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:
- A recent SVG build of Mozilla. At the time of release, only Windows versions of this are readily available as nightly builds.
- 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.
- 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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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:
- 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:
- I may be doing a "stand-alone" version of this whiteboard in the near future.
- 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.
- There are probably some performance optimizations that I can make to this whiteboard, both with the display, and the communication of data.