My Dream App - Michael Wuerthele

New Guest Judges, look here!

2006-10-11T13:10:18Z

I am curious as to your thoughts on the chatboard idea. Destroy it or praise it as you will- it’s an idea I’m never going to let die.

Not until somebody does it right, at least.

Thanks, I'm out!

2006-10-07T00:14:53Z

It was fun. Tense, but fun!

Anybody want to teach a busy IT guy photoshop for next time? :D

More judges?

2006-09-28T14:05:57Z

Hello gang- thanks for the comments, constructive and otherwise.

———-

“I think the Leopard version of iChat crushes this idea.”

Not even remotely, unless you’ve seen something we haven’t. Where the file sharing? The shared space? The bandwidth aggregation?

———-

“This is yet another demonstration of why Internet infrastructure and protocols should be base on open standards. Email is based on old, generally horrid protocols and standards, but at least they’re all open. That’s why we have email today with rich text, images, video, file attachments, encryption, and so on. If the IM world wasn’t crippled by Soviet-style central planning, we’d be on the 50th iteration of the Chatboard idea already.”

But we’re not on the 50th iteration, are we? Somebody HAS to step up to the plate. There’s no reason that this problem can’t be approached in a bittorrent-esque tracker methodology. THEN the problem would be fixed without massive server farms, and without help from fortune-500 companies that do what they will and make us deal with the issues.

The contest is mydreamapp. This is it. You need it, you all need it, and when you start using it, you won’t know what you did without it. It’s like the iPod. I initially said “5 gig? What for? I’ve got CDs to use in the car.” Then I bought one of the 5 giggers. Never looked back, but I had to USE it to see that CDs weren’t the best solution, and the iPod was done well.

How many of you now want to give up your MP3 players?

———-

“A major roadblock might be bandwidth between participants.”

Agreed, that’s why p2p is the way to deal with that. Every little bit helps, and everyone sharing what they have helps everyone. This is what makes bittorrent 50% of the world’s bandwitdh- it’s EVERYONE sending and receiving.

———-

“Chatboard as a peer-to-peer file sharing space is very interesting and should work but doing a shared workspace where you can literally work on the shared resouces (i.e. editing them together) is much more harder.”

And…

“Chatboad could do it right. But as it is with most networking apps the people you work with also need it otherwise it doesn’t make sense for you. Marketability could be Chatboard’s number one issue.”

Marketability is the number one issue. Cheap, and cross-platform is the way to go on this. Version 1 doesn’t need editability so much as it needs seamless IM file transfer, which makes it cheap, and makes it as ubiquitous as possible.

Boy Howdy, My Photoshop Skills Still Suck.

2006-09-27T11:28:47Z

This is best viewed inside the forum. Image heavy, and I hope I don’t kill my .mac.

So. There we were, chatting one day, and the boys started discussing the video cards in their gaming PCs. Everybody’s already got chatboard running, as evidenced by the hazy area on the desktop:

[img]http://homepage.mac.com/mesmww/image1nothing.jpg[/img]

One of the guys decided that we all needed to see a picture of his graphics card. It’s a jpg, so it’s the default for chatboard, so no special identifying icon, other than his tack, which HE picked the color for. Boink! (yes, it makes that noise when a new file pops up)

[img]http://homepage.mac.com/mesmww/image2onefile.jpg[/img]

How big is this file? Mousing over the tack shows me all this, plus, it tells me how many people have the complete file. Right clicking (or control clicking) brings up more details, such as the peer/seed total, and how many downloads of the file there’s been.

[img]http://homepage.mac.com/mesmww/image3mouseover.jpg[/img]

Tony doesn’t like what he sees, and thinks the graphics card isn’t any good. To prove it, he sends a quicktime movie of HIS setup, complete with framerate. A movie isn’t something to be trifled with- download times can take a while. So, there’s an identifying icon on the lower left of the sample frame.

[img]http://homepage.mac.com/mesmww/image5mouseover.jpg[/img]

Now I’ve done it. I have to see the movie. I drag it to the desktop and it opens up QT player AFTER it’s downloaded Bit-torrent style, not streaming. More on this decision in a bit.

[img]http://homepage.mac.com/mesmww/image6moviedown.jpg[/img]

Sorry about the load of images, and this doesn’t even cover the basic draw tools or the “stamp” menu- the menu with the temporary effects to draw attention to a particular item.

———-

“Hey, Dork! Why no streaming?”

I’m glad you asked. Bandwidth being what it is, I want to see the big movie, but I don’t want one person to bear the brunt of sending it all. That’s the point of the whole application. So, with a bittorrent-style download aggregation thing going on, everybody shares the load. A good book to read on this concept is “Peer-To-Peer; Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies” Edited by Andy Oram, ISBN 0-596-00110-X. It’s on Amazon, go buy it.

“What if nobody has a complete file?”

Simple. It fades from the chatboard space. This keeps the chatboard clean.

———-

Voting is today! I’ll be at the keys all day until about 3PM EST, and will be checking periodically throughout the next few days. Questions anyone?

Thanks for the votes!

2006-09-26T10:30:09Z

To whomever voted for Chatboard - thanks very much, the support is appreciated. Now, on with the show!

“Hey, where’s your mockup?”

I suck at photoshop. I don’t think you completely understand the depth and breadth of the suckery. I’ve enlisted some help, but he seems to be MIA. Still my goal to make it by Thursday’s vote.

Besides, what are you REALLY looking for? Your image would consist of a window, maybe it’s transparent and shows your desktop, and maybe it doesn’t- it’s your choice. Thumbnails of media with a thumbtack on it, which is your information point. A plain drawing palette, and a highlighting palette, with animations indicating such things as THIS ONE!

It’s a simple application, with a specific task. Your buddies want to share, you want to receive. Sure, pretty is good, but it’s not the be-all, end-all of functionality. This application needs to slickly function, and deliver content. Youtube isn’t pretty, but if you do any surfing, I bet you end up there once per day.

“So, collaborative whitespace or media share”

There’s no reason why it can’t be both. Sure, it’s not a universal tool, and shouldn’t have the power of CS or anything, but it does need a simple way for people to draw the infamous CDC or to illustrate a point without having to fire up another application.

“One piece of shared media or many?”

Many. So, you’ve got this group of friends. One finds a piece of interesting photoshoppery on the web at 2AM and sends it to the shared space. Cool, it’s on the shared space.

So, what happens if friend #2 has something else to share at 4 AM, well before you arise from slumber? I’d rather it NOT replace the first image, but I’d rather it be tacked to the board, so you can grab it at your convenience (or not, if you decide it’s stupid based on its thumbnail). Totally PUSHED media is all fine and good, but if I don’t want the 120 megabyte poorly compressed quicktime movie that my Aunt Ethel sent, then I shouldn’t HAVE to get it. Images can be pushed in their entirety, as they’re small given bandwidth these days, but I’d rather files greater than 250k or so NOT be pushed. User common sense needs to prevail. If the forces of darkness gets access to the pushed space, then I should have the option of not downloading their world-ending javascript.

“Pricing?”

Don’t know. Inexpensive. $10-$15? The idea is wide implementation. This point is not up to me, really, and should be left to the developers to hit a price-point where wide adoption is easy, but not so low that their work is undervalued. What good is working if you don’t get paid?

“Cross platform”

Wow, would that be cool, or what? Ideally, yes, as depending on who you listen to, the macly amongst us are only 3-10% of the installed userbase. Realistically, there may be some issues.

“So, really, what kinds of files does this thing support”

Everything it can. MPEG, QT, JPG, GIF, PDF, MP3, AIFF, M4A, Java and Flash it should know, and recognize, and play when directed to play. If Aunt Ethel sends me a .zip or .sit of a crapload of her 5th wedding pictures, then I should see an icon indicating it’s an archive, but not the contents until I download and decompress it. If Cousin Bob sends me a weblink, then I should see an icon indicating that too. If the application can’t handle the file natively, then it sends it as a document.

This isn't just my application...

2006-09-22T14:04:20Z

So, I understand from some conversations that there were other similar submissions.

Not so nefariously, I ask: What do you want?

No, it’s not a trick question. There’s no galactic doom and gloom approaching if you answer. Seriously. What do YOU want in a P2P media collaborative environment?

Judges Reaction

2006-09-21T11:21:40Z

Allan Odgaard - Developers:
“But of course it needs to be super simple to use, needs to work for users behind NAT, and it would help the adoption if people without the dedicated application could still get a peek of what goes on via snapshots provided over http.”

That’s the idea. My problem is, my salesman and showmanship is probably not up to snuff. I’m not sure I’m expressing myself clearly, and eloquently enough. I’m very good at writing scientifically, but not so good at flowery prose, or UI mockups.

Jason Harris - Development Team
“Chatboard in its default configuration should be nothing more than a window that sits at your desktop level. If you find something you think your friends would enjoy seeing, drag it in - it’ll appear in all of your friends’ windows. The “something” you drag in can be a movie, a flash game, a website, a song, a PDF, a picture, text, whatever. Or, it can be a collaborative drawing or text - that’s the whiteboard part. Which, as I said, is a secondary goal.”

I’ve been trying to get this across, but evidently, I’m not succeeding at that. The shared space can share ANYTHING that the machine can handle. All I had in mind for the tool was a collaborative space for anybody to use, for whichever task they may have. I’ve never intended the whiteboard space to be uber-featured- a minimalist toolset at best (see previous post regarding mac-draw style tools).

UI thoughts

2006-09-21T11:07:27Z

Been working on it for a few hours this week, it’s shaping up pretty well. Got some other stuff going on today which may interfere, but hey, that’s life, you know?

Anyhow, there’s some UI elements I’ve been thinking about.

MacDraw did a lot of things right.

[img]http://homepage.mac.com/mesmww/macdrawpalette.gif[/img]

The tool palettes are out of the way, on the edge of the space. The grid is clean, and light- no heavy grid to get in the way. Obviously, the color picker here is super dated, but you get the idea. I’d like to have the option of palettes on the sides of the window, or floating. The toolset is certainly adequate for the job- this isn’t intended to be photoshop after all.

Thumbtacks!

[img]http://homepage.mac.com/mesmww/Thumbtacks.jpg[/img]

These in the upper center or corner of a posted image or whatnot would be EXCELLENT metaphor-extenders. All of your maintenance on an item and statistics (like how many people have it, and so forth) are revealed on a mouseover. If you’re the original uploader and want to remove the item, click the contextual menu that the thumbtack reveals, and BAM, it’s gone.

Eye candy!

Where the REAL spiffyness of this comes is in the usage. Image thumbnails and textboxes should be rotatable. There should be temporary highlighers, like arrows, crawlers, and the like to say “Hey, THIS picture”. They aren’t kept in the shared space forever, rather just to point out something on the board temporarily. This helps with presentations and the like. While showing everyone’s cursor might be interesting, in a Flight of the Bumblebees way, it may be too cumbersome in an internet environment.

Road Trip!

2006-09-12T11:36:37Z

If you look at my faceshot, you’ll see a non-descript baseball stadium in the background- it’s Camden Yards. Road Trip time! I’ll be away from the keys for the next couple of days.

I’ve gotten some feedback on the concept, and I’m still working on the UI mockup. Friday? Saturday?

Oh, and congratulations to all the new finalists. I was already sweating it, and every day makes me more concerned about my app!

More thoughts on Chatboard

2006-09-10T18:12:41Z

I’ve been pontificating all weekend on this. There’s a lot to be noodled out still, but progress is being made!

Random thoughts, chatboard and not:
- Taking forum suggestions, I’ll be doing a UI mockup sometime this week.
- The best way for this to work is connection aggregation like bittorrent for the shared bits. Sure, one guy started with his garden photos, but if everyone clicks the thumbnail, why can’t they help send the 1.1 megabyte 5 megapixel full image to the next guy that does?
- If the connected machines keep track of who’s fastest, you don’t even need the application to at least view the shared space. The fastest machine can update a webspace of group choosing with a snapshot of the desktop every X minutes or seconds.
- The graphic tools may be best as Object oriented ones, like the old macdraw toolset, or the current illustrator set. Over a LAN, this isn’t an issue and bitmaps would be fine, but I’d like this to work smoothly across the internet also.
- This would be FANTASTIC over bonjour across a company LAN!
- Encryption of the connection might be cool, but not necessarily for the first version
- $900 of surplus computers from a university take a while to load and unload. Ouch!

Back tomorrow or Tuesday with more thoughts. This is your app too, and I’ll consider any suggestions you may have!

-MW

Surprise Surprise

2006-09-07T05:20:13Z

Unlike the other guys, I’m not creative at all. Not an artistic cell in my body. I’m a man of science, dry humor, and sarcasm, so I consider myself amongst great minds with the finalists in the dreamapp contest, and hope I hold up. I submitted two ideas on a whim, and was concerned what the masses would think, so never got involved in the board, as is normal for me. My modus operandi is to lurk, and watch, until I feel I know people enough to post.

Well, surprise. I’m a finalist. Time to get social.

Anyway, there’s a guy in this chat I frequent, and he always has garden pictures. 72 pound of tomatoes, Pumpkins as big as cars, what have you. He invariably ends up sending the picture 10 times, as it would have been too much of a pain to set up a HTML route somewhere for the file. Thus the idea of Chatboard was born. Idly, I speculated for months before the contest, that maybe I should dust off my C knowledge, and check what it would take to code this.

The phone rang yesterday, ending all that (hopefully). I do think that if coded, the app could be used as Groupware for the Rest of Us, to coin a phrase. If you chat socially or professionally, one-click publishing to a shared, protected space can help express yourself without having to figure out who’s got an isight, who can’t receive files because of a firewall, or even who’s at the keys.

I have a whole community to thank, and I’ll get to that later. For now, thanks to the judges who looked at the idea, and for you for reading this as long as you have. I do have a lot to say about the application, and I’m very excited to have gotten this far!

-MW