Claudio Perez Gamayo - 80KV

echowaves is dead, long live to echowaves

2010-02-23T00:00:00+01:00

Seems like it was yesterday when the echowaves project started. After more than a year of development and heavy daily usage, not only for fun, but also to do some serious collaboration work, we are going to rewrite echowaves from scratch.

Now we have a more clear vision of the project, there is a lot of exciting new technologies that we want to use, and that the app can benefit from.

Rails 3, jQuery, websockets, mongodb, here we go!

What's new on EchoWaves

2009-04-09T00:00:00+02:00

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

Workaround for safari never ending loading issue with Orbited

2009-03-17T00:00:00+01:00

Some days ago, we updated orbited to the last version (0.7.7) in the EchoWaves production 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

Euruko 2009 Barcelona: European Ruby Conference open for registration

2009-03-09T00:00:00+01:00

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 :-)

Remove users from private conversations in EchoWaves

2009-03-09T00:00:00+01:00

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”:

EchoWaves as a collaboration tool

2009-02-28T00:00:00+01:00

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

New feature of EchoWaves: private conversations

2009-02-26T00:00:00+01:00

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.

New feature of EchoWaves: embed videos and pictures into your messages with ease

2009-02-24T00:00:00+01:00

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