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.
