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!

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.

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!

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

Netflix are using Silverlight for their streaming service, see http://netflix.mediaroom.com/index.php?s=43&item=288 for details.

Not a good example. Netflix would have chosen Flash probably if it wasn't for a special deal with Microsoft. They traded something in exchange for choosing an inferior solution (inferior in that it requires a download).

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!

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!

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.

I'm also betting against installable software (Silverlight plugins excepted!). You just need to look at Joost's traffic since they went web-based rather than desktop client:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/08/joost-has-a-heartbeat/

I'm hopefull that over the coming months / years Microsoft manage to get Silverlight out there and available on as many platforms as possible, allowing me to write applications that can take advantage of that reach.

In the meantime the aim is to start building up enough user numbers to create a viable business, I've got very low overheads and no debt so hopefully that can come from the existing Silverlight install base + people who are willing to install it if they think the application will do a job for them.

Sure, what I could see of the app, and design looked very good. So congrats on that.

Good luck with it :)

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.

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.

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!

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.

I think you're right - allow them to evaluate the service with as few hurdles as possible first and then deal with the Silverlight install issue once they have made a decision. Working on it already!