal data you have provided us with. We retain nothing!

Note that if you do not want your call records to be screened then you can set your language setting to ‘Other’.

What’s Next:

As you would have noticed, the UI is very simple and basic. Very Web 1.0′ish. But we are working on a major upgrade to it and things will be much better soon. So keep tuned.

If you haven’t signed up already then please do it now. Click here. We are offering all these services for free in the beta phase. So give it a try and let us know what you think of it!