

Ask HN: Review my startup, colaab - A Silverlight 2 RIA for rich, real-time collaboration - stormideas

Over the course of the last year or so I’ve been spending all of my spare time (and increasingly more and more of my working day!) on building a RIA in Silverlight for rich, real-time collaboration over a range of resources:<p>http://www.colaab.com<p>Allowing you to comment and annotate documents, images and videos.<p>Inspirations include David Heinemeier Hansson’s talk at Startup School 08 (http://bit.ly/490Tkt) and 37 Signals in general. My dream is to combine their approach to monetization (build a service people want, charge a price for it, make profit) with a dedication to a richer user experience that is enabled by UI technologies like Flash, Silverlight, JavaFX etc.<p>The company and product has been bootstrapped up to this point, with contract work paying the bills up until now (and for a while yet I would think!). In terms of revenue, we’re operating a subscription based / freemium model.<p>Everything is hosted on Amazon Web Services (EC2 / S3) so hopefully that will enable us to scale up as demand increases!<p>I’m based in Edinburgh, Scotland and believe the time has never been better for small teams of motivated individuals to build truly innovative and user friendly software, which with the distribution and viral nature of the web, have a chance of being adopted by a global audience.<p>I appreciate that a full-screen Silverlight 2 application isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but if you’re interested I’ve setup an invite code:<p>HACKERNEWS<p>Which will give the first 100 people to use it a free "Starter" account (worth $24 a month) for a year.<p>Thanks,<p>Bob<p>-- 
Bob Thomson
storm ideas
http://blog.stormideas.com
http://colaab.com
twitter: movingforwards
======
siong1987
Ok. I spent 10 minutes to download SilverLight and restarted my browser just
to view the video. Why don't you just use the flash video player?

Then, when I proceeded to the sign up page, I were "amazed" that you created
the price plan with SilverLight too. And, it took time to load again just to
view the price and to login.

When I stumbled upon the sign up form, there were too much information that I
have to give. This doesn't really favor any users who want to try the service
(first name, last name, email, username, etc in SilveerLight). And, I have to
wait for a confirmation email to get started?!? Luckily, the confirmation
email reached faster than I thought and I gave my actual email. I wish that
you won't spam my mail box.

And, finally, I cousd get started with the service. I stared at it for 2
minutes and had no clue how to use it. Then, I clicked the close button. I
will try the service again if someone in HN give a good review about it.

I know that it is partially my fault because I didn't watch the 8mins long
intro video and the popup tooltips in the working platform.

<http://riastats.com/> < You can see that there is only ~15% of penetration of
silverlight on internet. Hopefully microsoft will put in more marketing budget
in Silverlight despite the "failure" of Vista.

Sorry if I am too harsh on my language and I am not trying to discourage you
at all.

~~~
stormideas
Thanks. The reason for using Silverlight for the video is to encourage people
to get over the Silverlight installation hurdle as soon as possible.

I've been back and forward on whether that's a good idea, and whether we
should replace the demo video with a flash version. Will definetely think it
over again.

We're currently redeveloping the sign up process as a more standard html form,
clearly this was me getting a bit too swept up in my Silverlight development
efforts!

I'm also working on a "Try it now, in a demo workspace" feature to allow
people to try it without submitting any information at all. Maybe I should
also change the email confirmation step to be something that needs to be
completed in time, rather than something that needs to be completed before you
can log in.

Do you think 8 minutes is too long for the intro video? Should we make a
shorter / snappier version?

Thanks for all the feedback, very useful.

~~~
gb
I think you're more likely to lose people immediately with that hurdle - I
certainly wouldn't install Silverlight just to view a video to see if I was
interested in a service, but if the video made the service look interesting
enough I might well download a plugin to try it.

~~~
stormideas
Seems obvious to me now! Will sort it out.

~~~
tower10
I was more than happy to download the Silverlight plugin (I didn't have it
installed). After an apparent successful install (latest OSX) and restarting
Firefox, I'm told the plugin's not installed. I don't know how typical this is
but perhaps Silverlight's not ready for the prime time yet?

------
jawngee
Well to start, rethink the EC2 web serving, you're spending more money than
you need to. Consider linode or slicehost as bandwidth is way cheaper than
amazon.

Second, why silverlight? The whole idea of online collaboration is allowing as
many disparate people come together regardless of device. So you've thrown up
roadblocks to two platforms that can no longer be considered marginal (OS X
and Linux) for what is an arbitrary technology choice. At least with Flex
you'll hit 98% of it and you can't sell me that silverlight has any advantage
over Flex that is worth that.

I'd love to give you more feedback because I'm very interested in online
collaboration, but I can't because I'm on Linux and won't install SilverLight
on my mac.

~~~
pclark
I think silverlight could be an issue, but plenty of companys get by on
windows only tools.

Why can't you install Silverlight on OS X? I had to quit my browsers then run
the installer. It failed if they were open.

~~~
jawngee
Why should I go through the hassle to evaluate something I won't potentially
use? Even the intro video is in silverlight. Perhaps if it were in flash I
could make some determination if it's worth the hassle.

And what's the point of the hassle in the first place? Someone has yet to
explain why SilverLight is better for me as the consumer than Flex/Flash.

~~~
pclark
I think having a flash tutorial (as well as a silverlight one) is a great
idea.

~~~
axod
_or_ , just a flash one, since it's what is commonly used for videos.

------
pstatho
Great job! I've only looked at the video though. Your user experience looks
quite intuitive which is important. I would continue to work on that. For
example, those that say to use Flash for video, well you can detect what the
browsers capabilities are.

Don't worry too much about the Silverlight installation. If the product is
good, that won't be a barrier.

I also believe RIA apps are much better than AJAX based apps.

~~~
stormideas
Thanks, appreciate that. Very nerve wracking pushing something out there to
the public that I've put so much time and effort into!

The user experience is meant to be one of the key differentiators and I'll
continue to try and improve it as time goes on and feedback comes in from
users.

------
Angostura
I've had a quick play and set up an account.

There's a few usability quirks that immediately sprung to mind;

I didn't find it particularly intuitive to actually dive in use:

1\. When you first set up account and start a workspace, the first thing it
asks you to do is choose the people you want to share it with. This seems
"wrong" to me. I would expect to be able to set up a workplace, add documents
and wotnot and only _then_ be bothered about who I wanted to invite in.

2\. I then tried to work out how to add an item to a workspace... there were
buttons on mouse over for Manage, Share and Delete - so I sat there trying to
find 'Add document'. It wasn't until I eventually clicked on the workspace
that I 'entered' it. I wasn't really expecting that 'enter to do something'
metaphor. How about a mouse-over 'click to enter message'.

3\. Add video resource - how about some clue as to the formats you accept.
None that I tried. that's for sure. It's a bit distracting to see the Web page
URL input go scrolling by on the way to the file chooser.

4\. Thumbnails of the documents would be good.

5\. The Black pallette really isn't to my taste.

6\. The big one... without the ability to actually edit Word or Excel files
(as opposed to annotate), it isn't really a collaborative tool in my opinion,
I'll probably keep using Google Docs or Drop Box and I suspect others will
too. Sorry, it's a lovely idea apart from that. I'm not sure I can even see
myself using it with the free account.

~~~
stormideas
Angostura, thanks for the feedback.

1\. I'm aware that the initial create workspace wizard is too complex. You can
do what you suggest by inviting no-one, adding your content and then editing
the workspace to invite the users but clearly that's not intuitive enough at
present. Will try to improve.

2\. Hoist by own petard here! I surfaced some functions to the list view in
order to try and reduce / simplify the interface once you were inside the
workspace. Will add rollover as suggested.

3\. I'd love to support more video formats in time - Silverlight natively
supports .WMV files so this is what colaab supports presently. In the future
I'd like to broaden this out and perform server side conversion for display
inside the application. The point about the way the wizards move stages is
noted, will see if I can improve on that.

4\. Thumbnails for all resources is in the JIRA features list, will put a note
on it saying someone else requested it. At some point I had to stop
implementing features and get a beta version out there and unfortunately this
was one of the features that didn't make it - it's in the works!

6\. Editing is such a huge area, and while I'd love for colaab to provide some
additional editing capabilities with the resources I have available it's just
not possible. For the moment I am hopeful that the need to collaborate in this
way (comments and annotations) over a wide range of content types will fit
with enough of a need to get up and running with an initial user base.

Many thanks for your feedback, will see what I can do!

~~~
Angostura
Glad they were at least marginally useful.

1\. Perhaps the Wizard should initially ask 'what would you like to do first -
add resources, or invite people to the space'?

2\. I'm not _sure_ that adding a roll-over is the correct idea here, so I
don't want to send you down a blind alley. It may be the correct solution is
to actually avoid surfacing the functions at all (they still have to be
provided inside the workspace, I presume so you aren't reducing complexity).

Instead maybe it is worth looking at how you could amend the workspace design
to make it look more 'clickable to enter'.

3\. Understood. All I would suggest is you list the supported format(s) to
avoid Mac users like myself attempting conversions blind.

6\. Completely understood. The comment was a bit brutal but I thought it was
worth making.

The very best of luck.

~~~
stormideas
Very much so, I really believe in the idea of putting something out there,
gathering as much user feedback as possible and then iterating quickly as a
way of developing software that meets the needs of users.

Obviously so much easier to do when dealing with a SaaS style web application
than a desktop one!

------
Encosia
It's crashing both IE8 and FF3 when I attempt to type the first character in
the email address field on the login page.

Silverlight version 2.0.31005.0.

~~~
stormideas
I've got an open support call into Microsoft about this one, not to shift the
blame but it seems to be a bug with the Silverlight plugin rather than
something we are specifically doing.

Thanks for the feedback!

------
tomh-
It looks very cool, I just created an account. Not sure if its usefull for me,
but it is at least interesting to see a nice silverlight app. Did you build it
with Blend or just Visual Studio? Personally I would pick Flex due the market
share it got. But silverlight is much more enjoyable to develop with. Mainly
because the adobe builder is not as good as Visual Studio and Blend.

~~~
abl
While I love Visual Studio, I have to say that Flex Builder 3 is very nice,
just as nice as VS in my opinion. What do you like more about VS that Flex
Builder 3 lacking?

------
dan_sim
This is a general point of view but I don't see the perks in using any RIA
technologies (Flash or Silverlight) when javascript librairies are available
everywhere (and I'm talking about jquery). What can you do with silverlight
that can't be done with jquery?

I didn't try the app (because of silverlight) but I really like the design. Is
black the new blue?

~~~
stormideas
For me personally I was able to build colaab faster and more enjoyably using
Silverlight rather than jQuery (which I love and use a lot in other projects).

Of course this is of no matter to the end user, but where it does have impact
is that hopefully I was then able to spend more time working on features that
add value to the application, thus benefitting the end user.

There's also some area of the application (like commenting on videos) which
would have been really hard to develop using just javascript.

In terms of the design there's definetely been a trend towards darker colours.
I love the style that Adobe have used for products like Photoshop Express and
this was definetely an inspiration.

Thanks!

~~~
dan_sim
That's a great answer. I like the "I'm working with the best tools I know"
instead of "I'm working with the latest tools to be part of a trend".

Working with tools with which you're the best makes great applications... as
long as you keep updating your toolbox.

------
ashleyw
• Silverlight could be an issue, the adoption rate isn't that great so the
majority of visitors would have to install a plugin to be able to do anything
— people get turned away from sites because of a slow loading page, so being
prompted to install a plugin may be enough for them to bounce back to where
they came from. Plus of course a lot of corporate environments have a ban on
installing new software, and a lot of mobile devices (iPhones, etc.) don't
even have Flash, so Silverlight is a long way off...

• Black — arrggg! Personally I hate websites which have a colour palette
ranging from #ccc to #000! They even disorientate me a bit…I think! It may
just be me, but somehow I doubt the rest of the world loves such a dull
colour.

However it's a very impressive app, you can tell you [guys (?)] have put a lot
of work into it, and I wish you the best of luck — if I needed such a product
I'd be MORE than willing to pay for Colaab! :)

~~~
stormideas
I'm hopeful that the Silverlight plugin issue becomes less and less over the
course of the next few months / years. Microsoft are pushing hard for adoption
so (for me at least!) fingers crossed.

Already had some great suggestions from HN on ways to improve in initial
experience (flash intro video, html sign-up form).

Shame you don't like the black but glad you found the application positive -
I've put almost every spare waking hour into it over the last year, so
hopefully there's enough people out there who share your opinion (about paying
for it) for it to become a viable business.

------
marketer
Looks great! I tried uploading a pptx and it worked flawlessly. This is
probably the most impressive demo I've ever seen on HN.

~~~
stormideas
Thanks! That's really encouraging. Glad you had such a positive experience.

------
pclark
wow, really impressive application (I made an account)

I couldn't get "website" resources to work? when I load them it just fails,
odd!

the app wasn't full screen for me by the way, merely full window :)

How did you find Silverlight to develop in? are you on twitter? you should be
:)

~~~
stormideas
Thanks, really glad you liked it!

I'll take a look into your issue with the website screen grabs and get it
sorted.

Yes, full window is indeed the correct term I should be using.

To be honest I found Silverlight a joy to develop in. In the past I've tried
AJAX and Flash / Flex when trying to develop this kind of RIA application.

Personally I don't enjoy writing code in Javascript, and found it difficult to
bring my ideas of how I wanted the user experience to come together into
reality.

With Flash / Flex I could get the richer experience I was looking for but was
then developing in a different application / language when working on the UI
component as opposed to the back end and this was less productive.

Thanks,

Bob

p.s My twitter username is "movingforwards".

~~~
pclark
cool, I proded the european amazon web services dude to check out your site -
nice publicity :) (he's @simon on twitter, I'm @plc)

Maybe, MAYBE, a little too many refelctions on the site. Just my 2 cents.

Can you turn this web app into a desktop app easily with silverlight?

~~~
stormideas
At the moment if you want to turn it into a desktop application then you've
got two choices:

1\. WPF application - copy / share the code with a full blown WPF application
and fix any incompatibility errors (Silverlight is a subset of the full .NET
framework so there shouldn't be many).

2\. Mesh Application - Live Mesh applications include the ability to run
Silverlight outside of the browser, like a desktop application (short cuts,
start menu items etc). I've done a bit of a proof of concept of this
(<http://www.vimeo.com/2542327> for an overview) but this introduces a hard
dependancy on the user having Live Mesh installed so for the moment it's just
proof of concept.

Thanks.

~~~
pclark
do you run OS X? I guess you could just make a browser app (eg, Fluid)

I was just thinking users like having a "desktop" application - might re-
iterate the lovely Silverlight experience if the user could "download" a copy.

------
dantheman
I would like to be able to select the text in the intro boxes, and pretty much
anywhere else that isn't a button.

Also, I uploaded a pdf -- when looking at documents it's hard to read I'm
running @ 1900X1200 and it's difficult to read; I'd work on the interface --
also, I assume you convert the pdf to an image? Why can't I select the pdf's
text?

Other than that it looks like a good start, and silverlight seems like a good
choice.. I recently chose flex for a project, but almost chose silverlight.

------
axod

      * It's way too shiny. Like by a factor of a billion.
      * I can't find somewhere to just click "Free - go - try it"
      * And I have to install silverlight??? You've just reduced your potential market to a very small niche.

------
ttrashh
Very impressive. I tried a word doc and a web page...nice UI.

I'm curious about the architecture. Did you use Model View ViewModel?

How are you converting the word docs? Do you convert every type of resource to
an image?

~~~
stormideas
Thanks, glad you liked it.

I started moving to MVVM as the project progressed and I began to see the
limitations / issues with using UserControls and code-behind.

To be honest the application grew from just hacking things together initially
so there are some older parts that were just me picking up the technology.

As time progresses I'm trying to move more and more of it to MVVM and get
everything covered by unit tests - at the moment the majority of unit test
coverage is on the server side - the client is a little light in that
department atm.

Word document conversion is a nightmare, and is some of the more obtuse code
I've ever written. At the moment we convert to XPS and work from there but I'm
sorely tempted to go to images and not loose too much sleep over the fact that
you then get pixellation as you zoom in a lot.

Thanks for the feedback, much appreciated.

------
johns
I think the intro video is too long. For the intro, skip the sign up part,
just get right into it. Try to get it under 5 minutes. And invest in a good
microphone. It sounds like you're talking into a tin can.

~~~
stormideas
My thinking was to show people how quick and easy it was to get going from
sign up through to actually using the product but perhaps this might be better
suited to an instructional video rather than the main promotional one on the
homepage.

Will order a microphone and see if I can get better quality sound on it,
thanks for the shout. I'm normally too busy squirming at the sound of my own
voice to notice the quality of the recording!

~~~
smysore
I have to second the comment on the length. In particular, I think the first
minute where you show yourself typing in your name to create a new account and
then checking email to verify the account, etc is a little unnecessary. At
this point in the video, I haven't even seen the product so I'm definitely not
sold on creating an account on your site or watching a movie about it. Maybe
you can move that part to another video for people that might need help
creating an account.

It would also chop off one minute of an 8 minute long demo.

It's cool that you decided to go with Silverlight despite the fact that it's
less tried than Flash. Good luck!

------
drhowarddrfine
No one wants to install yet another unused technology (Silverlight) for an
unknown new product.

~~~
stormideas
I took the decision to develop using Silverlight becuase I've got a strong
background in using the Microsoft stack for development, wanted to get in on
the ground floor with a new technology and follow it as it matures and becuase
I wanted to (try!) to produce a richer user experience within the browser.

As I said, I understand that this is going to be a limiting factor in some
regards, but I couldn't have built what I did in any other technology (that's
not to say that someone else couldn't have, just for my particular
circumstances).

I'm hopeful that as Silverlight adoption increases this will become less of a
problem, I'm also hopeful that colaab may act as a showcase for my Silverlight
abilities and lead to further contract work, which in turn can help to fund
product development.

Thanks for the feedback!

~~~
mattmaroon
Silverlight will be bundled into all versions of Windows from now on so you
won't have to worry about adoption.

~~~
axod
Will that work in firefox/safari/opera on windows?

Also, the web isn't composed of windows machines. It's a mishmash of a billion
different devices. The vast majority of which, know html, javascript, and not
much else. Seems a bad idea to only write for a small subset of them.

~~~
Angostura
Well, I'm a Mac user running Safari. Do I mind installing a free plug-in to
get access to an interesting app? No.

I don't see where you (necessarily) get "small subset" from.

~~~
axod
You don't mind potentially making safari crash more? You don't mind adding to
complexity, disk space used, memory usage, potential vulnerabilities?

I do. The less "installed" software I have to go wrong, the better.

~~~
Angostura
I don't mind making Safari 'potentially crash more' - I only mind if it
actually does crash more. Since Safari crashes are very few and far between,
and haven't noticeably increased since I installed Silverlight some time ago,
this potential problem isn't high on my list of priorities.

I suppose I can always go back to Lynx if these things really bother me too
much.

------
toodlestech
I tried signing up and have Silverlight installed. But it just hung at the
sign up stage wanting me to install siverlight even though I already had it
installed. I even reinstalled it silverlight to no avail.

------
geuis
Yeah, Silverlight. No thanks.

