Slatebox — Visualize Everything

Enhancements

Online Help Documentation

Here is a simple document to help explain how to build your first slate. Once you’ve understood the basics, it’s a snap.

Online guide to building your first slate

Thanks, Mr. Byrne

A nice man from Maine just posted some kind words about Slatebox. Dear sir, I thank you :)

http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2012/01/slatebox-visualize-everything.html

We’re trying to keep up with all the interest; to all of you have asked to be part of the education pilot: Thank You! It’s coming soon. I’ve had requests from all over the world. It’s exciting to see.

As usual, please drop me a line at tim AT slatebox.com if you have any questions or need some help.

User Experience Enhancements

I’m happy to announce some great UI improvements at Slatebox:

1. A new help site has launched. Look for it in the top bar of your site after you log in. We’ll have a bunch of great training materials in the Knowledge Base shortly.
2. A lot of improvements have been made to the canvas:
   • Slimmed down the birdseye to give more room for slate-building
   • Now, nodes are automatically centered whenever they’re updated with text or images
   • Newly created nodes now automatically enter text-edit mode

I think these enhancements will make a lot of people happy!

Stay tuned for some simple video instructions that will show up in the help center.

Customizable images and pop-down menus

Based on the recent feedback, I’ve made two quick adjustments:

1. The welcome message now loads bottom-up so it will not obscure the menu (Doh!) I’ve also changed the image search and text editing menus to pop up from the bottom as well.
2. Now, not only can you search the web for existing images, but you can also  your own image URL. Check it out!

Doh! issues

Dianne Rees recently posted a thoughtful article on Slatebox and I thought I would offer a couple of reactions.

SlateBox relies on HTML5 and Javascript, which means that slate creation is fast. You start off with a prompt to get you on your way and you really can probably figure out most tricks to SlateBox just by clicking around, but I’ll point out some of the doh! issues I experienced.

I am so grateful to actually hear of the Doh! issues, especially being a small fish in a big sea — it’s great to hear what issues users are actually running into while building slates.

Decidedly, one of the big Doh! issues is the silly welcome bar when you first create an account — it hides the menu, which includes the save button!

Another problem that Dianne noted was the need to manually save slates. With the intent of giving users undo/redo capability, I decided this manual-save-my-slate approach was decidedly 1997esque. Now, slates will always be auto-saved, any time you make a change.

Soon, I will change the welcome screen to provide more useful information and remove the obscuring top bar altogether. Thank you for this great feedback.

Many thanks to Dianne for her excellent post. Please check it out if you’d like a great overview of Slatebox: http://bit.ly/xNaHqu

Welcome

So, Slatebox. What is it? Why did I build it? What’s the vision behind it?

It’s the content, stupid

That’s my brain telling me: technology drives production. What users actually produce with Slatebox is what matters most. Can Slatebox get out of the way? How friction-less can I make this experience? Are students actually learning with this tool? Are users actually finding it useful and inspiring?

To that end, I began rewriting Slatebox one year ago. I had learned too much to pretend my previous foundation was solid. I scraped everything I had written from 2009 through 2010 and started over.

What you see now is the result. I believe there is a lot of potential to Slatebox as a visualization platform. I will ensure it continues to be drop-dead simple and lots of fun to use, and yet very extendable and powerful as a visualization tool.

Thanks for visiting! There will be plenty more to come.