Boy Howdy, My Photoshop Skills Still Suck.
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.
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“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.
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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?
