7 ms·

Mockingbird goes 1.0, introduces real-time collaboration using OT and Node

97 points by boucher 16y ago

patrickaljord 16y ago
Link to the live collaboration demo: https://gomockingbird.com/mockingbird/demo.html https://gomockingbird.com/mockingbird/demo.html edit: updated link to saikat's suggestion
- saikat 16y ago
  There are actually multiple demos going on. If you go to https://gomockingbird.com/mockingbird/demo.html https://gomockingbird.com/mockingbird/demo.html it will put you on one of the projects via ghetto load balancing (read: redirect to one of the demo projects at random).
saikat 16y ago
Hey guys, Saikat from Mockingbird here - I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have about our operation transformation framework or about our launch.
- jonpaul 16y ago
  Cool. I'm more interested in the fact that you built a large webapp using Cappuccino. I'm a beta member myself to the Atlas project, but I find its lack of updates troublesome. Can you give us a sense about your work environment (IDEs, etc) and how you go about debugging Cappuccino apps? Do you even use Atlas? Any tips for a noob Cappuccino dev? Thanks and nice work!
  - saikat 16y ago
    Sure. The majority of Mockingbird wasn't written using Atlas (we started on it a long time before Atlas existed), but we do use Atlas to make a lot of our panels (and if you use the --path flag with the flatten tool, you can load these panels up front to make the experience smoother). I've also heard good things about nib2cib in conjunction with interface builder if you're not liking Atlas. I work entirely in emacs and use OJTest to test my code as I write it. Sheena (my co-founder) uses TextMate though, and I think that might be a better environment for someone starting out. The best debugging trick I think I've learned is to use index-debug.html and enable objj_msgSend_decorate(objj_backtrace_decorator); (it's commented out by default). Other than that, I think I've learned to just try testing my code early and often with OJTest to catch things. I do want to try to build out better testing and debugging tools for Capp though. In general, just ask questions on the mailing list and don't be afraid of coming into IRC. The #cappuccino IRC channel is one of the most helpful ones I've been.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
  - sheena 16y ago
    As Saikat said, I use Textmate. There are decent bundles available for Objective-J/Capp. I'd also add that you should use Webkit (specifically Safari) when profiling Cappuccino apps for the best results.
- millions 16y ago
  You keep doing great work with Mockingbird! However, a few things keep me in Omnigraffle for now - the biggest issues I have is the lack of free drawing tools and/or a much larger library of components, icons etc. I would also put the ability to create interactivity within a page high on my wishlist - Omnigraffle does this (albeit crudely) with the ability to hide/show layers.
  - boucher 16y ago
    What ways would you envision for interactivity in addition to separate pages?
    - millions 16y ago
      Realistically: The ability to show or hide objects on a page. This would make creating things like tooltips, lightboxes, dialogues etc. a lot easier. Ideally: I would like components to match their actual behaviour more closely, e.g. a tab container would actually contain views in the respective tabs that would be shown or hidden depending on the tab selected. I know this is no easy feat - I have yet to find a wireframing tool that lets you infuse interactivity as easily as one would like to, and I have been through a lot of them.
  - sheena 16y ago
    We have plans to expand the available widgets and to let you make your own.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- mnemonik 16y ago
  Are you planning on open sourcing your OT framework? I started working on an OT implementation as a learning experience a few months ago, but eventually got caught up in other things. I would be very interested in playing with your code!
- shorbaji 16y ago
  Congratualtions. Look forward to reading the tech posts. Have you evaluated causal trees against OT as the collaboration algorithm? See: bouillon.math.usu.ru/articles/ctre.pdf bouillon.math.usu.ru/articles/broth5.pdf
deleted 16y ago
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deleted 16y ago
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hippo33 16y ago
Congrats, Saikat and Sheena! This is very cool.
dotBen 16y ago
As a (freelance) product manager type person, I spend a fair amount of my time designing wireframes... I LOVE Balsamiq (another wireframing option), Peldi (balsamiq founder) is a really nice guy and one of my companies even hosts some of their website... but I've moved over to using Mockingbird for my own work. It's that good. If you need to design wireframes, I encourage you to try Mockingbird.
- rrhyne 16y ago
  I've never used balsamiq as I've always been happy with Mockingbird. They've been really responsive over the only support issue I had as well.
pluies 16y ago
I used Mockingbird's beta in the beginning of the year for a project with 5 other colleagues, and it is pretty a pretty awesome web app. Hats off to you two!
xtacy 16y ago
The centre canvas where things are dragged/dropped or drawn is pretty cool. Did you guys create one yourself or is there a plugin that's available?
- sheena 16y ago
  The whole app is written in Cappuccino. To be more precise, that canvas is a custom CPView. :)
sachinag 16y ago
Pony request: change the size of the canvas. On my 13" MBP at 1280x800, there are highly-fucking-irritating scrollbars for the canvas. This fucks me up a lot. I'd love to be able to resize the canvas or "zoom out" so this didn't happen. I don't actually need 960px to play with to design for a 960px wide site. Give me this tiny horse and I'll abandon Balsamiq. Thanks!
- saikat 16y ago
  You can actually resize the canvas. Just move the mouse to the edge and a resize tab appears. You can drag that to shrink it or input values into the text fields - https://gomockingbird.com/help/Editing/#resize_page https://gomockingbird.com/help/Editing/#resize_page. Hope that solves the issue at least part of the way (zoom would be nice though).
- boucher 16y ago
  You can resize by dragging the handles at the bottom, right, and bottom-right edges. You can also use the chrome/safari full page zoom option to zoom out, the application keeps working fine (though there are a few slight rendering errors).
  - sachinag 16y ago
    HFS, I never knew about Chrome's full page option. Congrats, you won my business. Note: this is exactly like how 25% of AOL's support tickets involved issues with Windows. Remember, your users are always dumber than you are.
- btucker 16y ago
  I came to request similarly, then noticed that if you make your browser window big enough, you'll find there's a green canvas resize grabber in the bottom right of the canvas (when you hover over the canvas). This is great, but definitely easy to miss when the canvas starts out so large.
- rrhyne 16y ago
  The 'Fuck*'s in your request will probably help them get right on it!
rakkhi 16y ago
Really love Mockingbird, really made it easy for me to mockup what I wanted for my startup app. Especially using offshore developers a picture really is a 1000 words. Looking forward to trying the new features
zach 16y ago
Used it, presented a site to a client with it, love it. The level of detail on design elements is nice, so things can get blocked out without the distractions of too-polished design (i.e. hundreds of icons, custom images). Really appreciated and heavily used the grid update from a few months ago -- well implemented with the minimum amount of UI, like the rest of the app. Highly recommended.
deleted 16y ago
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ajessup 16y ago
Nice work! Are these guys thinking about open sourcing the OT components? A couple of us are starting up an npm module to allow generic OT using node. http://github.com/ajessup/pluto http://github.com/ajessup/pluto http://www.dontstopthesignal.com/2010/05/design-goals-for-pluto-open-source-ot.html http://www.dontstopthesignal.com/2010/05/design-goals-for-pl...
- saikat 16y ago
  Hey -- sorry, but we aren't planning on open sourcing our OT framework yet. I would be more than happy to talk to you about about it though (my e-mail's in my HN profile).
sudonim 16y ago
Congratulations. The realtime collaboration is pretty slick. For us it's less of a collaborative process and more I make the stuff and then send it for review. Im looking forward to what myBalsamiq.com will offer. The pain points in wireframing software are: * organizing projects / groups of similar wireframes * keeping track of versions * allowing anyone on your team to get access to / update the latest file.
djm 16y ago
I used Mockingbird a while ago (& loved it) but since then I had forgotten all about it. I got the email notification about these upgrades this morning and it was poorly written. You might want to re-visit the text and look it over. I've deleted it now so can't quote you specifics but I remember seeing lines advising that services would be available until Jan 2010 etc. It would have also helped having a line at the top simply stating what Mockingbird is for those of us who may have forgotten. (great product though; I'll be trying it again now I've been reminded it exists)
- sheena 16y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. The date mixup was a typo that somehow escaped our notice despite several re-readings, but good point about reminding users what the service is. That you yourself think about your product daily is no reason to entertain the fond hope that users sign up and then immediately frame a screenshot of your site on their desk to gaze at lovingly, just waiting for the next moment they can throw you a pageview.
dnmurphy 16y ago
HOw does the collaboration work? Is this part opf thre capuccino framework, on your web site you mention google wave.

97 points by boucher 16y ago

Link to the live collaboration demo: https://gomockingbird.com/mockingbird/demo.html https://gomockingbird.com/mockingbird/demo.html edit: updated link to saikat's suggestion

saikat 16y ago
There are actually multiple demos going on. If you go to https://gomockingbird.com/mockingbird/demo.html https://gomockingbird.com/mockingbird/demo.html it will put you on one of the projects via ghetto load balancing (read: redirect to one of the demo projects at random).

saikat 16y ago

Hey guys, Saikat from Mockingbird here - I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have about our operation transformation framework or about our launch.

jonpaul 16y ago
Cool. I'm more interested in the fact that you built a large webapp using Cappuccino. I'm a beta member myself to the Atlas project, but I find its lack of updates troublesome. Can you give us a sense about your work environment (IDEs, etc) and how you go about debugging Cappuccino apps? Do you even use Atlas? Any tips for a noob Cappuccino dev? Thanks and nice work!
- saikat 16y ago
  Sure. The majority of Mockingbird wasn't written using Atlas (we started on it a long time before Atlas existed), but we do use Atlas to make a lot of our panels (and if you use the --path flag with the flatten tool, you can load these panels up front to make the experience smoother). I've also heard good things about nib2cib in conjunction with interface builder if you're not liking Atlas. I work entirely in emacs and use OJTest to test my code as I write it. Sheena (my co-founder) uses TextMate though, and I think that might be a better environment for someone starting out. The best debugging trick I think I've learned is to use index-debug.html and enable objj_msgSend_decorate(objj_backtrace_decorator); (it's commented out by default). Other than that, I think I've learned to just try testing my code early and often with OJTest to catch things. I do want to try to build out better testing and debugging tools for Capp though. In general, just ask questions on the mailing list and don't be afraid of coming into IRC. The #cappuccino IRC channel is one of the most helpful ones I've been.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- sheena 16y ago
  As Saikat said, I use Textmate. There are decent bundles available for Objective-J/Capp. I'd also add that you should use Webkit (specifically Safari) when profiling Cappuccino apps for the best results.
millions 16y ago
You keep doing great work with Mockingbird! However, a few things keep me in Omnigraffle for now - the biggest issues I have is the lack of free drawing tools and/or a much larger library of components, icons etc. I would also put the ability to create interactivity within a page high on my wishlist - Omnigraffle does this (albeit crudely) with the ability to hide/show layers.
- boucher 16y ago
  What ways would you envision for interactivity in addition to separate pages?
  - millions 16y ago
    Realistically: The ability to show or hide objects on a page. This would make creating things like tooltips, lightboxes, dialogues etc. a lot easier. Ideally: I would like components to match their actual behaviour more closely, e.g. a tab container would actually contain views in the respective tabs that would be shown or hidden depending on the tab selected. I know this is no easy feat - I have yet to find a wireframing tool that lets you infuse interactivity as easily as one would like to, and I have been through a lot of them.
- sheena 16y ago
  We have plans to expand the available widgets and to let you make your own.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
mnemonik 16y ago
Are you planning on open sourcing your OT framework? I started working on an OT implementation as a learning experience a few months ago, but eventually got caught up in other things. I would be very interested in playing with your code!
shorbaji 16y ago
Congratualtions. Look forward to reading the tech posts. Have you evaluated causal trees against OT as the collaboration algorithm? See: bouillon.math.usu.ru/articles/ctre.pdf bouillon.math.usu.ru/articles/broth5.pdf

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

hippo33 16y ago

Congrats, Saikat and Sheena! This is very cool.

dotBen 16y ago

As a (freelance) product manager type person, I spend a fair amount of my time designing wireframes... I LOVE Balsamiq (another wireframing option), Peldi (balsamiq founder) is a really nice guy and one of my companies even hosts some of their website... but I've moved over to using Mockingbird for my own work. It's that good. If you need to design wireframes, I encourage you to try Mockingbird.

rrhyne 16y ago
I've never used balsamiq as I've always been happy with Mockingbird. They've been really responsive over the only support issue I had as well.

pluies 16y ago

I used Mockingbird's beta in the beginning of the year for a project with 5 other colleagues, and it is pretty a pretty awesome web app. Hats off to you two!

xtacy 16y ago

The centre canvas where things are dragged/dropped or drawn is pretty cool. Did you guys create one yourself or is there a plugin that's available?

sheena 16y ago
The whole app is written in Cappuccino. To be more precise, that canvas is a custom CPView. :)

sachinag 16y ago

Pony request: change the size of the canvas. On my 13" MBP at 1280x800, there are highly-fucking-irritating scrollbars for the canvas. This fucks me up a lot. I'd love to be able to resize the canvas or "zoom out" so this didn't happen. I don't actually need 960px to play with to design for a 960px wide site. Give me this tiny horse and I'll abandon Balsamiq. Thanks!

saikat 16y ago
You can actually resize the canvas. Just move the mouse to the edge and a resize tab appears. You can drag that to shrink it or input values into the text fields - https://gomockingbird.com/help/Editing/#resize_page https://gomockingbird.com/help/Editing/#resize_page. Hope that solves the issue at least part of the way (zoom would be nice though).
boucher 16y ago
You can resize by dragging the handles at the bottom, right, and bottom-right edges. You can also use the chrome/safari full page zoom option to zoom out, the application keeps working fine (though there are a few slight rendering errors).
- sachinag 16y ago
  HFS, I never knew about Chrome's full page option. Congrats, you won my business. Note: this is exactly like how 25% of AOL's support tickets involved issues with Windows. Remember, your users are always dumber than you are.
btucker 16y ago
I came to request similarly, then noticed that if you make your browser window big enough, you'll find there's a green canvas resize grabber in the bottom right of the canvas (when you hover over the canvas). This is great, but definitely easy to miss when the canvas starts out so large.
rrhyne 16y ago
The 'Fuck*'s in your request will probably help them get right on it!

rakkhi 16y ago

Really love Mockingbird, really made it easy for me to mockup what I wanted for my startup app. Especially using offshore developers a picture really is a 1000 words. Looking forward to trying the new features

zach 16y ago

Used it, presented a site to a client with it, love it. The level of detail on design elements is nice, so things can get blocked out without the distractions of too-polished design (i.e. hundreds of icons, custom images). Really appreciated and heavily used the grid update from a few months ago -- well implemented with the minimum amount of UI, like the rest of the app. Highly recommended.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

ajessup 16y ago

Nice work! Are these guys thinking about open sourcing the OT components? A couple of us are starting up an npm module to allow generic OT using node. http://github.com/ajessup/pluto http://github.com/ajessup/pluto http://www.dontstopthesignal.com/2010/05/design-goals-for-pluto-open-source-ot.html http://www.dontstopthesignal.com/2010/05/design-goals-for-pl...

saikat 16y ago
Hey -- sorry, but we aren't planning on open sourcing our OT framework yet. I would be more than happy to talk to you about about it though (my e-mail's in my HN profile).

sudonim 16y ago

Congratulations. The realtime collaboration is pretty slick. For us it's less of a collaborative process and more I make the stuff and then send it for review. Im looking forward to what myBalsamiq.com will offer. The pain points in wireframing software are: * organizing projects / groups of similar wireframes * keeping track of versions * allowing anyone on your team to get access to / update the latest file.

djm 16y ago

I used Mockingbird a while ago (& loved it) but since then I had forgotten all about it. I got the email notification about these upgrades this morning and it was poorly written. You might want to re-visit the text and look it over. I've deleted it now so can't quote you specifics but I remember seeing lines advising that services would be available until Jan 2010 etc. It would have also helped having a line at the top simply stating what Mockingbird is for those of us who may have forgotten. (great product though; I'll be trying it again now I've been reminded it exists)

sheena 16y ago
Thanks for the feedback. The date mixup was a typo that somehow escaped our notice despite several re-readings, but good point about reminding users what the service is. That you yourself think about your product daily is no reason to entertain the fond hope that users sign up and then immediately frame a screenshot of your site on their desk to gaze at lovingly, just waiting for the next moment they can throw you a pageview.

dnmurphy 16y ago

HOw does the collaboration work? Is this part opf thre capuccino framework, on your web site you mention google wave.