This morning, Apple launched iWork.com, their new document feedback tool. The screenshot looks eerily familiar:

If it reminds you of Backboard, you’re not alone:

We encourage you to try out both services, and in doing so, you might notice some advantages to using Backboard:

Nothing to install on your computer

You don’t have to go out and buy a $79 product in order to use Backboard. Everything runs in your browser, and feedback is just a simple upload away. You don’t even need a Mac, though we would suggest it for your own sake.

Backboard has live streaming of feedback

No waiting to see who shows up, no waiting for two minutes for new feedback to load in. Everything streams right away.

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We announced a promotion a couple weeks ago to support freelancers and independent consultants in these tough economic times. Freelancers who sign up from our promo page receive an Individual premium Backboard account for a year ($108 value), completely free of charge!

As 2009 approaches, the promotion is coming to an end — if you are a freelancer or independent consultant, make sure you sign up today!

Check out the full details:

Well it’s the most wonderful time of the year again, and I’ve been listening to a lot of holiday music. An album I’d definitely recommend is Christmas with the Rat Pack – it’s got a bunch of classics and I’ve been listening to it almost everyday while I code.

Recently at Increo we’ve made some major updates to Backboard, including a new viewing experience and the ability to organize Backboards into projects. Developing those two features was fun and challenging — they’re excellent examples of why we love making great software. However, one aspect of development I dread is making sure Backboard works in all the major browsers. Backboard officially supports Internet Explorer 6 or later, Safari 2 or later, and Firefox 2 or later. Most of the browser rendering discrepancies are minor, except for those pertaining to IE6. So to express my frustration, I’ve written a little poem/song in the holiday spirit:

The IE 6 Blues (sung to the tune of The Christmas Blues by Dean Martin)

We’re making applications
For the triple-W,
But there come some big frustrations
When I need to look into

How our code is generated
In IE 6’s shoes.
It’s giving me the IE 6 blues.

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Warning! Technical content ahead!

Increo’s office network is small and simple. All of our servers live at professionally-managed data centers, and our office has nothing more than a consumer-level wireless router on a shared Internet connection from Palo Alto’s Fiber Internet Center. Everything is wireless. It’s great, inasmuch as our total network equipment cost was in the two digits and adding a new computer takes no time at all. There’s no DNS server and no IP assignment; everything “just works”.

It becomes interesting, of course, when computers in the office need to connect to each other. For this, we turn to Zeroconf and multicast DNS, implemented as Bonjour on the Mac, Bonjour for Windows on Windows, and the team of Avahi and nss-mdns on Linux.

Now we can use computer names to connect to each other’s machines, no setup required. It’s really slick, and it has worked really well for us. At least, it works seamlessly up and to a point.

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Last Monday, we revealed The new Backboard viewing experience.

Today, we are excited to announce the second half of Backboard’s redesign: a revamped, more powerful My Backboards page.

Projects
Few people work on just one thing at once, and keeping tasks separated and organized is of utmost importance. Now, it is easy to distribute your Backboards into different projects so you always know where to look. On your My Backboards page, simply click Create Project and enter a name. You can then quickly organize your Backboards by dragging and dropping them into the appropriate project.

Recent Activity
Stay on top of new feedback and approvals with the new Recent Activity view, right at the top of your My Backboards page. This new tracker shows you the latest activity on all the Backboards you are involved with and doubles as a convenient shortcut to your currently active Backboards. Soon, you’ll have no idea how you ever lived without it!

Upcoming…
We are hard at work adding new features to Backboard and making it ever easier to use. If there is something specific you’d like to see, let us know in the comments!

Today, the whole team is proud to launch a major update to your Backboard experience.

We’ve listened to your requests and addressed many of them with these six features and many more:

Document and feedback, together at last

One of the biggest shortcomings of the old Backboard was that you had to be constantly scrolling between the document and the feedback people left on it. Viewing markup was even worse: the page automatically scrolled for you, but you couldn’t see what the person was talking about where they were talking about it. It was inefficient at best and maddening at worst.

Starting today, the feedback is on the right side of the page, always conveniently in view for your reference.

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When I joined Increo it was an entirely Mac shop. I was the only one who would be developing on a PC. Rather than worrying about potential compatibility issues and setting a development stack up from scratch, it seemed that the best approach would be to use a Virtual Machine running Ubuntu as my development platform.

The Pros of Virtualization:

1) Develop on the same stack as the production

This means that you can avoid running into issues with line endings, cross-platform quirks in parsers, etc. You know that you’re getting the same behavior locally that we will get on the server.

2) Portability: Single setup run from multiple locations

The VM is just a small set of files. You can pick up these files and copy them to another machine (or run them from an external drive) and always have access to your development environment. If you want to work at home on another computer, no problem.

3) Saved state

When you shut your computer down you normally have to close all open windows losing any state (unless the program itself saves it). You can simply shut down the VM and it will save the entire state of the guest OS, meaning next time you open it up, it’s exactly where you left off.

4) Don’t pollute the host OS with dev tools

Your computer stays clean. It doesn’t need a local web server or a local SQL server for development since that’s all on the VM.

5) Cross platform testing on a single computer

You can launch the product and test on either the host OS or the guest OS with a few simple clicks.

The Cons of Virtualization:

1) Lots of RAM needed

You should allocate at least 1GB to the guest OS if you are going to be developing on it. This means you’ll probably want 2GB or more in your computer.

2) Speed, some lag since not running natively

The guest OS isn’t quite as snappy as the host and you always notice a little bit of lag.

3) Mouse support

The back button on the mouse doesn’t work and it took a couple tries at editing config files to get the mouse wheel to be recognized. The mouse doesn’t behave the same way in the host and guest (although tracking speeds are thankfully the same) which can sometimes be frustrating.

4) The VM can’t use multiple monitors

There just isn’t a clean way to have the guest OS occupy two monitors, especially if your monitors aren’t identical. You can avoid this by running a browser, email, and other non-programming tasks on the host OS (on the second monitor) and leave the guest OS to use one screen for coding.

5) Focus can be confusing

Every one in awhile while working in the browser on the host, you’ll probably look over at the VM and see the cursor flashing in a text document and think that it is active. Then you try to type something only to realize that the host OS has focus and the VM does not.

A few days ago, we took a break from developing our own products and participated in SocialText’s Widget Wednesday, a “distributed hackathon for widgets and mashups.” All this means is that SocialText invited companies to participate in a day of coding micro-applications that would make use of their newly released OpenSocial Widget API. SocialText Widgets are simple tools that sit on your SocialText Dashboard, a personalized homepage for your corporate life, and are analagous to Google Gadgets which sit on your iGoogle homepage — in fact, they leverage Google’s gadgets.* API.

The hackathon was “distributed” in that all the participating teams stayed at their respective company locations and communication was done via an IRC chatroom and dedicated conference calls. For goodwill, SocialText organized it as a competition in which the winning team would win a gift certificate toward kiva.org.

After the opening conference call shenanigans, we dove right into coding. Now, I love what I’m currently working on for Backboard, but getting to work on a miniature side-project was very refreshing. I got to play with technologies I hadn’t yet explored and learned how to make and deploy widgets. One of the tricky things about creating a widget is that it doesn’t sit on your site, so we had to do some refining of our own API in order to format and grab the data we wanted to display. After that, the rest was fun and easy: it turns out that making a widget is as simple as wrapping a little HTML and JavaScript in XML file.

At 4:30 pm (the “deadline” to turn in our projects) we dialed back into the conference call to join the show and tell session and presented our three completed Widgets. “My Backboards” is simply a listing of your backboards with recent activity. “Get Feedback” allows you to upload a document, set permissions, and create a backboard all within the widget. “LOLPirates,” Jim’s masterpiece, cycles through incredibly cute pictures of cats dressed up as pirates. Like Fluffy-beard here.

For young ambitious companies, it’s often hard to be the treated as the underdog, but at Increo we draw confidence from the supportive startup community and believe in giving back in any way we can. Our participation in Widget Wednesday was just one example of our philosophy — we fostered relationships with other startups and simultaneously strengthened Backboard and SocialText Dashboard.

This weekend I sat down and tackled the RAM problem: the amount of memory it takes the server to generate a single page of a website.

For Backboard, we have our server set up to allocate just 16 MB of RAM to PHP for the execution of each request. This allows us maximize the number of Apache processes we can run on a single server and thus maximize the number of users we support. To do this, though, means that the site has to be pretty light on its memory requirements.

Backboard, as a CakePHP application, has a theoretical minimum requirement for RAM: namely, the amount needed to execute a base installation of Cake. In our testing, this falls between 4 and 6 MB. The goal, of course, is to minimize anything above and beyond this.

Here are some concrete steps you can take to limit the RAM needs of your site:

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Over the coming weeks and months, we hope to provide an occasional window into the more technical side of Increo’s products and share some of the more interesting challenges we’ve faced and problems we’ve solved with the greater web developer community.

The topic this week is Flash 10, but please let us know if there is another technical aspect of Backboard that intrigues you and you want to know more about!

Now, to the story:

Starting a few weeks ago, we began hearing some intermittent reports from users that they could no longer create a Backboard by uploading a file. They said they kept clicking the “Select File” button and nothing happened. 

We were understandably disturbed, as the ability to create Backboards is rather critical to the site… but despite numerous attempts, we were unable to reproduce the problem. We were busily working on brand new Backboard functionality, and the reports were infrequent enough that we chalked it up to a potential incompatibility with another browser plugin. Or maybe they just had Flashblock installed and didn’t realize it? Yep, that had to be the problem.

Flash matters because we use the excellent open-source SWFUpload package to handle document uploads on Backboard. This allows us to not only customize the appearance of the upload buttons themselves, but also display informative progress bars as the file is transferred. Being a tight-knit combination of Flash and JavaScript, SWFUpload takes a bit of work to configure and integrate, but the results are well worth it.

A week ago, we located a computer that exhibited the problem, and it was immediately clear that it was an issue we could no longer ignore: the other Flash that we use on the site worked fine, but the Select File button did nothing when clicked.

After a quick check on the SWFUpload forums for news of recent incompatibilities, the cause was immediately apparent. Unfortunately, the solution was anything but…

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