What is the technology of Skype – could it be Adobe Cirrus or Stratus?

My Son was experimenting with the latest Skype functionality – calls with > 2 participants. This lead me to say: “Looks like they’re using Cirrus/Stratus Multi-casting.  Does anybody know??”. So that’s the question – what is Skype’s technology, if you have some insight let us know. Perhaps someone with a “Super sniffer” could help.

 

Update: I know that there is a (new) iphone Skype app which means that they are not using the Flash player. But by not using the Flash player doesn’t exclude using Cirrus (but it really reduces the chance).

Logo? What do you mean Logo !!

Some where on www.colabry.com is a graphic which says:

Secret Weapon: On board Interpreter

So secret is this, that I haven’t mentioned it here during my description of the whiteboards at  www.colabry.com .

By having an interpreter at the center of the whiteboard, I can offer User developed collaborative applications (at least in theory ).

But Logo??   The late comedian Bill Hicks would say: “Stop your internal dialog”.

Logo has at the top of the list for whiteboards; Persistance. Add to this a true language for exploring, discovery, invention.

Now I’m not going to say “throw away your structure, frameworks,  MVC,  design patterns, dependency injection   & Embrace the Turtle”:

But what if we had the best of both?

Situational Applications, Adobe Genesis and Mosaic, Coghead and Zoho

How did I get here?
1. SAP mentions Adobe project Genesis
2. Adobe Genesis was exploring RIA workspaces which can be shared and collaborated
3. Matthias Zeller was a prime Adobe architect/blogger and was interviewed by Micheal Cote’ http://www.redmonk.com/cote/2009/07/23/riaweekly055/
4. Micheal characterizes Genesis as Situational Application
4a. Genesis gets productized into Adobe Mosaic ( … if it only had collaboration ).

5. http://www.slideshare.net/jasapir/situational-applications-in-60-seconds-presentation good overview of Situational Application
6. Coghead, Zoho, Caspio and others are mentioned.
7. Coghead hit the rocks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coghead
8. You are here.

So I think that Situational Applications are another natural for the  www.colabry.com ….

“Live Development” and “Design time at Run time”

It’s something to do a Google search for “design time at run time” (in qoutes)  you’ll get:

…. design time. At run time ….       …. design time — at run time….

…. design time,  at run time….        …. design time; at run time …..

Where all of these results (the vast majority)  aren’t talking about design time at run time. They are not joining design time to/with  run time, but are separating or contrasting the two.

Searching for “Development at Run time” yields similarly coupled-for-contrast results.

“Live Development” comes close to meaning “Design time at Run time”.  Live development  requires that run time must be capable of design, or at least “Development at Run time”.

Search for “Collaborative Development’ and what a different story.  If you have a BS detector, it will peg with over 9 million Google search results – brimming with BS.   Some companies think that revision control constitutes  development collaboration.

True run time for “Live Development”  will also be “Collaborative Design time”.

Some thoughts about Wave

I’ve been reading Google news alerts about Wave. It’s almost comical how there isn’t a Google marketing filter on them.  Some articles do no favor to the Wave brand,  let alone the  Google brand.  I’ve put two of them at the end of this posting.

Two articles I’ve read and commented on leads me to reprise the comments  here.

Quest For The Perfect Design Tool

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/UrbainBruno/20100202/4298/Quest_For_The_Perfect_Design_Tool.php

Urbain Bruno discusses Waves merits and suitability for his work at Gamasutra.

I added this to the discussion:

1. Consider the need for a collaborative technology platform rather that an application or tool.

2. As applications become more social, realtime and collaborative, I believe they will inter-operate and be user extensible too.

3. Design time at run time, Develop In Situ.

This is what I’ve thought about:

A “whiteboard OS”. where rich media applications can be built upon and which run collaboratively.
Common whiteboards now are just a scribble boards in my view. What I’m talking about is full GUI, windowing/MDI with full rich media types.
By having a complete set of GUI elements, the whiteboard real estate can be very organized and virtually unlimited in size.
Assets can be dragged and dropped from the desktop right onto the whiteboard. These assets could be programs too.

What I’ve be able to realize: http://www.colabry.com

The second Google news piece about Wave is titled   “Google Wave: Collaboration Reworked”   from  LibraryJournal.com by Melissa L. Rethlefsen.

http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6713140.html

The article also discusses Waves merits and suitability for library staff.

Melissa, your observations and arguments are solid. Discussing the virtues of Wave objectively is really needed.

I define collaboration as communication which enables, through iteration, development results.
A voice conversation (esp multi-party) can achieve a high level of collaboration.

Email, given time, can also achieve this as well. Email does have two advantages over voice. First, communicating working media assets like images, documents as attachments. The second advantage over voice is a record trail. However iteration time is the show stopper.

Wave can bring email to real time. But if asset modification isn’t plain text (and therefore has to be done serially outside of wave) the effectiveness ( iteration rate and thus the rate of development/evolution) is greatly reduced. Wave is an improvement, but is it a dramatic improvement? The drama, I am convinced, is in the desire for better collaboration mechanisms.

Web based whiteboards are a promising start although they are now fairly primative. Most are just scribble boards. They get very crowded and noisy, but they have potential.

I’m an advocate of next generation web whiteboards. Voice and Webcam, drag and drop documents and graphics from the desktop to the whiteboard. Edit and interact in parallel – and in real time. With the introduction of graphical user interface (GUI) components, whiteboards will change dramatically. With windows that can be minimized and assets stowed in folders, the familiar and powerful desktop metaphor will come to collaboration. Also, with team participation the space can be organized, huge, deep and rich.

Wave  anti-branding campaign:

http://twitpic.com/qmxa5

http://video.yahoo.com/watch/6218596/16143522 (viewer discretion is advised)

Stratus Multicast Whiteboard and LCCS/Stratus Hybrid Whiteboard on www.colabry.com

I have created a Stratus Multicast whiteboard as well as a LCCS/Stratus P2P hybrid. On http://www.colabry.com the top whiteboard remains the LCCS whiteboard and the lower is the Stratus P2P. The Stratus P2P now includes LCCS connectivity.

You are invited to see the  Multicast whiteboard by sending me an email: ajlogo@gmail.com . This version as well as both earlier mentioned whiteboards are virtually all the same code.  I see two huge advantages to Stratus multicast:

1. More engaging due to free/un-metered use. Using LCCS to broadcast slider adjustments, window resizing,  mouse and window scroll bar movements are potentially expensive. It is easy to imagine 36,000  messages a hour.

2. Whiteboard over simple P2P  ( two people max) is minamally collaborative.

The down side is that roles/rooms/credentials  and other LCCS comforts need to be created. And the base content needs to be persistent somewhere.

I want to reiterate my suggestion to watch  the talk by Matthew Kaufman at 2009 MAX (esp at ~ 39:00)

http://tv.adobe.com/watch/max-2009-develop/p2p-on-the-flash-platform-with-rtmfp

Arnie

ajlogo@gmail.com

New Whiteboard on www.colabry.com

A new version of my whiteboard is available on http://www.colabry.com which you may find interesting. The big new feature is nested UIComponenets / MDI.  The new version uses the Cocomo / AFCS / LCCS api for connection and my Stratus based whiteboard code for the (er) whiteboard.  Stratus can still be used for just p2p connections.   And things are only getting started…..

Extending the LCCS whiteboard further just wasn’t a viable plan. The LCCS API as wonderful as it is, focuses on shapes; not UIComponents.  Creating a white board for Stratus forced the creation of all the whiteboard code, and that meant a unified set of UIComponents. What I mean here is a component can be placed on or off the whiteboard,  dragged on or off the whiteboard, and it would be the same component (with the LCCS whiteboard the component had to go through a magic mirror).

With this new version, I finally got the MDI qualities that Bob Johnson and I created a year and a half ago into the whiteboard.  This isn’t your simple MDI; components are mobile and nestable.  Having nestable UIComponents on whiteboard is something I hope you’ll take the time to experience. You will look differently other on whiteboards.

Have I left Stratus behind?  Not at all.  It may be the future.  The cloud will not be just  Google or IBM server farms. The cloud will include a mesh of  Flash players  (vers 10.1)  doing multicast. But for now, the new version can run Status p2p instead of LCCS.

If your interested, you’ve gotta watch the talk by Matthew Kaufman at 2009 MAX:

http://tv.adobe.com/watch/max-2009-develop/p2p-on-the-flash-platform-with-rtmfp

Collaborative Design-time is Run-time

This blog will focus on collaboration software.  Technologies and platforms that enable collaborative design and development. Web based whiteboards look like the mechanism or vehicle for realizing this next step for the internet. My experimental research at http://www.colabry.com will be showcased here (hopefully embedded).

Currently on http://www.colabry.com I’ve got two active demonstrations.

First is a Cocomo/AFCS/ LCCS (Adobe) based whiteboard. Its most notable feature is UIComponents on the whiteboard. Unlike most whiteboards this one has images and video as well as Panels, Canvases, TabNavigators, Sliders, Buttons, DataGrids.  These elements can be dragged and dropped from the workspace. The real power of the UIComponents is to enable a virtual space that is orders of magnitude bigger than the original real estate. This space can also be orderly and organized; unlike most whiteboards which become very crowded quickly with scribbles/doodles and 0ther attempts at annotation.  This version could be extended to include webcam & audio, and/or an AIR version.

The Cocomo version extends the Adobe LCCS  API (most of the work extends the Whiteboard class). Until my code is refactored, perhaps it’s better to describe the code as mangeling the Adobe API rather than extending it.

The second whiteboard on http://www.colabry.com is based on Adobe Stratus.  It shares the fundamental innovation of UIComponents on the whiteboard; with very different infrastructure.  Stratus connects Flash 10 clients directly  peer to peer. There is no  API so all the whiteboard code is custom from scratch.  Webcams and audio as well as file transfers are supported.

There is an AIR version of the Stratus based whiteboard concurrently being developed which has extended features. The AIR version supports drag and drop from the desktop to the whiteboard (which indirectly benefits the web version) . This is quite important to delivering a practical collaboration vehicle.  Also unique to the AIR version is use the HTML Class which enables whiteboard co-browsing.

Beyond Adobe, I’m looking at Google Wave. Right now there’s way too much buzz and little real collaboration. Oh, and there is the pesky “R” in RIA – something that GWT can’t do well even with a Canvas.  Perhaps using the Google infrastructure and transport mechanisms would make sense.