Over the past weeks we have been adding some new things to EchoWaves, we are working on writing a small guide that lists all the features of the application, and show examples of use, meanwhile, there are the new features:

Favorite conversations

Now, next to the title of each conversation, you can see a small star, if you click on the star you can make the conversation “favorite.” In the menu there is also a link (a star icon) from which you can access the list of your favorite conversations with a single click

Mute notification of new messages

In the menu there is now an icon of a speaker, click on it, and you can silence or activate the sound notification of new messages

Better URLs

The URLs of the conversations and user profiles now include the title of the conversation and the name of the user respectively, my profile would be:
http://www.echowaves.com/users/51-crossblaim
and the URL of my photo log would be:
http://www.echowaves.com/conversations/119-crossblaim-photolog

Some days ago, we updated orbited to the last version (0.7.7) in the EchoWaves produvtion server, and we found an issue with Safari, where the browser never finish to load a page. The XHR streaming transport used to not cause the never ending loading bar in safari. Apparently it does now.

The orbited team is going to change the default transport to “LongPoll” which doesn’t have this problem, but meanwhile you can use the following solution, which consist in detect the browser used and configure orbited to use “LongPoll” if the browser detected is Safari:

There is some javascript to detect the browser

Over the last few days is possible in EchoWaves to have private conversations, either by starting a new conversation or making a existing conversation private. The owners of a private conversation can invite other users to enable them to participate, but one important thing was missing, the owner of a private conversation has to be able to remove users from their conversation. Since yesterday it is possible. To remove a user just need to enter the followers tab and remove the user you want by clicking the little red “x”:

Euruko 2009 is now open for registration. The European Ruby Conference will take place this year on May 9th-10th in Barcelona, Spain. The price? only 30 euros. The schedule is also available.

See you in Barcelona :-)

Following the series of articles on EchoWaves, I will talk a little about some of the features that make the service an attractive option as a collaboration tool.

Unlimited conversations

You can create all the conversations you need, one for every case, project, customer or whatever

Private conversations

Since a few days, EchoWaves allows the creation of private conversations. This way you can create a conversation for a specific project or client, and keep the conversation away from the eyes of other customers.

Share files

You can share files with other team members or clients in a very simple way, just attach the file to a message. You can download the file by clicking on the file icon. You can upload files of all kinds, PDF documents, spreadsheets, etc…

Show images

You can add images to your messages in the same way as files, and the program will display the image online. If you click on the picture you can see it in real size.

And this is only the beginning, EchoWaves is a very simple and versatile tool, with a little imagination you will surely occur in many other ways to use it.

In closing, just to remind you that EchoWaves is free and open source software. You can download it and use it as you need, for example to have a private installation within a company for employees to communicate and collaborate, to customize and adapt to specific needs, etc…

If you’re a developer and want to collaborate, you can find the source code of the project on: http://github.com/dmitryame/echowaves/tree/master

Another day and a new feature of EchoWaves, this time a highly requested one by users since the beginning: private conversations.

Now, when you create a new conversation, you can choose to make it private, thus the users can not read it. You can invite other users to participate on your private conversation, they will receive an email with the invitation so they can access it.

You can also convert your private conversations to public, and public to private, whenever you want.

The site is developed using Ruby on Rails and consists on a custom CMS with blog, comments, news, pages, Picasa integration and Vimeo videos.

Since yesterday we have a new feature in EchoWaves, you can embed videos and pictures into your messages easily, just by copying the url address of a video or image.
For example, if you paste in a message in EchoWaves the url of a video of Vimeo like this:

the video is displayed directly in the message, like this:

the system works with youtube and Vimeo videos for now, but also works with image urls, if you paste the url of an image, the image will be displayed inline.

To see a live example of this you can visit my video blog in EchoWaves

Enjoy :-D

This design is a variation of mine in 80KV, the design is integrated into the fantastic blog engine mephisto and is built on XHTML and CSS

EchoWaves is an opensource group chat social network project started by Dmitry Amelchenko

EchoWaves is a Collaboration Tool and a Social Network. EchoWaves is as powerful as CampFire, and as simple to use as Twitter. It’s built around conversations (convos) rather than users. Isn’t it more natural for humans to socialize around convos?

Basically this tool could be an important addition to an agile team, specially to a geographically distributed one. We all know the importance of communication which could be difficult if people are not in the same room, or when someone walks out for few minutes…

You can talk with me in my personal convo in EchoWaves

If you’re a developer and want to collaborate with us, feel free to look at the current tasks list in google code

The source code is hosted at github, the authoritative repository is:

http://github.com/dmitryame/echowaves

my working repository is:

http://github.com/crossblaim/echowaves

Web/cover SummerCox Festival 2008. HTML + CSS

It is a simple website with static content. It’s not editable by the customer, the design is provided by the customer, I was responsible for implementation using HTML and CSS

dokuwiki is a standards-compliant and simple-to-use wiki. This is a modification of the default design to make it looks like the beautiful and clean interface of 37signals’s backpack.

This is a work in progress, but the theme is very nice right now. To install it, simply download the archive and uncompress it in your dokuwiki themes folder, then choose the new installed theme in the admin section of dokuwiki.

The code is hosted on github feel free to collaborate if you want.

You can see the theme in action in the datamapper website

The website is developed in Ruby on Rails and consists of a custom CMS and a area where customers can follow their orders and look at samples, for example they can see their wedding photos from the comfort of their homes and choose which photos they like most, etc…

The site is developed in Ruby on Rails and consists on a custom CMS, blog, news section, highlighted offers and localization to some languajes. Everything is managed by the customer.