Archive for January, 2008

Shared whiteboard beta

Monday, January 14th, 2008

Today Beta 8 of PeerAware is available for download. This release is an important milestone, as it marks the first time a collaborative component is ready for testing. PeerAware now allows a group of people to draw together in real-time and work on the same whiteboard. Basically this is like a simplified version of Visio, but the interesting part is that multiple users can work on the same diagram, working each on their own part, or just observing changes made by another person.

The types of diagrams that can be created are:
Basic diagrams with arrows, rectangles, circles and other shapes.
Flow charts with notes, processes, decisions, junctions, delays, or, merge, extract and more.
Network shapes with servers, firewalls, routers, bridges, laptops etc.
Mac and Windows UI controls for doing layout of program UI.
Workflow diagrams with human resources, legal, QA, accounting, inventorying, shipping and sales.

I guess more diagrams types would be obvious, like gardens or interior designs, but that will depend entirely on what requests I get. In reality I have no plans to make this into a full ArchiCad, AutoCad or Visio replacement, rather it should be a good alternative for prototyping, especially when you need to prototype something in a group spread across multiple locations.

And I guess we really need to get support in place for saving and loading drawings, but meanwhile I hope you have fun playing with it.

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Music

Sunday, January 13th, 2008

PeerAware is my way of relaxing, but in the right environment this gets even better. First of all, a nice view from the window is nice, along with some good music.

While working on PeerAware I often find myself listening to the following albums:
4 Non Blondes - Bigger, Better, Faster, More!
Frank Sinatra - My Way
Nazareth - The Ballads Album
Pearl Jam - Ten
Pink Floyd - Echoes
Rolling Stones - Hot Rocks

For some reason most of these are quite old, maybe it is time to get some new music. What would you recommend?

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Collaborate through a Whiteboard

Saturday, January 5th, 2008

As hinted earlier the next version of PeerAware will contain a collaborative shared whiteboard that allows all connected users to draw on the same whiteboard in real-time. For a preview take a look at this screenshot. All workspace scripts will go open source under the mozilla public license (MPL) version 1.1. For users and developers that means that anyone can edit existing scripts or create new ones, all based on open standards, html and javascript.

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