One last note to let you know that we’re moving on for good to Outlook and shutting down the Sunrise apps on iOS, Android, Mac and Web.
What’s happening?
As of today, your calendar will stop updating and any changes you make to it will not be reflected on any other platform. Tomorrow, you will be logged out of your account. Don’t worry though, all the information held in your calendar will still be available on the original platform you were using (Gmail, iCloud, Outlook, etc.).
What’s next?
This is definitely the end of an era. But more importantly, it’s the beginning of a new one. We’re excited by what’s ahead and we’d love for you to come and join us in our latest adventure. We’ve kept our promise to bring the magic of Sunrise to the Outlook calendar - and the Outlook inbox while we were at it - and we’re only getting started.
To have a look at what we’ve been up to you, check out the latest calendar features we’ve released for Outlook on iOS and Android. You can also download the apps directly and try us out (you can find us here on iOS and there on Android).
This is it
We’d like to extend a final and massive thank you to all of you who’ve supported us along the way. It’s been a hell of a ride. We really hope you enjoyed those years we spent together as much as we did.
As some of you might already know, we were acquired by Microsoft last year and have now moved on to work on Outlook for iOS and Android. Different products, same goal: making your day-to-day life easier and more enjoyable to manage.
The entire Sunrise team is now working side-by-side with the Outlook team and it's a thrilling moment for us to work on an app of this scale. Unfortunately, as all good stories go, there's a sad bit to it: we're not able to support and update Sunrise anymore. No new features. No bug fixes. For us, that's the definition of a lousy app and it's not a user experience we want to leave you with. For this reason, we'll be removing Sunrise from the app stores in the next few days. On August 31st, we'll officially shut down the app and it will stop working all together.
As heartbreaking as this sounds, we're hard at work bringing the magic of Sunrise to the Outlook apps, with all your most loved features - interesting calendars, event icons and calendar apps. We're confident you'll be able to find our special touch there too.
Whether you decide to follow us to Outlook or not, we couldn't go without first saying a massive THANK YOU. You've been with us all the way and Sunrise wouldn't have been great without all of you supporting us, sending us feedback, encouraging us to fix bugs and sharing the app with your friends.
Today, we're taking on a new challenge, helping even more people be more productive on the go. We hope you'll be there with us too.
As you’ve probably noticed, we’ve been off the grid for the past few months. Rest assured, we weren’t out on a very long summer break, we were building something. Something exciting. Something big. Today, it’s time we finally tell you what that something is.
Is this even a calendar?
Short answer: It’s way more than a calendar.
Long answer: This is an email app and a calendar app all in one. It lets you easily share files and includes all of your contacts. This is Outlook for iOS and Android. Well, at least the latest version of it.
Since we joined Microsoft at the beginning of the year, we’ve been working increasingly closer with the Outlook team and in particular with the Outlook Mobile team. A few months ago, they asked us to join them in making Outlook for iOS and Android the best productivity apps out there.
Most of you have known us for a while now, and you know how passionate we are about making people’s lives easier and less stressful through beautifully designed apps and well-thought out features. Joining the Outlook Mobile team was our chance to make a difference on a much larger scale, tackling calendar and email all at once, working with people as passionate as we are. It was an offer we couldn’t refuse. We said yes.
We’ve been working for the last few months now with the Outlook team on completely redesigning both their iOS and Android apps with the “Sunrise touch”. Today, we’re sharing our work officially on the Outlook Blog, revealing the iOS app, now available on the App Store, and giving you a glimpse of the Android app, coming soon.
What does this mean for the Sunrise apps?
Now here comes the sad news. As the entire team is completely focused on the Outlook for iOS and Android apps, we won’t be updating the Sunrise apps anymore. We won’t lie, it’s tough for us to leave behind the apps we’ve been working on so passionately for the past years. Mid-May, we’ll be removing the app from the different app stores. On August 31st, 2016, we’ll be shutting Sunrise all together.
But then we think about how we are going to be able to bring all of what made Sunrise great to the Outlook Mobile apps. How exciting is that? In the meantime, the Sunrise apps will still be available on their respective app stores.
If you’re thinking about switching, here’s what you should know.
. Some Sunrise features are already present in Outlook for iOS and Android.
You can already connect multiple accounts (Office 365 and Exchange obviously, but also Gmail, iCloud and more) to have a complete overview of what your day looks like. The current calendar section of the app also has the agenda view and the day view as well as the expandable month view we had in Sunrise.
. All the features you love in Sunrise are coming to Outlook soon
We are currently working on integrating all the extra features that made Sunrise so delightful to use in Outlook for iOS and Android. Expect features like Interesting Calendars, Connected Apps and our 3-day view to show up before the end of the year.
. We won’t stop innovating
While building Sunrise, we were always learning from and listening to you to come up with ways to delight you and make you more productive. This isn’t stopping any time soon and we already have quite a few innovative ideas for Outlook.
Thank you
Whether you’ll be following us at Outlook or not, we want to finish this blog post with a huge thank you. Thank you for being there with us since day one, for pushing us to make a better app, for getting involved and asking questions, for sharing the word around you, for sending us love poems and pictures of our logo around the world. We wouldn’t be here without your support and we wanted to let you know.
We started out as a daily newsletter filled with your agenda 3 years ago. We then grew up into 3 different apps helping millions of users sort out their days. Today, we’re taking on a new challenge, with the goal of helping even more users be more productive on the go, whether it’s through a better calendar or a more seamless email experience. We hope to see you there with us.
You want it all. We get it, we do too! That’s why we think you should have a universally great experience no matter which calendar you come from or which device you are on. Today, you might just be one step closer to this goal.
You’re everywhere, we should be too.
Sunrise now connects directly to Office 365 on Android, iOS and Desktop. Thanks to that, we’re making it easier than ever to see all of your events - work and play - in one calendar, accessible from anywhere.
To get it set up, just head to the Settings and select the “Accounts” tab on desktop or tap “Add account” on mobile. You’ll be up and running in no time!
Why Office 365 in Sunrise is the real deal
All of your events in one place, accessible from everywhere.
With Office 365 in Sunrise, you won’t have to rely on mobile-only to check your calendar. You can get the full experience, from mobile to desktop, making planning and scheduling even easier than before!
Better compatibility with new features
Because Office 365 is now fully integrated with Sunrise, we also have a lot more flexibility to play with new features and give you the best there is out there for all of your calendars. As an example, Meet will work way better with Office 365 than it did with Exchange, giving you more reliable availabilities straight from your calendar.
Not sure if you have an Office 365 account?
Office 365 and Exchange are two different things and it can be confusing to know which account you have. Simply put, Office 365 is “Exchange in the Cloud” whereas Exchange is mostly hosted by companies’ internal servers.
Sunrise now supports Office 365 accounts on all of your devices. However, we only support Exchange on iOS and Android at the moment.
Now you may not know if your account is hosted in the cloud as part of an Office 365 subscription or hosted in your company’s on-premise servers. Try connecting your account directly in Sunrise and see if it’s supported!
If it’s not supported, this means that your account is either hosted in your company’s on-premise servers or that it’s part of the very few Office 365 accounts we don’t support yet. You won’t be able to add your Exchange account directly in Sunrise. In the meantime, you can still connect it on our mobile apps and access your events from there.
We hope you enjoy this new feature as much as we do! This is a great first step towards using Sunrise with other Microsoft services and we’re excited to show you more soon :)
If you have any questions, feel free to shoot us an email at [email protected] or come say hi on Twitter (@Sunrise)
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PS: We’ve also added support for Outlook.com accounts, as well as hotmail.com and live.com accounts! You can find more information about this specific integration here.
After developing Sunrise for Android, iOS, and desktop, we’re now welcoming a new member to the Sunrise family. This app fits on your watch and we think it might just change the way you go about your day. Say hello to Sunrise for Apple Watch.
A Match Made in Heaven
When is my next meeting? Where do I need to be in an hour? Do I have time to call Mom today?
These are questions that you might find asking yourself quite often during the day and you’ll grab to the nearest device you have at hand to find out the answer. More often than not though, you’ll check the location of your next meeting a bit too early in the day. When it actually becomes useful to you, you’ll realize you’ve forgotten it.
The good news is we’re in the same boat. That’s why we set out on a quest to make Sunrise for Apple Watch always relevant to the current time of day. The right information at the right moment.
Here’s how we’re making it work.
The Sunrise App
Our Apple Watch app lets you quickly scroll through events for today and upcoming days. You can tap on events to access more details - like attendee list or location - and force touch to change your RSVP status.
Glance
You can quickly access details for your next event through our Glance by swiping up from the watch face. We’ll show you the details that matter the most at that moment. When it starts, where it is, and who you’re meeting with.
Notifications
No need to take your phone out for these. A gentle tap on your wrist will let you know Sunrise has something for you. From invitation requests to which you can RSVP on the spot to event reminders and confirmations, we keep you up to date on what’s happening in your calendar.
Want to try this out right now? Just head to the App Store and get the latest version of Sunrise. You’ll then be able to find Sunrise in your Apple Watch app on your iPhone.
This is just the beginning
We won’t lie, building an app for a brand new device like the Apple Watch was tough. We had to challenge our entire interface to make it fit on such a tiny screen, cropping out text and icons with every design iteration. The toughest part for us though was to make sure you felt at home. Sunrise for your watch had to feel like Sunrise everywhere else.
We did our best and built Sunrise for Apple Watch as an extension of the iOS app on your wrist with all the essentials of your calendar. Now all we’re waiting for is to hear how Sunrise feels to you on your wrist!
Hand in hand, both apps should help you move through your days effortlessly, leaving us with the dirty job of knowing where you need to be next, who you’re meeting with, or what you have to do.
Sorry though, we won’t be able to call your Mom for you.
Sunrise Welcomes Wunderlist on Android, iOS, and Desktop
We’re big fans of the productivity app Wunderlist at Sunrise. The main reason is that we like this feeling we get when we check things off our to-do lists. We really do.
We also think the key to be truly productive is to always pair what you need to do with a time when you’ll be doing it. That’s how we came to the idea that matching a to-do app with a calendar was probably a good move. Well idea no more, Wunderlist in Sunrise is now reality!
You can now connect your Wunderlist account to your Sunrise Calendar
To do so, just head to your settings in Sunrise and select “Add Account”. Find Wunderlist amongst the other apps we connect with and enter the email address and password of your Wunderlist account. That’s it, you’re all set.
All your Wunderlist tasks that have a due date will now show up in Sunrise on the right day as an All-Day event. Now you know what you need to do and can plan your day based on that.
Our pro tips to make the most out of it
Create tasks directly in Sunrise. Just create a new event and choose one of your Wunderlist lists as the calendar. As soon as the event is created in Sunrise, the task will also appear in Wunderlist.
Change due dates of your Wunderlist tasks by simply dragging and dropping them from one day to another in Sunrise.
Write a task as done in Wunderlist, a checkmark will automatically appear in Sunrise right next to it. Did we already mention we really liked checking tasks off to-do lists?
We hope you enjoy this new feature! Stay tuned for more :)
Introducing Meet, the fastest way to schedule a one-to-one on the go
Ever spent more time scheduling a meeting over email than actually talking over coffee? We definitely have. Have you ever tried doing it on-the-go? We doubt it went very well.
This is the reason why we spent more than a year at Sunrise trying to solve one of the most time-consuming and, let’s say it, just plain boring calendar activity out there: scheduling meetings.
We always believed that there had to be a better way of scheduling 1:1s on mobile, and as your favorite calendar, well, we felt we had to find it. Good news is, we think we figured it out :)
Introducing Meet, the fastest way to schedule a one-to-one
Meet is a keyboard for Android and iOS that lets you select available time slots in your calendar without leaving the app you’re in and send them to anyone through a simple link, even if they don’t use Sunrise.
No more back-and-forth via email, no more time lost switching to your schedule to find the right times, your calendar is always just one tap away. You don’t even have to manually enter the meeting in your schedule anymore, we automatically do it for you when it’s confirmed.
Sounds pretty good, right?
Here’s how it works.
To schedule a Meet one-to-one:
Open the Meet keyboard for Android, iPhone and iPad from any app.
Pick the times that work for you, the place you want to meet and send your Meet link with just a tap.
To RSVP to a Meet:
Click on the Meet link and and choose the best time for you, even if you’re not using Sunrise.
The event is automatically created in both calendars with all the information you’ll need.
Meet always displays real-time availabilities for iCloud and Google Calendar so you can be sure you’re never double-booking.
An important note on privacy
We understand you don’t want to share your calendar with everyone. That’s why we created a solution that respects your privacy. Meet lets you share available time slots of your choice. And that’s all. No one will see any events from your calendar.
To try out Meet, just update the app and we’ll take it from there!
We hope you enjoy using Meet to schedule all your one-to-ones as much as we do! We are also releasing this feature in the desktop and web apps so that you can schedule meetings from absolutely everywhere.
If this works out well - and we sure hope it does - we’ll even think of extending the experience to group meetings. Stay tuned :)
About a year ago, we introduced “Interesting Calendars”, a hidden gem in your settings to let you stay up to date on the things that matter to you: your favorite sports team, your kids’ school holidays or the phases of the moon.
We didn’t stop there though. Today, we’re adding a whole batch of new calendars that you’re bound to find interesting too.
Introducing brand new TV calendars on Sunrise
Your interesting calendars have now been upgraded with the schedules of more than 90,000 programs on 2800 TV channels in 21 countries in North America and Western Europe. This means that you can add the airing time of all your favorites TV shows and series right in your calendars.
To access TV schedules in Sunrise, go to your settings and click on “Interesting Calendars”. You’ll then have a list of countries and channels to pick from .The toughest part? Choosing your favorite shows :)
Introducing Basecamp and Meetup on Sunrise for Android
To our Android friends,
We are excited to share with you today the newest apps available on Sunrise. Meet Basecamp and Meetup, right inside of your calendar.
Before we get started, make sure you update the app here.
Basecamp + Sunrise, the new productivity combo that’s here to stay
Productivity fan? We are too. With Basecamp now available in Sunrise, you can connect all your projects and to-dos and merge your beloved Basecamp calendar with the rest of your life. It’s that simple.
Meetup + Sunrise, never miss an event ever again
Remember when it was difficult to stay on top of all the events happening around you? That was yesterday. With your Meetup account now connected in Sunrise on your Android phone, you’re able to see the Meetups your attending or all the Meetups happening in your groups. Your call.
Try both apps for yourself by downloading the new Sunrise app right here and let us know your thoughts!
What are the next apps you want to see in Sunrise? Shoot us an email to tell us at [email protected]. Or come say hi on Twitter @sunrise. We’ll share the latest news with you right there.
As you read this post, someone is trying out Sunrise for the very first time. Whether or not they stay with us in the long run pretty much determines how well we’re doing our jobs here.
This is one of our biggest product design challenges here at Sunrise. Designing for millions of people is no easy task and we know we’re bound to lose some people along the way with every decision we make. Unless we resign ourselves to becoming boring or generic, we’ll never make it right for everyone.
We just have to keep trying. So we ask ourselves: how we can create the easiest and most enjoyable time management experience for as many people as possible?
We start small and grow big.
Sunrise was just a daily email when we first started out a couple of years ago.
You would receive a quick digest every morning in your inbox around sunrise with your events for the day. This agenda included pictures to remind you of the people you were meeting with and weather forecasts to help you plan your outfit for the day. This is what it looked like back then.
The daily email soon gained traction among our users and we realized that we needed to take it to the next level. This is when the road diverged for us, leaving us with two options:
Make a calendar for your work life
Make a calendar for your social life.
We eventually decided that we wanted to make a calendar for all of it. A calendar designed for professionals, students, families, and groups. A calendar designed for you.
This is how we set out to design a product to manage something as intimate as people’s lives while keeping it enjoyable and efficient. Here are a few ways we are trying to achieve that.
1. Reinventing core experiences
There are a lot of experiences that are taken for granted in app design. Most of these experiences, however, can be reinvented and made better. Way better.
One of our favorite examples of this at Sunrise is the “New Event” view. Our first design for selecting a date and time made no improvements on the existing solutions. We did what everyone else was doing and let it sit there for a while until we finally decided enough was enough.
The idea behind this redesign was to let our users choose a date and time in context of what they already had going on in their calendar, not out-of-the-blue.
It’s now our daily job to spread these innovations to other parts of the app as well as on all the platforms that we currently have.
2. Bringing personality to the calendar
In Sunrise, the icons for events change depending on their names: a cup for coffee, a cocktail glass for drinks, or a cart for grocery shopping.
These icons might just sound like minor details but they are the kind of details that matter. They are the details that make our app that much more enjoyable to use. Most importantly, they are the details that help create interactions with our users.
Today, these icons are part of our brand identity. We get to be the “calendar app with the little icons” and we love it. Sunrise may be more than that in its entirety but this is what defines us at our core. As people send us all the different events they would like icons for (and there are some crazy ones out there) as well other personalization ideas, we grow to become the calendar you enjoy to use.
3. Making it more than just a calendar
Building a calendar app is great. But it’s not enough.
Your calendar should showcase everything that is happening in your life including when, where, and with who. You shouldn’t be responsible for manually entering all of that into your calendar though. We should be able to help.
This is why we decided to design Sunrise as a platform, integrating it with all the apps that you use on a daily basis. We build connections to apps like Facebook, Twitter, your to-do list, your project management software, Meetup, Eventbrite, and anything else imaginable. This leaves us to do the dirty work of putting events in your calendar and leaves you with more time to do what you want to do.
As we work on partnering with even more apps in the future, we’re even starting to consider opening up our platform so you can build the apps you want to see in your calendar.
Wrapping up
There is no magical way to build an app that works for everyone while still being innovative, enjoyable and efficient. At least, we haven’t found it yet.
The only thing we can rely on to get there is focus. We do this by choosing our priorities well and never losing sight of what matter most to us: our users and our product. Staying close to the community that has gathered around Sunrise is truly essential to our mission of continuously improving our products.
Combining the great ideas we get from our users with the creativity and ingenuity of our engineering and design teams is what pushes Sunrise forward towards a unified and enjoyable platform for all devices.
Any ideas? We’re always listening. Shoot us an email if you want to talk: [email protected]. We look forward to it!
PS: The content of this post was adapted from a presentation by co-founder Jeremy Le Van. Here’s the video of his talk at #DesignDrivenNYC.
Following our recent integration into the great Microsoft family, we have more news to share with you today! Brace yourself, this is going to be exciting.
We have been working hard for the past few weeks and are happy to say that we have finally succeeded in bringing back to life one of the most famous artificial intelligences of all time, a.k.a Clippy.
After almost 10 years of unemployment, we are offering Clippy the job it always deserved. Right inside your Sunrise calendar as your very own personal assistant.
Here are a few reasons why you’ll be glad Clippy is back.
- Clippy will always be here to help, at all times. Can’t see him anymore? Don’t worry, he’ll pop back soon.
- Clippy knows Sunrise inside and out. No need to email our support anymore, Clippy has all the answers you need.
- Clippy is now able to suggest events for you during your free time. It will know when it’s time to call your Mom, do your laundry or go out to get marshmallows.
- Clippy is always learning. With it’s easy “yes or no” questions, Clippy learns from you each time you interact with it. Soon, it might just feel like no one has ever known you as well.
We can’t wait to hear your thoughts to help us make Clippy the best personal assistant out there.
We’d like to thank each and every one of you for making this possible.
Introducing Basecamp and Meetup on Sunrise for iOS8
These last few months have been quite full of excitement and we’ve been keeping busy! We have plenty of surprises coming for you in the coming weeks and are super excited to share them with you soon.
While we put the finishing touches to all of that, we want to share with you today the newest apps available on Sunrise. Meet Basecamp and Meetup, right inside of your calendar.
Before we get started, make sure you get the app here.
Basecamp and Sunrise, the new productivity combo that’s here to stay
There’s always a way to be even more productive. At least that’s what we believe here at Sunrise. That’s why we’re quite excited to offer you Basecamp as our most recent app. Connect all your projects and to-dos and merge your beloved Basecamp calendar with the rest of your life.
Meetup and Sunrise, never miss an event ever again
Remember when it was difficult to stay on top of all the events happening around you? That was yesterday. With your Meetup account now connected in Sunrise, you will be able to see all the Meetups coming up in your groups or just the ones you will be attending. Your call.
Try both apps for yourself by downloading the new Sunrise app right here and let us know your thoughts!
What are the next apps you want to see in Sunrise? Shoot us an email to tell us at [email protected]. Or come say hi on Twitter @sunrise. We’ll share the latest news with you right there.
Today, we're excited to announce that Sunrise is joining Microsoft. For Sunrise, this is just the beginning.
Sunrise started two years ago with a simple idea that by combining beautiful design and great engineering, we could reimagine your calendar.
Sunrise will remain free and available for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Android and Desktop – we're not going anywhere.
At Microsoft, we will continue to do two things very well:
- build an amazing team (we're hiring designers & engineers)
- build the best product to help you manage your time
Both Sunrise and Microsoft share this vision to make your life a little easier by focusing on time, design, and building experiences that delight you everyday. We can’t wait to show you what we’ve been working on lately :-)
And, we would like to thank you – our users –, our investors and our team.
Today, we're excited to announce our ... new Android app for tablets!
Also, Sunrise now offers over 25,000 calendars for holidays, sport teams, name days, week numbers, and more. It’s all free so you can add as many as you want. Get started by going into the Settings > Interesting Calendars.
One more thing: you can connect two news apps – Google Tasks and Eventbrite.
Welcome to Sunrise 3.0 made for iOS 8! Today we're introducing our new widget, a new experience designed for iPhone 6 & iPhone 6 Plus, and two new apps: Google Tasks and Eventbrite. Get the app now!
We've built the best widget to show what's next in your day without opening Sunrise. You can add this new widget now from the Today View in the Notification Center. We think you are going to love the design.
Sunrise now looks great for your new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. We've redesigned the entire app for bigger screens.
You wanted more apps to connect to Sunrise? We've listened and this update brings you Google Tasks and Eventbrite integration. Create and edit Google tasks directly in your favorite calendar or buy a ticket on Eventbrite and it will appear in Sunrise with all the information you need to get there. Magic!
Today, we've just released our latest update for Sunrise for Android.
Push for Google Calendar
Any changes you make between Sunrise from our Web app, Mac app or Chrome will be directly pushed to Sunrise app on Android. It's so fast.
New Apps: Todoist and Trello (also available on Desktop too!)
One of the favorite feature of Sunrise are apps. We want to make your life easier to connecting your calendar to all the apps you're using everyday. Trello and Todoist, two great apps for tasks and project management, are now available in Sunrise.
The best part is that you can edit your tasks and cards directly from Sunrise! We even support deep-linking.
Thanks for using Sunrise everyday and keep the feedback coming on Twitter or via email at [email protected]
Today, we're introducing three new features for your favorite calendar.
Search
Finally, search is here! You can search for past or future events by title, location, and attendees. Search has been designed to be fast and is available by dragging down on the upper calendar view.
Push for Google Calendar
No more waiting for events to sync. Today Sunrise becomes the only calendar on iOS to support push for Google Calendar. Any changes to your events will be pushed in real-time to Sunrise. You will need to enable push-notifications for this feature to work (open the app to accept them). Then edit an event on Sunrise Desktop (now available on Mac too!) and see the change sync immediately on your iPhone or iPad.
Todoist Integration
This great to-do list and task manager app is our latest addition to our apps! Connect Todoist with Sunrise and get all your tasks your calendar.
Thanks for using @sunrise everyday and keep the feedback coming on Twitter or via email at [email protected]
