Lars Trieloff's Collaboration Weblog

We recently released Mindquarry 1.1beta. Most of the changes center around the user interface.

• we have re-worked the user interface using an UCD-process. In my point of view this gives us a much better usability and has made me from an user-centric-design agnostic to a true believer in UCD.
• Activity timeline (based on the SIMILE Timeline) to view older versions of files, Wiki pages, tasks. When I saw Stefano's presentation at ApacheCon Europe I learned that the SIMILE folks created this widget to lure ingenuous developers into creating a web of data. The widget is really easy to use, I only had to write a small wrapper script to turn it into a Dojo Widget for SIMILE Timeline.
• Include tables and images in Wiki pages. This is a side-effect of the transition to Dojo 0.4.1 that Jeremy contributed to Cocoon in January and that took us some time to pick up, because the API and implementation of the servlet services we are using heavily had changed (before they were called block servlets)
• Conveniently link to a file, a task or another Wiki page from within the Wiki. In the window for adding a link, you can search for the item you intend to reference. This is another heavy Dojo widget that uses the JSON data we produce internally.
• Desktop client for Mac. The Desktop Client for Mac 1.1-beta included a bug, this is why I released 1.1-rc as a release candidate today.

Especially the activity timeline is a huge step forward for us, because it brings us closer to our goal of an ultimate undo/redo of all collaborative content within Mindquarry. This allows teams to have full revision control and provides a good overview of a team's productivity. We are already versioning all contents since 1.0 thanks to the ease of versioning JCR and Jackrabbit provide and have found a convenient interface to access this data using the timeline widget.

The Mac client has proven to be very useful while testing it internally at Mindquarry. Most of us run Mac OS X and of course we use Mindquarry for daily work to share files. My colleagues especially like that they can now easily comprehend which files have been added by others to the server's files repository and also see the changes to the local copy they made to the repository on their computer. Simply by hitting the "Synchronize" button, they can commit and retrieve changed or added files. Furthermore, they also value that they can use the Mac client to manage tasks offline and synchronize once back online again.

You'll find more information about this release on the Mindquarry 1.1 Release page. This release would have been impossible without the great work of open source communities of our core components, especially the Apache Cocoon, Apache Jackrabbit and Dojo Toolkit community.