Jabberzilla Whiteboard Beta Notes

This is a relatively untested release of a whiteboard that uses Jabber for communicating SVG tags (for the most part) that are displayed on the screen.

Requirements:

  1. A recent SVG build of Mozilla. At the time of release, only Windows versions of this are readily available as nightly builds.

  2. Your video card needs to be set at 16 bit for the color to display properly. This is a bug with the SVG code in Mozilla, and will hopefully be fixed soon.

  3. Jabberzilla needs to be logged in before using the whiteboard. If you don't have a Jabber account, you can create one from the Jabberzilla login screen.

Usability Notes:

  1. If you have a slow computer (under 400 MHz), this thing may not run well. This code needs fast, smooth JavaScript execution, and I have not tested it on a slow machine.

  2. When freehand lines and pointer movements are being drawn on the screen, you will not be able to draw anything yourself. Considering how this compares to whiteboarding in real life, I really don't see this as a problem.

  3. For text, if you don't see anything after exiting the text box, mousedown and move the mouse. You should then see the text you typed.

  4. If the whiteboard seems to lock up, just exit the window and try again. Hopefully I have gotten this taken care of, but if it happens to you, send me an e-mail at ericmurphy@jabber.org, so I can find out if people are having problems. Also let me know how fast your computer is, and what OS you are using.

Where to go:

  1. These are standard Jabber conference (groupchat) rooms. Therefore, you can join any new or existing room on any Jabber server that has the conference transport.

    I plan on hanging out in whiteboard@conference.jabber.org.

The Future:

  1. I may be doing a "stand-alone" version of this whiteboard in the near future.

  2. Sometime soon, I want to have the option available to save the SVG DOM tree (using Mozilla's built-in DOM serializer) to a regular SVG file.

  3. There are probably some performance optimizations that I can make to this whiteboard, both with the display, and the communication of data.