My Dream App

Chatboard promises a lot with the ability to support just about any file type and be a media share/collaborative space. I think the idea has yet to be fully realized and needs to mature before adding any more features. I already think this one will be a challenge for developers. In it’s most basic principle, Chatboard sounds like your run of the mill Basecamp account, with drag and drop.

Chatboard is a great idea that takes SubEthaEdit to the next level. I am constantly writing stuff with colleagues in SubEtha and I’m ready to take things to the next level.

I think the Leopard version of iChat crushes this idea.

An idea whose time has come? There is much potential to be realised in electronic collaboration. A couple of companies out there working with electronic whiteboards already offer functionality like this, but none of the solutions seems to be done quite right. A major roadblock might be bandwidth between participants.

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. I’ve been using mostly iChat for ad-hoc file exchange with my colleagues and friends but it often just don’t work because of networking issues. 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.

The entrenched IM services are horrid warts on the technology landscape. Every goddamn time I can’t get an IM file transfer to go through a firewall or whatever, I want to kill someone. I’m typing to the person right now! There’s obviously an open channel for communication. Use that to send the file, you stupid piece of crap! Die, AOL! DIE!!!

Ahem. Anyway, obviously I’m not the only person who wants better real-time services. A reliable network collaborative space like Chatboard is long overdue. Unfortunately, the hurdles in front of it are almost entirely political, not technological. Chatboard doesn’t do me much good unless I can convince all my friends and family to use it. My casual bit of sharing (”Hey, check out the hideous new BBEdit icon!”) quickly becomes a tech-support chore. (”Do you have Chatboard? Do you have a Mac? Can you install it? Try this web site instead.”)

Ubiquity is the only way this’ll ever become useful outside small groups. Unfortunately, AOL, MS, and Yahoo have a collective monopoly on real-time collaborative services these days, and they can’t even be bothered to get freaking file transfer right.

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.

This was one of my favorite submissions, but I don’t like the way it’s progressing. I don’t care about collaborative whiteboards. At all. I care about capitalizing on people sharing stupid media with each other, which is obviously something that’s very popular (see YouTube). And that’s what I think Chatboard’s strength should be. Collaborative whiteboarding should be secondary. A distant second.

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.

There are technical considerations here, of course - there always are. But everything I said above is possible to do, and it’s the direction I’d like to see Chatboard take. A name change might be in order there, too… If whiteboarding is secondary, the name shouldn’t focus on it.

A persistent collaborative space is no new idea, but beyond SubEthaEdit very few collaboration tools have taken off for the Mac. While it is hard to be optimistic, I can’t help but encourage Chatboard since something is definitely needed. iChat and Bonjour integration need to be very well done, but this app looks like it is heading in a good direction. It could be a very useful utility.

It does amaze me that nothing good exists for sharing images. The need does frequently arise for me, and I am rarely dealing with graphics, so I would think there is a market for this.

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.

For the latter one could use an existing image sharing service.