LukasMathis

English is not my first language. I apologize for my English; I do the best I can.

Why does that line make you think my essay was supposed to be a troll? Is there something logically or obviously wrong with that line?

Thank you for writing this. It's exactly the same experience I've had, and the reason why I wrote the article.

My original goal was to help people recognize the problem, not to start some kind of war about it. I now regret having written the whole thing in a way which caused some controversy.

Yes, I am both. Which is why I've noticed that I'm often conflicted between the two goals. I'm not sure where the contradiction lies?

The original goal of the article was to alert people who do both to this conflict, so that they can handle it consciously. I think I overstated that premise while writing it, which I now regret.

While the prototype does not implement it, the concept includes the ability to show two windows at the same time.

I guess that depends on your definition of the word "remote". By American standards, Switzerland would be too small to have remote areas anyway since you can pretty much cross the whole country in a few hours ☺

But there are, in fact, areas which are only sparsely populated.

Imagine how much you'll love the Internet when you're living in a small cottage in a remote part of the Swiss Alps :-)

I did upvote it, but I guess somebody else downvoted it again. Sorry!

Yes, using ratings that are made in the context the comment originally appears would probably be better. /. is another site which could be used as source material for such an analysis.

Yeah, I got some complaints about calling that section "swear words." Some people also complained about "cock" and "suck" and some of the other words. I guess "profanity" would have been a better term to use.

You're welcome :-)

I think there are Oberon applications for Linux and Windows, one of the article's links goes to an ETH page with downloads for these. Other than that, you can try running it in Parallels. It didn't work in VMWare on my system, either, but the trial version of Parallels ran it just fine.

We do the "moving sketches around" way of collaborating, and it works, but it tends to be a bit slow. There are some ways to get around the slowness: plasq's skitch makes it easy to share the things on my screen with other people, for example, and sometimes we just skype psds to each other. And I'll certainly keep using those tools.

The iPhone mockup tool I've created is a very specific tool for a very specific issue I have: I'm thinking about the layout of an iPhone screen and I want to quickly throw some ideas at somebody who's far away, and let them give live input. I don't even think that the mockup tool is the best solution for that specific problem, it's just the first idea I came up with :-)

I find it useful, but I can totally see how it's not for everyone.

You're absolutely right, and for people in the same office, I'd use paper, too. But I have to collaborate with people who live far away from me, which is why I created this web version of pen and paper for myself.

The idea is that several people open the same mockup and move stuff around on the screen while they're on the phone, talking about the mockup, similar to what you would do with plain old paper when sitting next to each other.

Look, I created this thing for myself and figured it would be useful for others, too. I don't intend to steal your "great next killer app idea", and I already have more ideas than time anyway. Ideas are essentially worthless, everyone has an infinite number of them :-)

Furthermore, the mockups on my site are not password protected, so they're essentially public (although there is no easy way to find them). In other words, yes, don't use the site for secret stuff.

I've been putting this together for myself in a few hours, so there are not too many features yet. Automatic snap-to is certainly something on my to-do-list, align probably too. Not sure about multiple pages since it's easy to just create additional mockups.

Two reasons:

First, those mockups are not supposed to look "real". The idea is to give somebody something that very obviously is not anywhere near a finished product so as not to give the wrong impression of how "finished" the product is.

Second, it's easy to share my mockups since you can simply share the URL, and all changes will be synchronized live. So you can collaborate over the phone and see each other's changes (which is why I've made the thing).