Co-founder Jon Chambers of YCombinator startup Thinkature has built one of the most ambitious YUI implementations to-date, a multiparty collaborative ideation space that includes whiteboarding, text/voice chat, and much more; TechCruch reviewed Thinkature’s approach to visual collaboration in this November 2006 article. Jon Skyped in to give us a tour of the Thinkature interface and to talk about the role YUI played in the product’s development. The screencast was recorded on my Mac in Sunnyvale with Jon in Boston while we shared control of a sample Thinkature workspace.
You’ll find many YUI components (including Event, Connection Manager, Drag & Drop and Animation) being put to work in the Thinkature application.
For the optimal viewing experience, download the full-resolution screencast and view it in QuickTime Player. The embedded version below is scaled down for lower-bandwidth connections and plays within Yahoo! Video’s Flash-based player.
More videos on YUI and frontend engineering can always be found in the YUI Theater.
December 14, 2006 at 6:15 pm
[...] I had the privilege of speaking with Eric Miraglia of Yahoo! earlier this week, and they’ve just posted the interview on the Yahoo! User Interface Blog. Eric works with the Presentation Platform Engineering team, which produces the Most Excellent(tm) YUI Library and Design Pattern Library. We use YUI extensively throughout the Thinkature application and web site, and I have only nice things to say about it (and I’ll say them in a future post). I also have to say that I’m totally flattered to be included in the ranks of people interviewed by the YUI team, a list comprised of many of the rock stars of modern web development. [...]
December 21, 2006 at 12:44 pm
Looks like a really neat product, but the website, http://www.thinkature.com/ doesn’t seem to be up.
Anyone know when it will be up and stable for general use?
December 21, 2006 at 1:16 pm
@Arthur:
It does appear that the site is down at present — not sure what’s up with that. Do check back; it’s very much worth seeing.
Regards,
Eric
December 22, 2006 at 8:01 am
Hi there!
The site did go down for about an hour yesterday from about 17:00 to 18:00 EST. For whatever reason, two of our IPs (yes, IPs) just vanished for no good reason. Then they came back for no good reason. We’re very confused, and our ISP hasn’t been forthcoming with an explanation.
In any event, we’re happy to be back, and we really hope you enjoy Thinkature when you get a chance to take a look!
December 22, 2006 at 8:04 am
Oh — one last point (and I’m sorry for the double-comment):
Thinkature is stable and freely available to the general public. It was just an unfortunate fluke that it was briefly unavailable yesterday.