Blogature

Yes, folks, it’s going to be another one of those posts.
We discovered as soon as we (and our users) got their hands on Internet Explorer 7 that freehand drawing in Thinkature was misbehaving. In particular, we learned that it was only possible to start a drawing in IE7 if the cursor were positioned on […]

I had the privilege of speaking with Eric Miraglia of Yahoo! earlier this week, and they’ve just posted the interview on the Yahoo! User Interface Blog. Eric works with the Presentation Platform Engineering team, which produces the Most Excellent(tm) YUI Library and Design Pattern Library. We use YUI extensively throughout the Thinkature application […]

Whew. I’m tempted to come up with a shorter title for this post, but I think “Flash-to-JavaScript communication with a streaming HTTP connection in Internet Explorer” appropriately and specifically defines the problem (which I’m sure people run into all the time). I digress.
If you’re interested in the Hot New AJAX Web 2.0 Ethernet […]

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve added voice chat to Thinkature!
When you log into a workspace, you’ll notice a speaker button to the right of the user list. Click on that button to get at the voice chat controls (join/leave voice chat, adjust microphone settings, etc.). You’ll always be able to see who’s […]

Setting up handlers that run after an event has fired is a tricky thing to do in JavaScript. Suppose you’re trying to work with text as it’s being entered by a user. As a silly example, suppose you wanted to have a <div> mirror the contents of a <textarea>. You might try […]

Very large JavaScript applications like Thinkature are not yet very common (or at least not as common as their smaller AJAX cousins). As a result, the body of literature on designing, debugging, and optimizing those applications is small, although it is growing.
As we got ready to launch Thinkature, we noticed that loading complicated workspaces […]

Lately, I’ve been working hard on revising the interface for managing and exploring workspaces. One of the challenges that popped up in the process was creating a list of contacts known to the user to making inviting them easier. Del.icio.us does this with tags; when you go to bookmark a new page, it presents you […]