Slatebox — Visualize Everything

Slatebox.js 0.5.0 Released

heckelr — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 01:18:22 -0500

I’m very excited to announce the inaugural open-source release of Slatebox.js 0.5.0. This brings all of the simplicity of Slatebox’s mind-mapping and concept drawing into the hands of Javascript developers, including real-time collaboration powered by the SignalR library.

You can check it all out here: http://dev.slatebox.com/

The latest Slatebox source can be easily served from our CDN:

http://static.slatebox.com/dev/js/0.5.0/slatebox.min.js (74KB, gzipped and minified, including all dependencies except jquery)

http://static.slatebox.com/dev/js/0.5.0/slatebox.js (for development)

As always, please hit me up at tim@slatebox.com with any questions. Thanks!

Fixed image export; image search...

heckelr — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 22:34:07 -0500

Apologies to those of you frustrated with the image searching and the image exporting; we’ve fixed the issues and continue working on the education dashboard. Thanks for all your patience! Please let me know if either image searching or image exporting is not working as you expect.

Have fun :)

300% Increase in speed

heckelr — Sun, 22 Jul 2012 18:58:20 -0500

Hooray, we’ve made saving and exporting slates on Slatebox 300% faster! Because there is no save button in Slatebox, everything is always automatically saved. Due to increased growth and the way slates were nested in our database, slates were taking longer to save, and in some sad cases slates were getting corrupted. Some folks lost a couple, and I’m very sorry about that.

But no longer will you suffer under the weight of slow saving or exporting; now, your slates will save and export as fast as you can make them! We’ve made the path to accessing the data in your slates much simpler and more straightforward in the back-end system, and the result is a much snappier experience.

Please let us know at support.slatebox.com if you run into any trouble.

Enjoy the new speed!

Developer Preview - the future ZUI and real-time web

heckelr — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 22:57:00 -0500

Whew. It’s been a crazy last three months. Slatebox, the open-source, Prezi-style, ZUI (zooming user interface) engine is nearly ready for developer consumption!

While Slatebox has traditionally been known as a mind-mapping tool (and will continue to grow this functionality as SlateMind), its horizons are shifting to align with the forthcoming developer preview release. The Slatebox developer platform is intended to provide a viable, full-stack replacement for traditional application user interfaces. Instead of the fragmentation found in traditional UIs, interfaces built using Slatebox rest on top of an infinite canvas: whether panning or zooming, the “Slate” will deliver the UI in an expressive, non-linear form.

What do we know about applications so far? The single most important truth: “feature-reach” software is dying software. A close second: technology is not an end in itself, and protectionism is medieval. Software must always be delivering beautiful content with an incredible user experience. So. The Slatebox development platform is both opinionated, and open source.

Opinionated? Yes. The application structure follows specific conventions. The deployment is through a GitHub service hook. The entire app consists of structured javascript and CSS files, with optional “callouts” to a proxy app built in whatever language you’d like, as long as it adheres to RESTful principles. You will easily be able to spin up a hello world app in less than five minutes.

Baked into every app is the goodness of the real-time web, thanks to the amazing work of SignalR — an open-source library for delivering real-time communication.

Create a github repository, set up the Slatebox service hook, then “git push origin master” and your app will automatically be deployed for your testing on the Slatebox app store.

I’m very excited! While not stellar quality, the little video provides a snippet of the first app I’ve been creating using the platform for TIES, a consortium of school districts in Minnesota. Visit Slatebox and stay tuned for more information.

A new look, a better roadmap!

heckelr — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 20:33:22 -0500

Slatebox is more beautiful than ever with a completely new logo and design. Enjoy!

We’ve also spent time deliberately casting a wider vision throughout the site by rebranding the core mind mapping app as SlateMind, and emphasizing Slatebox as a platform for ‘off-rail’, real-time applications instead of merely a single mind-mapping app. We are committed to mind-mapping as ever, and SlateMind will be the defacto standard app that ships with every Slatebox account, but as we reach out to developers, it’s increasingly important to convey Slatebox as a platform that provides a unique user experience for a multitude of applications far beyond the scope of just mind-mapping. Slatebox has always been designed as a platform, and the re-branding done today is in sync with the long-term vision.

We’ll have plenty more to come!

Resize many nodes at once

heckelr — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 22:11:20 -0600

Now the multi-selecting includes proper re-sizing. (And there was much rejoicing.) Simply use the resize icon in the lower right of the box surrounding the selected nodes to resize all the nodes at once:

Multi-select nodes

heckelr — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 17:53:41 -0600

Now you can select a group of nodes easily using the new multi-select link in the upper-left of the slate. Just click this link and select a group of nodes by dragging across the slate to include the nodes you’d like to include. You will be able to move and delete the selected nodes easily. Resizing is coming soon.

Once selected, the group will be contained by a background rectangle:

You can simply drag this rectangle around to move the group, or click DEL on your keyboard to be prompted to remove the entire group:

Please let us know at support AT slatebox.com if you have any questions. Thanks!

Keyboard Shortcuts

heckelr — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 19:50:56 -0600

A handful of keyboard shortcuts have been added to make it easier to delete or add nodes to your slate. While hovering over a node, you can now:

Use the RIGHT ARROW key to create a new, detached node
Use the DOWN ARROW key to create a new, attached node
Use the DELETE key to remove the node.

Also, there was a brief outage while the slate image export wasn’t working as expected — but that’s been fixed.

Have fun!

Slatebox: An Overview Video

heckelr — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 13:56:00 -0600

I’ve gotten a number of requests to provide more help documentation, and thought I would embed a new video that gives a succinct overview of Slatebox and its capabilities.

Additionally, here are a couple links to other online help documentation.

Resource Links Are Here!

heckelr — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 23:11:48 -0600

More documentation to follow, but you can now embed URLs on your nodes to provide external links. Please email support AT slatebox.com if you have questions. Thanks!

Enhancements

heckelr — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 22:59:53 -0600

Two simple enhancements:

There is now a tweet button next to your collaboration link so you can easily spread the word about your URL.

The open slate window has been tweaked with a prettier gradient

Have fun!

Online Help Documentation

heckelr — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 22:34:10 -0600

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

heckelr — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 15:13:00 -0600

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

heckelr — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 22:45:00 -0600

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

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.
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

heckelr — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 21:41:00 -0600

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

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.
Now, not only can you search the web for existing images, but you can also your own image URL. Check it out!

Doh! issues

heckelr — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 10:59:00 -0600

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

heckelr — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 08:45:00 -0600

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.