Long time no talk, we know...
However, even if in silence, we kept working on Postino to make it the best app to easily send physical postcards all around the world...and with today's release of version 1.0.5 we're another step closer to that :) (please forgive the not-so-humble intro, but we're happy at every release!)

Version 1.0.5 adds a few things:

• Postcards sent to addresses in Europe are no longer printed and sent from the USA as it happened before -- they are now printed in Italy and sent through a fast and reliable European courier! This should bring down delivery times from around 12 business days, to 4 or 5! Quite a bit improvement for our fellow European friends eh? (postcards sent to USA and the rest of the world are still processed in the USA as before -- times are already pretty good for them thanks to USPS ;) 
• We added 12 new frames with Christmas / New Year theme. We hope you'll find something you like to embellish postcards in this magical period of the year!
• Better import of addresses selected from the Contacts app.
• Destination country is now selected from a pre-filled picker of choices, so that you cannot type it wrong! In the previous version, the fact that you could type anything you wanted caused some problems, because people sometimes wrote abbreviations or just mispelled the name, making the address invalid. This problem should be gone now!
• For Italian users: l'applicazione è stata localizzata in italiano! Yes, you guessed it right...we localized the app to Italian. Localization for Spanish, German, French etc. etc. will follow soon!

The Postino contest ended on August 31. We allowed some time for all cards to arrive even from the farthest location in the world, and took some time to pick the winners. Here is a group photo of the first 10 positions (pardon the crappy camera and light used for the shot):

And now the photos of the single postcards, ordered by position.

#1: fashion anguria nails (by rachellandsborough)

#2: bon appétit (by and3aa)

#3: body painting (by turrini)

#4: home sweet home (by sara193)

#5: watermelon sculptures (by soldatino)

#6: finger-drawn art (by krisztian)

#7: stained glass angurias (by missib49)

#8: how big is that! (by raffaella)

#9: happy meal (by gb)

#10: Japanese square angurias (by peter)

Winners from position #4 to #10 have already been awarded the coupon for the 10 free stamps. The first 3 winners have been contacted by email and asked to pick their favorite prize and let us know where it must be sent.

We would like to thank all contestants for their participations: it has been a lot of fun to receive and look at your photos (and messages on the back side too!), really, and we hope to run another contest soon!

We are proud to announce the first Postino Contest! Simply send a physical postcard to the AnguriaLab Team with Postino (any version) and have the chance to win great accessories for your iPhone, iPod or MacBook! Take a look at the prizes (from the 1st to the 10th position!) and read all conditions here!

Today it has been a busy day here at the AnguriaLab's offices. We have three pretty important news to let you know about:

1) After much work and sweat, we released the Windows Mobile version of Postino. Physical cards are not an old and surpassed media, they are still a great way to show your friends and family members that you think about them - we want to give the opportunity to send them easily, and with custom photos, to as many people as possible, and to do that we're expanding the number of supported platforms: iPhone, Facebook and WinMobile...what's next?

2) Many of you requested a "Clear Recents" feature. Until know, the Recents list could not be cleared and you'd had to keep sending cards to make the oldest ones in the list disappear (the list shows the 20 most recent cards). Today we implemented this feature, and what's great is that it is available right now, with no need to update the app on the iPhone. Just go to the Recents tab, scroll to the bottom, and you'll see a new button.

3) We uploaded an updated version of Postino on iTunes: the new version adds no less than 30 new frames! We had 22 until now, now they are 52: having more than doubled them, it's likely that you'll find something you like ;) Even with the many additional frames, the frame picker now loads much faster than before! Finally, we also fixed the address format for USA recipients (it was wrong only in the Preview, but the address actually printed on the postcard was already fine).

Since the initial release of Postino we've been working hard to improve our service. Last week version 1.0.3 of the iPhone app (which adds the long awaited and requested Preview) was published on the App Store, and a new minor update with many new frames will come soon! We've also released a Facebook version, and right now are completing the tests for the WinMobile version. Not bad for a venture started just a few months ago.

When you work hard on something, it's great to know that someone appreicates the result, and that pushes you even further. So it was a great pleasure (and surprise) when today we received a mail from O'Reilly saying that they selected Postino as one of the best 200 apps from the App Store, and thet they included us in their upcoming book (PDF version already available!) "Best iPhone Apps - The Guide for Discriminating Downloaders". We're proud of this "award", and hope that we'll do even better with future releases. Thanks O'Reilly!

Version 1.0.2 of Postino for iPhone was published last Saturday on the App Store. We've just submitted for approval version 1.0.3, which adds the much requested Preview mode. Here are a few screenshots:

The view shows the postcards's front-side when you open it. Then you swipe your finger on it (or tap the button on the top-right corner) and the postcard is flipped so that you see its back-side. The postcard is flipped from left to right, or from right to left, according to the direction of the swipe. Pretty cool, eh?

A new minor version of Postino for iPhone has just been submitted to Apple. Here's what's new:

* A confirmation is now required when you send a physical postcard. The alert message contains the current destination address, so that it's easy to verify its correctness. This is useful to avoid sending a physical postcard while you instead wanted to send an e-card, but forgot to save the settings in the Recipient view.

* Added a "clear" button inside each address field, so that it's quick and easy to reset them.

* Enabled auto-capitalization for the physical address fields.

Starting from tomorrow we'll be working on the next version for the iPhone, which should include the Preview!

Yeah, it's here at last! Read more about it on its dedicated page.

During the weekend we finally published the new processing service, which makes things much more scalable and stable. Processing is now done by an async service (but still within seconds), which also shortens the sending time, and dramatically decreases the sending timeouts. Besides this, we've also completed a brand new Postino service. I'm talking about a web-based, fully-integrated-into-Facebook Postino! That's right, it runs inside Facebook, at it allows you to use the stamps you already purchased from the iPhone. So, you'll use the iPhone version while you're on the go, and you may use the Facebook version when at home. We're pretty happy with the result: everything is done with AJAX, we've got frame animations and a powerful photo editor which lets you crop a photo or select whether the card will be in portrait or landscape orientation. The app will go live really soon (no later than tomorrow), and I'll post here the link when it's 100% ready.

Hi guys and gals, and welcome to the AnguriaLab's blog. Last week we released Postino for iPhone to the world, and things are going very well. We've already had a few global reviews (in addition to the many many more in Italy, where we have the most contacts since we're Italian ;) but we expect a lot of others in the near future, when we'll release new additions to Postino. And I'm talking about cool additions that we're sure you'll appreciate if you like the Postino concept now.

In addition to these new additions, we've always worked to make the current version of Postino more stable and reliable. The iPhone app is actually fine, but during the first few days we've had some problems on the server due to the huge traffic we had. Huge traffic is good, but we you don't really expect it, things can be tough at first :) Things are much better now, and with the improvements we'll finish within this weekend, the service should become even more stable and scalable.

Now that we finally found the time to install the blog, we'll try to post regular updates about what we have in the works here.