Multilingual collaboration

By the way, the bug that caused problems with Chinese language skrbling has been fixed. Some of our users faced problems while skrbling in Chinese, this had us really worried, because we can't afford to ignore 1.3 billion potential customers :).

The fix has been in place for some two days now and I think we finally killed it for good. People should be able to skrbl in most languages, we've tried out a few (Chinese, Urdu, Greek, Japanese, Hindi, Russian, Arabic, Korean, Telugu) here. Go ahead and try out more.

We got text samples from wikipedia and altavista.

The demo skrbl is for you to try out, so feel free, try out other languages. Do let us know (in English) what language it is so we can boast about it.

Picture this

We launched the 'upload pictures' feature over the weekend. You can display and share pictures on your skrbl whiteboards. Check out this skrbl whiteboard for a sample.

Users can now upload pictures to their whiteboard and manage all their pictures from the 'my skrbls' page. Login is required to upload pictures but anyone with access to the whiteboard can download them, so your guests don't have to register.

The concept is simple - your pictures are linked to your userID so you retain ownership (& others with access to your whiteboard can't delete your pictures). Basically you upload a picture to your account and 'show' it in a tag in one or multiple whiteboards. Deleting a tag does not delete the picture, it is still online and can be shown in any whiteboard.

Only owners can delete their pictures from their 'my skrbls' page. Once deleted here it is gone from all whiteboards that show it.

We have some ideas about enhancing the functionality & making it more accessible, and we will work on this in the coming days. As usual you will see the incremental changes as we deploy them and we hope you will continue to give us feedback during the process to let us know what you do like, and what you don't.

The skrbl movie

I've not posted these last few days - staying focused on the coming features (picture upload, freehand drawing :), but this topic I couldn't resist. We were pleasently surprised to fine someone's uploaded a skrbl movie on YouTube.

The clip is in German, unfortunately I don't speak the language but that hasn't lessened the kick I got from seeing the movie (titled skrbl). All of us here have seen it & I am showing it to everyone I run into. The jokes range from Oscar nominations to skrbl as celebrity...

Bottom line is we love it - that someone out there cares to make a short skrbl clip and post it online is a big deal.

Thank you bayrischerloewe.

Promises to keep

I must apologize to those who have been asking questions about our coming features. My answers have not been very specific, and that can't be very satisfying. Allow me to explain...

We do have major releases planned for this month, and I think we are on target to getting them done. With the hectic load our small team has, I hesitate to announce the specific schedule, thus retaining a little bit of leeway and flexibility. Meanwhile work progresses (as you can see), we dropped some new features into skrbl today.

About the new features -
The file menu is new and it lets you save a copy of your skrbl whiteboard. We think the ability to save to your desktop was critical, and now you can. Users have the option of saving a WYSIWYG version or a printer friendly view of the skrbl Whiteboard. You can also email invitations to your guests. Your guests just click a link in the mail to join you online.

We also moved the Text formating menu into a floating toolbar, the functionality remains the same as before, the driver here was to make room for coming features.

As you can see we are getting there, one feature at a time, in the meantime, we beg your indulgence.

Shake & Bake

Some people have wondered about skrbl's uses in the 'practical' world. - we've added a section in the FAQ titled "How to use skrbl". These are suggestions based on how some of our users actually use skrbl.

skrbl is an Online, Shared, Whiteboard just take those 3 features and 'Shake & Bake', I am sure you can come up with your own new uses for skrbl.

Do share with us how you use skrbl, we always love to hear from you.

The right tool

When communicating in real life, 'showing' is so much better than just 'telling', but, participating in developing a concept or idea is far far better than having one presented to you.
An idea communicates so much better when you see it develop in front of your eyes, rather than having one presented as a packaged done deal. That's what happens on a whiteboard isn't it? You pick up a marker and start writing, others can see what you are doing see the idea develop & they contribute or prompt or question or ... The whole thing takes on a life of its own. Great fun as long as the whiteboard is big enough and there are enough markers to go around.
Documents and presentations don't come close.
We modeled skrbl's unrestricted, freeform, click anywhere and type interface to be as close to a whiteboard as possible. Whiteboards are great in the office, in the classroom & in boring meetings (where they can offer respite from mind numbing banality). It didn't make sense that there were no whiteboards on the Net.
Efficiency requires the right tool (or the closest proximation) for the job. The flexible interface took some doing, but I think it was worth it.