Yesterday evening we presented the latest version of the itsme prototype to CSCW2010 participants. We think we captured their attention and got very interesting feedback, but I won’t write about that. I think it’s more interesting to write a brief report about what was new in our prototype, compared to the last we showed online and during other demos.
- We have a brand new way to deal with email: beside the preview-based approach, allowing to send new messages very quickly, we have now integrated Mozilla Thunderbird, so that users can use it to access all system mail (the standard way to use it) or to have a venue-based view and creation of messages. This also means that you can use thunderbird to compose mail from a venue, with attachments and everything.
- We are continuing integrating productivity tools thanks to FSter power, abstracting file system access, and now we have Microsoft Word compatibility with AbiWord… we know we can do more than that, and possibly OpenOffice is on the way (and it will of course bring spreadsheets, disgrams and slide shows into the prototype).
- We have the ability to have a rich preview thanks to Webkit: this means being able to preview pictures within the prototype, and it’s been a nice feature to show
- We have added RSS capability thanks to tracker-miner-RSS, and we addedd a default behavior linking to Twitter: each twit hash-tagged with the name of a venue automatically goes to that venue (pretty cool having populated in a few seconds a venue called CSCW2010 with the many participants’ twits).
We’re going alpha-testing (staff only) very soon, and we’ll hopefully go public (with a downloadable version of the prototype, e.g., with a bootable ISO) quite soon afterwards, in order to collect as much feedback as possible to make the itsme system prototype really usable in everyday situations… well, everyday stories actually
Tags: abiword, cscw2010, demo, Guglielmo, prototype, thunderbird, update
[...] – Latest in the itsme prototype [...]