A “first time user” is someone that comes to your site and encounters a Viewplicity page, perhaps as a result of a login workflow on your site. These first time users may or may not have cameras attached to their system. Viewplicity automatically detects that the user has never configured a camera with our environment and selects a default camera for him, if the release “auto add camera” is enabled. The camera is added to his camera list and a self view player is made visible that will allow him to make configuration changes if the default isn’t what he wants to use for this session.

The remote video control feature may be configured to allow the owner of a Viewplicity group to remotely control the camera and microphone configuration settings of anyone online in the group or the feature may be configured to allow anyone in the group to remotely change settings for any other user.
Frequently, the experience that a receiver of a video or audio stream is having is the best predictor of the settings that should be used to send the stream. With this new remote control feature, the user receiving the stream can adjust the settings himself without the aid the sender.

For large conferences, or conferences with first time users, this feature is useful to allow an administrator to handle video and audio quality problems in one central location.

The new “push-to-talk” (ptt) feature provides an aid to handling audio (feedback) problems. In situations where the participants are not using headsets and are experiencing echo problems, the ptt feature can be used to ensure that only one microphone in the group is activated.

The ptt feature can be configured such that the owner of the group can turn it on and off. When ptt is on (enabled), all users will see a “hand” next to their camera in the group management UI that can be clicked as a “request to talk,” as a “cancel request to talk,”or as a “talk release.” If two or more people issue requests, they will be processed in order.

When ptt is first turned on, all microphones are placed in a mute state so it is a quick method to immediately get control of echo, When the owner turns ptt off, all requests will be cleared and all microphones will return to their prior mute state.

This service upgrade also supports a new PHP programming interface that allows web developers to manage the Viewplicity user and group database for their domain from within their web application. They may still empower their users to create new groups and invite people into them, but the web application can also perform those functions. The web designer can build workflows that manage the users and can access activity (call) detail reports to account for their usage.

Note: You first have to license the Viewplicity product with your site.  Click here to get started.

Viewplicity is pleased to announce the 1.2 service upgrade release. We have added extensive automation features to make it easier for web sites to handle users that are new to the Viewplicity features and that are new to the use of cameras.

All new features are controllable by the web site designer, enabling varying degrees of automation depending on the site requirements.

A “first time user” is someone that comes to your site and encounters a Viewplicity page, perhaps as a result of a login workflow on your site. These first time users may or may not have cameras attached to their system. Viewplicity automatically detects that the user has never configured a camera with our environment and selects a default camera for him, if the release 1.2 feature auto add camera is enabled. The camera is added to his camera list and a self view player is made visible that will allow him to make configuration changes if the default isn’t what he wants to use for this session. Changes that he makes will be remembered for the next browser session.

When the browser session with Viewplicity is started, our first time user is placed in a group. In our initial release, this group was always what we call the “default home group” – a user named “sam” would be placed in the group “sam_home”. The web site has always been able to dictate a different starting group. Once in a group, the user can add more groups and switch groups.

With release 1.2, the site may use a new guest only group feature to place the user into a specific group and to keep the users in that group from being able to add additional groups or from being able to switch to a different group (except for the owner of the group – the creator of the group). The site may use an owner must be present feature to also indicate that guests cannot stay in a group unless the owner of the group is online and active in the group.

The web site may dictate to Viewplicity in release 1.2 to use an auto receive feature. If enabled, this feature causes the user in a group to automatically start viewing anyone who becomes publically viewable in the group. There is also an auto public feature that causes the user to start publishing his camera(s) into the group, making him publically viewable, if there is anyone in the group to watch him. When coupled together and enabled for all users in a group, they will constantly attempt to stay public and connected to each other.

These features in combination allow the construction of a site that requires no clicks from the members of a group in order for them to see and hear each other. All of these features work as well for users that only have microphones (no cameras). The auto connect feature can even be used by members that have neither cameras nor microphones. Used in this manner, the members simply watch the video broadcasts in the group (and, they can still broadcast text messages).

Release 1.2 also gives the web site new controls for the camera video resolution options. Using HTML directives, the site can be set up to use any of the supported resolutions from 160×120 up through 1024×768. The web site can also enable the users to select a different resolution for each camera using their camera advanced options dialog. There is a new feature called user controlled resolution that can be enabled. When used in this manner, the Viewplicity camera persistence feauture remembers the resolution settings across browser sessions. Also, our adaptive bandwidth allocation function has been extended for the new supported resolutions.

Release 1.2 adds an auto resize feature that allows the remote player window in the player panel to automatically resize when the sending user changes the resolution associated with that player. A rollover has been added to the player that indicates what resolution is being received. If this feature is not enabled, the player will scale the input video according to the player’s current size and allow the user to control the player size with the player panel size slider. This feature is a great advantage for an application that uses a mixture of cameras (document cameras, talking heads, wide angle shots, etc.).

The use of larger resolutions brought about the desire to allow additional options for dynamically changing how the space of the screen is used in the web site’s browser window. Thus, release 1.2 adds a pop-out function for the Viewplicity player panel and a full screen capability for the individual players themselves. The player panel can now be placed in the page using a relatively small space, but be allowed to pop out of that confinement and use the entire page temporarily while the user is watching or participating in a conference. This mode will support any mixture of player window sizes. Viewplicity also supports the Flash full screen capability for any individual player as well.

We asked Bob Nimon, our Chief Developer, to expain the differences between Viewplicity and Skype.  In the final of this two-part series, Bob gives us a peak into the camera features, plugins and simplicity of Viewplicity.

• Skype supports a single, active camera in a single two-party call.  Viewplicity was designed from the bottom up to support multiple cameras for applications that benefit from broadcasting multiple views of a subject or multiple subjects simultaneously. Viewplicity provides a novel, patent pending approach to managing the bandwidth of the various cameras to make it easy for users to handle. We can even record from all of the cameras on the users MAC or PC simultaneously.

• Skype provides little control over the user of the camera, the power that it consumes on your PC, and the bandwidth used. Viewplicity starts with automatically measuring your available bandwidth and then sets the use of it to a reasonable percentage of that amount. Viewplicity can be used in very low bandwidth situations by allowing the proper alignment with frame rate and quality with that bandwidth. If you have the bandwidth, you can have very nice 24-fps quality video. If you have very little and want to save most of it for audio we will drive it down to a small fraction of that. The user is allowed to take manual control and place the settings anywhere he wants. We provide both the senders and receivers a visual indication if the video is having network problems getting the camera streams through to the receiver.

• Skype can consume bandwidth from your computer even when you are not actively in a call to support other Skype users. Viewplicity does not use a peer-to-peer architecture and only needs one stream per active physical device. There is never any video/audio bandwidth consumed due to other users calls.

• Viewplicity’s focus is on ease of use, hence the “simplicity” aspect of its name. Easy for the web designer and easy for the web site users. Skype has a professional API that can be licensed to integrate into applications. With Viewplicity, there is no need to learn an API, or even be able to program at all. If you can copy and paste a few HTML tags, you are integrated – you can make video calls from your web site.

• We also have simple plugins for many popular frameworks (Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress) to integrate with their user database where appropriate but their use in not required to “get connected” through your site.

• Viewplicity is based on Flash technology, which supports many communication protocols and uses this to automatically adapt to different user environments (firewalls, network routers, etc.) and can even work over straight HTTP (the basic web protocol) and can leverage the same SSL technology used in ecommerce. Skype uses its own proprietary protocol that can have problems in many network environments.

• Both products have certain security features at the network protocol level, but Viewplicity adds to that the additional safety of not traversing streams through other users computers and by having some added safety in the use of the private groups that require an “engraved invitation” to join. The streams associated with the groups are sent through dynamically allocated servers with identities that are not known ahead of time. The videos recorded in the groups are only accessible by the invited members of the group. Only the owner of the group can issue the necessary invitations. Invitations are only sent within the Viewplicity service, not through email or other non-secured communications. The Viewplicity invitations are sent through encrypted channels. The text messages sent between users ina group are also sent through these encrypted channels.

The shorter story, then is it is easier to use, much more full featured, and more secure. I actually like Skype and it has its uses. It would be one of the things I might pick if I wanted to place a single point to point call to someone I didn’t know, would be unlikely to talk to again, wanted to spend a very long time on the phone with, and didn’t care too much who listened in. Since its peer-to-peer, it would be very cheap for that type of use. Most of other cases – I would use Viewplicity.

That being said, there is a lot of talk about which web development platform is best.  While we’re not handing out any awards here, we did want to get an idea what users think about the different platforms.   Without getting to technical, here are some thoughts on how Drupal compares to other development platforms.

With plug-ins (or modules, in Drupal lingo) for just about everything, Drupal might just be leaving the “others” (a.k.a. Joomla) in the dust.

On the surface, Drupal is the open source platform geared toward the experienced developer and programming expert.  Joomla, as one user said, is made for “mere mortals.”

But a closer look at the two reveals that while Drupal may have a higher learning curve, its ease of use increases over time, while Drupal advocates say that Joomla is easy to use, until you get into the more detailed elements of design and development.  That’s where Drupal’s 3000+ modules come in– making site customization easy, without the need to touch the core code.

In his testament to Drupal, Colin Alsheimer (Twitter: @levelten_colin),  from Dallas-based Drupal web design firm, LevelTen Interactive, used a recent blog post to explain 9 reasons why Drupal is like a fine wine:

1. Gets better with age—with constant module updates and upgrades, Drupal really can grow with your business.
2. Appreciated by true connoisseurs—Drupal is preferred by true developers and programmers.
3. Plays a complementary role—framework of Drupal doesn’t overpower your content, but adds functionality to your website.
4. Can be appreciated on its own—base installation of Drupal can stand on its own for a fully functioning site, without additional modules.
5. Is well balanced—Drupal doesn’t try to sway you toward one particular type of site, unlike the framework of Wordpress, for example, which leads you towards blog-like sites.
6. Has complex flavors—because of its open source community, Drupal has its own complex flavors, in the form of thousands of modules and themes.
7. Takes time to make—Drupal makes it easy to set up a functioning website in a short amount of time. But to make a truly great site, you have to put in some time.
8. Requires appropriate glassware—Drupal requires appropriate hosting.  Some cheap hosting sites (GoDaddy) don’t do Drupal justice.
9. Is best enjoyed with friends—great for building sites that encourage community involvement and a high level of engagement with your audience.

As for Viewplicity, the bottom line is, whether you use Drupal, Joomla, or even Wordpress, Viewplicity is a user-friendly product that is now easily integrated into any site.  Try it FREE now!

Read Colin’s full article at http://www.leveltendesign.com/blog/colin/9-ways-drupal-fine-wine.“

Here’s the skinny on what went down and who’s coming up according to CMS.

Defending Champion

Drupal stole the show and $6000 after grabbing the first ever Hall of Fame Award.  2009 is Packt’s first year to induct anyone to the CMS Hall of Fame! The induction was just the icing on the cake, as the little blue droplet that could also took home the 2009 Open Source PHP CMS for the second year in a row. The Drupal community has worked hard to improve Drupal by adding internationalization, enhancing security, facilitating customization, increasing extensibility, and easing the user experience. Drupal jogged one more victory lap with their “Best Overall Open Source CMS Award” (which they’ve one for three consecutive years!). This critical recognition helps build both momentum and excitement towards releasing Drupal 7 in 2010.

Hey, Drupal, there’s a blue spot in my heart just for you!

Never to be Outdone

Joomla! held its spot in the top three pocketing a modest $2500 in prize money.  Honored with the 2^nd place spot in the “Hall of Fame” and the Best Open Source PHP CMS standing, Joomla! maintained its rep as one of the top CMSs on the market.

Packt’s 2009 Overall Best Open Source CMS Award now graces the epicenter of the blogsphere- WordPress. The Jeffersons of the CMS world, WordPress moved on up in the hearts of users and developers alike this year.  WordPress found its de-luxe apartment in the sky- they made the top 5 list for Best Open Source CMS Category’s top 5! And they qualified for the 2010 Hall of Fame race! Not too shabby.

Well, according to the WordPress blog, 2.8.6 “…fixes two security problems that can be exploited by registered” users who are logged in and “have posting privileges.”  “If you have un-trusted authors on your WordPress blog, upgrading to 2.8.6 is recommended.”
WordPress credits Benjamin Flesch with the discovery of an XSS vulnerability (cross site scripting) which translated from geek-speak means that attackers can bypass access controls and alter data on the site without typical permissions.

WordPress credits Dawid Golunski for uncovering the second security issue, “sanitizing uploaded file names that can be exploited in certain Apache configurations.”

Once more, Viewplicity breaks it down for the rest of us:
Simply put, sanitizing is the process of removing sensitive, or private, information from a document, or other file, so more people can have access to it. And, in the case of the WordPress, this would cause file disruption among other annoyances.  But, not anymore, thanks to 2.8.6.

This update was much appreciated by WordPress fans, but after checking the boards, we noticed that people are already camped out awaiting the 2.9 release like it’s Black Friday! (And, some eager beavers have even been playing around with the 2.9 Beta).

Feel free to post a comment to let us know what you think about this new security release.

For those that don’t subscribe, it’s a great article on a project and web site called Scratch (Imaging, Program, Share)., hosted at MIT. This project has been going on for over six years and targets mostly kids from ages eight to 16. They develop programming skills to take them from basically just being “digital natives” that can use online technologies to people possessing true “digital fluency” by being “able to design, create, and invent with new media”.

At its core, Scratch promotes learning through “tinkering” – sort of building things from the bottom up and playing with your application until it does something useful. For these applications, the kids are primarily developing games and other forms of collaboration.

Collaboration is also at Viewplicity’s core, so we take note. We started recently to foster more tinkering with the user interface appearance of our components, giving the web developers more control over the colors and shapes of the visual aspect of them. We already also have some limited capability for their end users to control aspects of our appearance on their page (things like being able to drag/drop/minimize the components), but not nearly to the degree implied by what the Scratch end users can do. We certainly stop short of any sort of programming capability.

We are driven to eliminate the need to write software in order to use our product on a web site. As we add features to give the web developer or his user more control of our appearance and behavior, there is an increase in difficulty to keep our interfaces simple – to avoid creeping into the complexity of programming in Javascript and CSS.

Building web applications themselves, even with a framework like Drupal, involves some programming – more than we wish sometimes. Viewplicity doesn’t want to add to that burden, but efforts like the Scratch project may be teaching that it’s not totally about whether you are programming, but perhaps how you are programming.

Software tools become more friendly the more they are “domain specific” – when they are designed to do one thing well. Scratch makes the point that their domain is for a specific age group and for kids that want to learn what programming is about while doing fun and useful things, but they don’t tackle the domain of professional programmers. Were they successful? One measure may be that over a half a million projects have been written and shared by “Scratchers”.

Their accomplishments make us look at our goals – at least we should stretch to foster more tinkering by the end web site users of our product. We want to be more “tinkerable”, as Scratch refers to itself, but within the comfort level of our target domain.

And, maybe someone will do a Viewplicity plugin for Scratch someday.