ArgumentCollection - Broadchoice Engineering - Workspace

Announcing Broadchoice Workspace Free Edition!

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 19:57:00 -0400

Back when we ran the beta program for Broadchoice Workspace we talked about the possibility of offering a completely free version alongside our subscription-based version. By the time we officially launched the product, just before MAX 2008, we settled on a 30-day trial period and a subscription-only model. Since launch, we've been evolving the product, streamlining the user experience, simplifying the navigation, providing real-time activity notifications ("toasts") and native application menu support. We've also continued to extend the integration with Salesforce, reducing the data entry burden on sales people. With our latest release today, we are now offering a free edition of Workspace instead of the previous 30-day trial. You can now download Workspace and use it - for free - for as long as you want. Naturally, the free edition has a few restrictions (shown on the pricing page) but for smaller teams or individuals this provides a great collaboration experience without costing you a penny (or a cent). We originally provided all of our beta testers with a free one-year subscription to thank them for their help in shaping the initial version of the product. We've converted all the beta accounts over to the free edition so that they can continue to use Workspace indefinitely at no cost. If you've wanted to check out the AIR application but were put off by the 30-day trial, now is your chance to try it out for free and see how it can help you and your colleagues (and friends!) collaborate on projects!

Recentering Flex Alerts on Application Resize

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 11:51:00 -0400

I recently had a bit of a challenge to tackle with our Workspace application and thought I would share some details. As many of you probably know from trying out the application, Workspace is meant to be kept open to fully capitalize on it's collaborative features. The application provides a lot of behavior that is based on real-time communication, such as content being updated or users being added to Spaces. All of this works quite well right now, and we are already working on more features as well as some simplification of the interface to allow new users to get up and running more quickly. We have, however, noticed a small but annoying glitch that happens as a result of certain real-time notifications that trigger Flex Alerts. Namely, if the application is minimized and an Alert is triggered, when the application is maximized, the Alert does not appear in the proper place. Normally, an Alert will automatically center itself in the window where it appears. But if the application is minimized, this centering does not happen. So when the app is maximized again, the modal Alert is located far in the upper left corner of the screen, with most of it's content off the screen completely. Users had a hard time figuring out what was happening, and since the Alert is modal, the app can't be used until the Alert is closed. This resulted in a lot of confused users! I set out to solve this issue by triggering a re-centering of any open Alerts when the application is resized, but this turned out to be more difficult than it first appears. At first, this seemed like it should be fairly simple: the Flex SystemManager object contains a property called popUpChildren, which references any PopUp objects that are open. So no problem, right? Just loop over this list and recenter them. In a frustrating turn of events, Flex Alert objects are not stored in this list. I'm not sure why, but they aren't. This seems like an oversight or bug, but the fact remains that looking at the popUpChildren wouldn't work. This list appears to only contain any PopUp instances created using the PopUpManager, but not any Alert instances. Nor is there a similar list such as alertChildren. It turns out that Alerts are added to the SystemManager's display list but are not actually kept track of anywhere. The first part of the solution was to add an application resize event handler that loops through all children of the SystemManager's display list and locates any that are instances of the Alert class:


var systemManager : SystemManager = Application.application.systemManager;

// Look for children of SystemManager that are Alerts, and recenter them.
for ( var i:int = 0; i < systemManager.numChildren; i++ )
{
	var thisChild : Object = systemManager.getChildAt( i );
	if( thisChild is Alert )
	{
		PopUpManager.centerPopUp( thisChild as IFlexDisplayObject );
	}
}

This code actually does work and will recenter the Alert. But in another frustrating turn (and what certainly appears to be another bug), the re-centered Alerts did not display correctly. Any text within the Alert box that was "off the screen" prior to re-centering would not display. I tried triggering an invalidateDisplayList() and invalidateProperties(), but nothing would get the Alert to re-draw the text correctly. I was banging my head against the monitor when my astute colleague Joe Rinehart made a suggestion that turned out to give the desired result:


var systemManager : SystemManager = Application.application.systemManager;

// Look for children of SystemManager that are Alerts, and recenter them.
for ( var i:int = 0; i < systemManager.numChildren; i++ )
{
	var thisChild : Object = systemManager.getChildAt( i );
	if( thisChild is Alert )
	{
		PopUpManager.removePopUp( thisChild as IFlexDisplayObject );
		PopUpManager.addPopUp( thisChild as IFlexDisplayObject, this );
		PopUpManager.centerPopUp( thisChild as IFlexDisplayObject );
	}
}

Essentially, you have to kick Flex in the head by removing the Alert, re-adding it, and then re-centering it for good measure. All of this seems like a lot of hoops to jump through to accomplish something that seems like it should be rather easy to do, but there you have it. Going forward, we'll probably set up some sort of centralized manager class that can be used to create and keep track of both Alerts, PopUps, and any other components that need to display at the very top display list of the application (such as Callouts and Tooltips), and we're also looking at some Growl-like notifications to minimize the use of Alerts. But that's a topic for another day (probably in the very near future though). In any event, hopefully this post will help anyone who ends up in a similar situation!

One Month On...

Sat, 13 Dec 2008 20:59:00 -0400

It's been almost exactly one month since we launched the Broadchoice Workspace application, just before Adobe MAX 2008, and during that time hundreds of new users have been downloading the application and starting their 30-day free trials - in addition to our many beta testers who are continuing to use the application on a daily basis. The ArgumentCollection team has been hard at work on a new build of Workspace which went into production this week. We've now surfaced all the trial subscription machinery and added licensing, in time for those 30-day trials to turn into paid subscriptions, and added a file storage usage indicator (a Workspace account gives you 5GB of storage, which may not have been obvious before). We've also added automatic synchronization of activity in the Workspace back to Salesforce for collaborative spaces that have been created from opportunities. If you create a Note in Workspace, it is automatically added to Salesforce, along with any messaging in the space so that the opportunity history in Salesforce shows all of the collaboration you did to help close a sale. Given how salespeople often feel about the Salesforce.com web interface, this has proved to be very popular in sneak peeks since it provides them with a much simpler way to keep their opportunities up to date in addition to the ability to easily get help from their colleagues in closing sales. We've also made a number of changes to the user interface in response to feedback from customers. Some are simple tweaks to visual aspects of the UI, some are simplifications to make workflows more intuitive. There's always more polishing to do! Over the next couple of builds we'll be focusing on streamlining common workflows and making it even easier for new users to start using the application to collaborate with colleagues, as well as giving the iPhone web version lots of love and adding full support for the Blackberry.

Broadchoice Workspace - 2-for-1 license offer ends Sunday

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 19:36:00 -0400

Broadchoice is offering two licenses for the price of one through the end of November. You can download the Workspace application and start your free 30-day trial any time but if you actually place your order before Monday, December 1st, you can benefit from the 2-for-1 pricing and get two user licenses for every $99/year you spend! Happy Thanksgiving!

Cocomo Post-MAX

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 15:42:00 -0400

Adobe's Cocomo technology entered public beta at MAX and the day one keynote featured an extremely brief demo of a little of what Cocomo can do. Nigel Pegg (of the Cocomo team) did a couple of sessions during the conference which I had planned to attend but, as is usual with MAX, my schedule got derailed early and often so I didn't make either of them. I'll be writing up my MAX experience on my own blog shortly (and may contribute an extended version as an article for Fusion Authority as I have done with conferences in the past). Now MAX is over, Nigel has blogged more about Cocomo and talks about what beta testers get access to in terms of source code, documentation and features. Nigel includes a nod to me for contributing the Groovy version of the provisioning script and and a mention of the Broadchoice Workspace which uses Cocomo behind the scenes - and which we demo'd at both the Adobe Partner booth (Wednesday lunchtime) and on the Ribbit booth. If you didn't get a chance to look at Ribbit, check out this video of Joe and Rick (our CTO) talking about Ribbit integration into Broadchoice Workspace (as a proof of concept for now - would the ability to make phone calls from within the Workspace be valuable to you?).

Some Code Statistics for Broadchoice Workspace

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 20:10:00 -0400

Now that the Broadchoice Workspace has been officially released, I thought I'd post a quick entry with some code statistics. I ran the codebase through a line counting tool that gives a breakdown by file, folder, language, etc. We all know that lines of code is not a very good way to judge quality or effort, but it is still interesting in a general way. This is only lines of code, all blank lines and comments were excluded:

Total Lines of Code: 50,125
Total Files: 633
Lines of MXML: 10,784
Lines of ActionScript: 12,675
Lines of CFML: 7,730
Lines of Groovy: 8,878
Lines of XML: 1,757
Lines of CSS, HTML, JavaScript, etc.: 7,612
Lines of SQL: 1,089
Lines excluded as comments or blank: 15,778