Ask HN: Review my startup, colaab - A Silverlight 2 RIA for rich, real-time collaboration
http://www.colaab.com
Allowing you to comment and annotate documents, images and videos.
Inspirations include David Heinemeier Hansson’s talk at Startup School 08 (http://bit.ly/490Tkt) and 37 Signals in general. My dream is to combine their approach to monetization (build a service people want, charge a price for it, make profit) with a dedication to a richer user experience that is enabled by UI technologies like Flash, Silverlight, JavaFX etc.
The company and product has been bootstrapped up to this point, with contract work paying the bills up until now (and for a while yet I would think!). In terms of revenue, we’re operating a subscription based / freemium model.
Everything is hosted on Amazon Web Services (EC2 / S3) so hopefully that will enable us to scale up as demand increases!
I’m based in Edinburgh, Scotland and believe the time has never been better for small teams of motivated individuals to build truly innovative and user friendly software, which with the distribution and viral nature of the web, have a chance of being adopted by a global audience.
I appreciate that a full-screen Silverlight 2 application isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but if you’re interested I’ve setup an invite code:
HACKERNEWS
Which will give the first 100 people to use it a free "Starter" account (worth $24 a month) for a year.
Thanks,
Bob
-- Bob Thomson storm ideas http://blog.stormideas.com http://colaab.com twitter: movingforwards
95 comments
[ 12.5 ms ] story [ 190 ms ] threadThe whole point of a collaboration type app, is that you can use it from anywhere - your laptop, desktop, iphone, nokia, netbook, internet cafe, library, wii, etc etc
Requiring a user install some software negates the whole point for me.
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.
Good luck with it :)
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!
Also, the web isn't composed of windows machines. It's a mishmash of a billion different devices. The vast majority of which, know html, javascript, and not much else. Seems a bad idea to only write for a small subset of them.
I don't see where you (necessarily) get "small subset" from.
I do. The less "installed" software I have to go wrong, the better.
I suppose I can always go back to Lynx if these things really bother me too much.
Silverlight is actually pretty good; it's a much easier experience for developers than Flash/Flex. You might hate Microsoft, but you shouldn't hate the tech.
Adobe, while not perfect itself, has been committed to keeping Flash cross platform. This makes Flash harder to hate than Silverlight despite the high cost of developer tools
That will be most everyone. People will do just about anything you ask them to. The prevalence of phishing has proven that. They'll put their online banking creds into any site that has bankofamerica somewhere in the domain name. They'll buy Viagra from an anonymous email through a Costa Rican pharmacy. They'll most certainly click the button that says "Install Silverlight from Microsoft to watch the video".
But the other reasons are silly unless someone is paying you to increase Silverlight usage.
The difference between a biz and a hobby is that biz try hard to avoid doing things that don't help the bottom line.
The reason being, earlier this month I bought an xbox360 (There is no choice, be stupid and spend a ton on a ps3 with its ridiculous bluray, or be stupid and spend less on an xbo360).... I bought the lips game, and went to lips.com to see what songs you can buy. It requires silverlight... for a list of songs. I installed it reluctantly, and in the most hideously badly rendered font you can imagine, it said "Song list coming soon".
A lesser evil is still an evil.
I consider the fact that Flash is pretty terrible a feature, as at least is helps discourage people from only using it in places where it's absolutely essential. I firmly believe RIAs are a fundamentally bad idea and the quicker they are replaced with open standards the better.
I couldn't get "website" resources to work? when I load them it just fails, odd!
the app wasn't full screen for me by the way, merely full window :)
How did you find Silverlight to develop in? are you on twitter? you should be :)
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".
Maybe, MAYBE, a little too many refelctions on the site. Just my 2 cents.
Can you turn this web app into a desktop app easily with silverlight?
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 was just thinking users like having a "desktop" application - might re-iterate the lovely Silverlight experience if the user could "download" a copy.
Silverlight version 2.0.31005.0.
Thanks for the feedback!
Second, why silverlight? The whole idea of online collaboration is allowing as many disparate people come together regardless of device. So you've thrown up roadblocks to two platforms that can no longer be considered marginal (OS X and Linux) for what is an arbitrary technology choice. At least with Flex you'll hit 98% of it and you can't sell me that silverlight has any advantage over Flex that is worth that.
I'd love to give you more feedback because I'm very interested in online collaboration, but I can't because I'm on Linux and won't install SilverLight on my mac.
Why can't you install Silverlight on OS X? I had to quit my browsers then run the installer. It failed if they were open.
And what's the point of the hassle in the first place? Someone has yet to explain why SilverLight is better for me as the consumer than Flex/Flash.
Thanks!
Ok, this may age me some. But people said exactly the same thing when Java and Flash first came out... if you go back far enough they were also intrusive annoying frustrating bug ridden technologies.
I'm not directly supporting SilverLight. I'm just supporting as many competitive web platforms as possible. They all add something, even the evil Microsoft ones. That being said Microsoft is losing the battle with that horrible SilverLight install. It needs to be as easy to install as Flash. It should be as close to transparent as possible.
To a fair number of people, they still are.
I'm curious about the architecture. Did you use Model View ViewModel?
How are you converting the word docs? Do you convert every type of resource to an image?
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.
• Black — arrggg! Personally I hate websites which have a colour palette ranging from #ccc to #000! They even disorientate me a bit…I think! It may just be me, but somehow I doubt the rest of the world loves such a dull colour.
However it's a very impressive app, you can tell you [guys (?)] have put a lot of work into it, and I wish you the best of luck — if I needed such a product I'd be MORE than willing to pay for Colaab! :)
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.
Then, when I proceeded to the sign up page, I were "amazed" that you created the price plan with SilverLight too. And, it took time to load again just to view the price and to login.
When I stumbled upon the sign up form, there were too much information that I have to give. This doesn't really favor any users who want to try the service (first name, last name, email, username, etc in SilveerLight). And, I have to wait for a confirmation email to get started?!? Luckily, the confirmation email reached faster than I thought and I gave my actual email. I wish that you won't spam my mail box.
And, finally, I cousd get started with the service. I stared at it for 2 minutes and had no clue how to use it. Then, I clicked the close button. I will try the service again if someone in HN give a good review about it.
I know that it is partially my fault because I didn't watch the 8mins long intro video and the popup tooltips in the working platform.
http://riastats.com/ < You can see that there is only ~15% of penetration of silverlight on internet. Hopefully microsoft will put in more marketing budget in Silverlight despite the "failure" of Vista.
Sorry if I am too harsh on my language and I am not trying to discourage you at all.
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.
Do an A/B test for a month using Google Analytics. That should settle it. Anything else is pure speculation.
This is simple but very, very important : any testable hypothesis should be tested. Long live popperianism.
* make the intro video in flash as well as silverlight! :)
* I'm personally really against confirmation email things.
* price plans/intro as HTML/PNG/Flash as well as silverlight
I think its important to really sell your site to users without silverlight - they will absolutley install silverlight if they WANT your service.
What is this? 1995?
I didn't try the app (because of silverlight) but I really like the design. Is black the new blue?
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!
Working with tools with which you're the best makes great applications... as long as you keep updating your toolbox.
Don't worry too much about the Silverlight installation. If the product is good, that won't be a barrier.
I also believe RIA apps are much better than AJAX based apps.
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.
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!
It would also chop off one minute of an 8 minute long demo.
It's cool that you decided to go with Silverlight despite the fact that it's less tried than Flash. Good luck!
There's a few usability quirks that immediately sprung to mind;
I didn't find it particularly intuitive to actually dive in use:
1. When you first set up account and start a workspace, the first thing it asks you to do is choose the people you want to share it with. This seems "wrong" to me. I would expect to be able to set up a workplace, add documents and wotnot and only then be bothered about who I wanted to invite in.
2. I then tried to work out how to add an item to a workspace... there were buttons on mouse over for Manage, Share and Delete - so I sat there trying to find 'Add document'. It wasn't until I eventually clicked on the workspace that I 'entered' it. I wasn't really expecting that 'enter to do something' metaphor. How about a mouse-over 'click to enter message'.
3. Add video resource - how about some clue as to the formats you accept. None that I tried. that's for sure. It's a bit distracting to see the Web page URL input go scrolling by on the way to the file chooser.
4. Thumbnails of the documents would be good.
5. The Black pallette really isn't to my taste.
6. The big one... without the ability to actually edit Word or Excel files (as opposed to annotate), it isn't really a collaborative tool in my opinion, I'll probably keep using Google Docs or Drop Box and I suspect others will too. Sorry, it's a lovely idea apart from that. I'm not sure I can even see myself using it with the free account.
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!
1. Perhaps the Wizard should initially ask 'what would you like to do first - add resources, or invite people to the space'?
2. I'm not sure that adding a roll-over is the correct idea here, so I don't want to send you down a blind alley. It may be the correct solution is to actually avoid surfacing the functions at all (they still have to be provided inside the workspace, I presume so you aren't reducing complexity).
Instead maybe it is worth looking at how you could amend the workspace design to make it look more 'clickable to enter'.
3. Understood. All I would suggest is you list the supported format(s) to avoid Mac users like myself attempting conversions blind.
6. Completely understood. The comment was a bit brutal but I thought it was worth making.
The very best of luck.
Obviously so much easier to do when dealing with a SaaS style web application than a desktop one!
Also, I uploaded a pdf -- when looking at documents it's hard to read I'm running @ 1900X1200 and it's difficult to read; I'd work on the interface -- also, I assume you convert the pdf to an image? Why can't I select the pdf's text?
Other than that it looks like a good start, and silverlight seems like a good choice.. I recently chose flex for a project, but almost chose silverlight.