Lars Trieloff's Collaboration Weblog

I could have twittered it, but this is too important to go down the lifestream that fast: Dojo 1.0 is released. Dojo is the most powerful, most solidly engineered open source Javascript and AJAX toolkit and everyone who is still developing his own widget system has no more excuse of not using Dojo, now that it has reached 1.0 and no more API breaks are to be expected. Congratulations to the Dojo team!

There has been another release of Mindquarry, the Open Source Collaboration Software. Intended to be only a bug fix release there have been visible usability improvements additionally to the 43 bug fixes.

We are currently in the process of cutting a new release of the Mindquarry Collaboration Server and the Mindquarry Desktop Clients that will be named 1.1. The main focus of this release has been user interface optimization, Alexander Klimetschek has written some words about the user-centered-design approach we have takes to get a user interface, that is from my point of view much clearer and from our testing we can see that it is actually easier to use and comprehend for first time users.

The three main aspects of the new user interface are separation of list view and content view, introduction of a second level navigation, and the introduction of a sidebar that currently contains only a teamlist, but may contain custom widgets, gadgets, portlets in the future.

For Wiki and Tasks, we have a much requested feature: Tracking of changes. The Mindquarry Wiki and Task Manager did track all changes made to wiki pages and tasks since the beginning, but there was no way to actually track these changes visually and no way to see older versions of a wiki page or tasks. With Mindquarry 1.1 this is history. Now you have three ways of tracking changes: With the scrollable timeline integrated into every wiki page and task, with the recent changes list and the ATOM feed of recent changes. The latter is linked from an OPML file, which makes it easy to build a community portal using Mindquarry and a web-based OPML aggregator. Watch this space for more information.

There are more things that improve the wiki, most important the new Wiki toolbar which fits to the overall icon design of Mindquarry, with icons from the tango-icon theme and similar icons from the Mindquarry Artwork project. Taking a closer look at the toolbar, you will notice that there is a table icon and, yes, Mindquarry 1.1 offers support for inserting and editing tables. Secondly we have overhauled the link dialog. Mindquarry offers two modes of linking: Hot linking will turn the currently selected text into a link to a wiki page with the same name. If it does not exist, you can create it by following the link. The advanced link allows you to link to any resource in the system, to files, tasks, web sites and other wiki pages.

We could not add the scrollable timeline to Wiki and tasks without adding it to files, so there is now an easy way of tracking changes and activity in the file browser.

A part of the new release that I found especially cool and that I blogged about before is the new Mindquarry Desktop Client for Mac OS X. This client is a native cocoa application with a very slick looking UI and has some unique features: It allows integrated task management, offers one-click synchronization of your files, supports multiple server setups and it is able to deal with Keynote and Pages files, and is thus as far as I know, the only subversion client so far that offers this feature.

For the desktop client for Linux and Windows users, we have included lots of bug fixes and user interface polishing. It will be available as a standalone download and the web-start deployment has been eased, so you do not have to enter your username and password three times before you can get started.

These are the features that I am looking forward most for Mindquarry 1.1. If I have forgotten some features, please mention them in the comments of this post.

From my posting history (only del.icio.us links in the last five days) you may have seen that I have been very busy in the last days. The reason for this is now visible for everyone: The new Mindquarry Website is online and, even more important Mindquarry 1.0-M1 is available for download.

Mindquarry is a teamwork support software that supports the teamwork of software developers, technical writers, engineers, scientists, designers and analysts by enabling file sharing with version control, easy-to-edit WYSIWYG-Wiki and a flexible task management system that features customizable fields that can be added on-demand. The basic idea of Mindquarry is to use tools that have proven their ability to solve teamwork problems in the open source community like version control systems, wikis or bug trackers and to make them available to other information workers (those without a degree in CS) by integrating the tools and providing a simple, streamlined user interface.

Mindquarry is open source (Mozilla Public License) and uses many of the great open source products of the Apache Software community, most notably Apache Cocoon, Apache Jackrabbit, Apache Lucene and Apache Maven. Additionally Subversion, DocBook and Dojo are used intensively in Mindquarry. So my thanks goes to the open source community, especially to Jeremy and Ellen who helped us getting up to speed with open source development.