stormideas

Very much so, I really believe in the idea of putting something out there, gathering as much user feedback as possible and then iterating quickly as a way of developing software that meets the needs of users.

Obviously so much easier to do when dealing with a SaaS style web application than a desktop one!

Angostura, thanks for the feedback.

1. I'm aware that the initial create workspace wizard is too complex. You can do what you suggest by inviting no-one, adding your content and then editing the workspace to invite the users but clearly that's not intuitive enough at present. Will try to improve.

2. Hoist by own petard here! I surfaced some functions to the list view in order to try and reduce / simplify the interface once you were inside the workspace. Will add rollover as suggested.

3. I'd love to support more video formats in time - Silverlight natively supports .WMV files so this is what colaab supports presently. In the future I'd like to broaden this out and perform server side conversion for display inside the application. The point about the way the wizards move stages is noted, will see if I can improve on that.

4. Thumbnails for all resources is in the JIRA features list, will put a note on it saying someone else requested it. At some point I had to stop implementing features and get a beta version out there and unfortunately this was one of the features that didn't make it - it's in the works!

6. Editing is such a huge area, and while I'd love for colaab to provide some additional editing capabilities with the resources I have available it's just not possible. For the moment I am hopeful that the need to collaborate in this way (comments and annotations) over a wide range of content types will fit with enough of a need to get up and running with an initial user base.

Many thanks for your feedback, will see what I can do!

Thanks! That's really encouraging. Glad you had such a positive experience.

Netflix are using Silverlight for their streaming service, see http://netflix.mediaroom.com/index.php?s=43&item=288 for details.

My thinking was to show people how quick and easy it was to get going from sign up through to actually using the product but perhaps this might be better suited to an instructional video rather than the main promotional one on the homepage.

Will order a microphone and see if I can get better quality sound on it, thanks for the shout. I'm normally too busy squirming at the sound of my own voice to notice the quality of the recording!

Thanks, appreciate that. Very nerve wracking pushing something out there to the public that I've put so much time and effort into!

The user experience is meant to be one of the key differentiators and I'll continue to try and improve it as time goes on and feedback comes in from users.

I'm also betting against installable software (Silverlight plugins excepted!). You just need to look at Joost's traffic since they went web-based rather than desktop client:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/08/joost-has-a-heartbeat/

I'm hopefull that over the coming months / years Microsoft manage to get Silverlight out there and available on as many platforms as possible, allowing me to write applications that can take advantage of that reach.

In the meantime the aim is to start building up enough user numbers to create a viable business, I've got very low overheads and no debt so hopefully that can come from the existing Silverlight install base + people who are willing to install it if they think the application will do a job for them.

I'm hopeful that the Silverlight plugin issue becomes less and less over the course of the next few months / years. Microsoft are pushing hard for adoption so (for me at least!) fingers crossed.

Already had some great suggestions from HN on ways to improve in initial experience (flash intro video, html sign-up form).

Shame you don't like the black but glad you found the application positive - I've put almost every spare waking hour into it over the last year, so hopefully there's enough people out there who share your opinion (about paying for it) for it to become a viable business.

A/B testing is definetely the way to go, my only excuse is that up until now I've had my head so deep in the development to even begin to think about much else!

Thanks, glad you liked it.

I started moving to MVVM as the project progressed and I began to see the limitations / issues with using UserControls and code-behind.

To be honest the application grew from just hacking things together initially so there are some older parts that were just me picking up the technology.

As time progresses I'm trying to move more and more of it to MVVM and get everything covered by unit tests - at the moment the majority of unit test coverage is on the server side - the client is a little light in that department atm.

Word document conversion is a nightmare, and is some of the more obtuse code I've ever written. At the moment we convert to XPS and work from there but I'm sorely tempted to go to images and not loose too much sleep over the fact that you then get pixellation as you zoom in a lot.

Thanks for the feedback, much appreciated.

Seems obvious to me now! Will sort it out.

For me personally I was able to build colaab faster and more enjoyably using Silverlight rather than jQuery (which I love and use a lot in other projects).

Of course this is of no matter to the end user, but where it does have impact is that hopefully I was then able to spend more time working on features that add value to the application, thus benefitting the end user.

There's also some area of the application (like commenting on videos) which would have been really hard to develop using just javascript.

In terms of the design there's definetely been a trend towards darker colours. I love the style that Adobe have used for products like Photoshop Express and this was definetely an inspiration.

Thanks!

At the moment if you want to turn it into a desktop application then you've got two choices:

1. WPF application - copy / share the code with a full blown WPF application and fix any incompatibility errors (Silverlight is a subset of the full .NET framework so there shouldn't be many).

2. Mesh Application - Live Mesh applications include the ability to run Silverlight outside of the browser, like a desktop application (short cuts, start menu items etc). I've done a bit of a proof of concept of this (http://www.vimeo.com/2542327 for an overview) but this introduces a hard dependancy on the user having Live Mesh installed so for the moment it's just proof of concept.

Thanks.

I think you're right - allow them to evaluate the service with as few hurdles as possible first and then deal with the Silverlight install issue once they have made a decision. Working on it already!

That's sounding good to me. Going to add detect for Silverlight and switch in a flash version of the intro video if Silverlight isn't present.

Thanks!

Thanks. The reason for using Silverlight for the video is to encourage people to get over the Silverlight installation hurdle as soon as possible.

I've been back and forward on whether that's a good idea, and whether we should replace the demo video with a flash version. Will definetely think it over again.

We're currently redeveloping the sign up process as a more standard html form, clearly this was me getting a bit too swept up in my Silverlight development efforts!

I'm also working on a "Try it now, in a demo workspace" feature to allow people to try it without submitting any information at all. Maybe I should also change the email confirmation step to be something that needs to be completed in time, rather than something that needs to be completed before you can log in.

Do you think 8 minutes is too long for the intro video? Should we make a shorter / snappier version?

Thanks for all the feedback, very useful.

Thanks, Will check it out.

Thanks! It was built using a combination of Visual Studio and Blend. Tend to use blend to do a first pass at UI elements then hand crank things in VS from then on.

Aha, yes. I got a bit carried away there. Currently redeveloping in ASP.NET MVC as a more standard web form!

Thanks, really glad you liked it!

I'll take a look into your issue with the website screen grabs and get it sorted.

Yes, full window is indeed the correct term I should be using.

To be honest I found Silverlight a joy to develop in. In the past I've tried AJAX and Flash / Flex when trying to develop this kind of RIA application.

Personally I don't enjoy writing code in Javascript, and found it difficult to bring my ideas of how I wanted the user experience to come together into reality.

With Flash / Flex I could get the richer experience I was looking for but was then developing in a different application / language when working on the UI component as opposed to the back end and this was less productive.

Thanks,

Bob

p.s My twitter username is "movingforwards".

I took the decision to develop using Silverlight becuase I've got a strong background in using the Microsoft stack for development, wanted to get in on the ground floor with a new technology and follow it as it matures and becuase I wanted to (try!) to produce a richer user experience within the browser.

As I said, I understand that this is going to be a limiting factor in some regards, but I couldn't have built what I did in any other technology (that's not to say that someone else couldn't have, just for my particular circumstances).

I'm hopeful that as Silverlight adoption increases this will become less of a problem, I'm also hopeful that colaab may act as a showcase for my Silverlight abilities and lead to further contract work, which in turn can help to fund product development.

Thanks for the feedback!

I've got an open support call into Microsoft about this one, not to shift the blame but it seems to be a bug with the Silverlight plugin rather than something we are specifically doing.

Thanks for the feedback!