Coming Soon: Yakkle + Twitter

We've been very busy this month of April and thought we would update our user community with some great news.

Yakkle is branching out! With our integrated IM, Voice and Desktop Sharing features making up our base product, we are almost ready to release Twitter integration into Yakkle. What does this mean? You will be able to log in to your Twitter account and view all the "tweets" you'd like. You can create statuses, reply to your friends, pick your favorites and follow other Twitter users that your are interested in. Not only that, Yakkle will notify you of any Twitter updates that you might want to view. That's just for starters.... when we are ready with this release, we'll let our users find the new features.

We've also taken care of some issues found by our users and continue to improve our user experience, from our web site through using Yakkle. We've also been working on some more Emoticons.

For all of our international users (which there is a lot!) we are looking into translating Yakkle into different languages. We'll be calling on our user community to help with the translation. Look for the "Help Us Translate" link on our web site and you can help internationalize Yakkle, making it the first multi-language collaboration product.

Check us out on Vator.tv, watch our Yakkle YouTube video, and read about our software certification on Softpedia.com.

Yakkle Emoticons Are Here

Announcing release v0.5.7


We've had a real spike in the number of new Yakkle users and want to thank you all for your continued feedback and the many blogs, articles and reviews that are now appearing all over the net and all over the world. We are featuring them on our "News" page, so if you find one or write one, let us know and we'll add a link to you.


What's New In This Release?

Automatic status updates: In our last release, we introduced automatically setting your status to "Away" if you have left your computer. If you were Yakkling, we did not set your status automatically. With this release we will. If you are Yakkling and leave your computer and forget to stop Yakkling, we'll automatically change your status to "Away" for you. We've also changed the "Away" time from 5 minutes to 3 minutes, meaning that if you leave your computer for 3 minutes, we will automatically determine you are away.

New Releases: If you start Yakkle and we have a new release for you to install, we will automatically notify you of this. You can click on the "What's New?" button to instantly see what we've changed in the new release so that you can download and use it.

Emoticons are here: Send a smile, a happy face, a wink, a heart and more. When instant messaging with someone, you will now see an emoticon smiley face in the chat area. Click on this face and you will see all the different emoticons that we currently support. Pick any of these and they'll be sent along with your text to the person you are chatting with. We automatically convert the icon into text so that if you happen to be chatting with someone not using Yakkle, they will still be able to see your smiley face.

Here's our first set of emoticons.





If you want more or have a suggestion for some, send us the text pattern, like :-) and what the resulting emoticon should be and we'll draw some more.


Have fun with this latest release... get your own copy of Yakkle at http://www.yakkle.com

Turbocharged Desktop Sharing

Announcing Release v0.5.6

First, we want to thank all you Yakklers out there that gave us feedback, sent us feature requests and told us about issues you were having.

Here's the latest goodies:

• Usability improvements including: tighter spacing in the Contacts list so that you can see more of your contacts without having to scroll, as well as some color, font and icons cleanup.
  


• File Sharing fixes: for those sharing very large files. See instantly how much data has been transferred and how much is left to go.
  


• Desktop Sharing performance: the desktop sharing code has been optimized and supercharged to bring you the best desktop sharing performance that Java can offer.
  


• Automatic status updates: have you ever set yourself to be "available" and then walked away from your computer? Your friends, family, or colleagues see that you are available but get no response when trying to Yakkle or Chat with you. With this release, Yakkle will automatically see that you are away and change your status to "Away". When you return, Yakkle will automatically reset your status to what it was before you left your computer. There's no need for away messages now!
  


• Googlemail.com support: for some of you, your gmail account is actually googlemail.com and not gmail.com. Yakkle now automatically picks the proper server to log you into and to get you connected.
  

Have fun with this latest release... get your own copy of Yakkle at http://www.yakkle.com

Yakkle 2008 - New Features

With the start of the New Year, Yakkle is getting new features. After listening to user feedback, we've decided to integrate Gmail into Yakkle so Google Talk users can now fully convert to become Yakkle users. So, this release now contains email integration with Google's GMAIL. What does this mean? If you are running Yakkle and new emails come in to your GMAIL account, Yakkle will instantly notify you of these emails and will even let you read a small snippet from the email.



You will also notice that Yakkle now uses a system tray icon (look in the lower right hand corner of your Windows screen and you'll see other applications icons as well). You can double-click on the Yakkle icon to open up Yakkle. You can right click on the Yakkle icon to exit Yakkle or to view your emails.



You will also notice that the Yakkle icon will pop up messages for you if an email arrives or if one of your users goes online or if you receive a new text message from someone.



Now, as a Yakkle user, you can start up Yakkle and leave it up and running all the time. Take advantage of the email, user, and message notifications that Yakkle will present to you. With this version of Yakkle, you will be required to update to Java 1.6, which you are probably already running. If not, follow the directions to upgrade as it will only take a minute.

If you are a new user to Yakkle, try using the "Show Help Text" menu item under the "View" menu. This will provide you with text on your toolbar icons so that you can quickly and easily identify the "Start Yakkling" icon, or the "Mute" icon, etc.

....these features are just a start to what will be coming in 2008 from ZenViva. Get your own copy of Yakkle now from http://www.yakkle.com/

Yakkle Comparison Charts

Based upon its features, Yakkle straddles two market segments as identified in the charts below.







If you currently use any of the listed products, we invite you to take Yakkle for a spin. You'll be Yakkling in under a minute....as opposed to doing long complicated installations, reading manuals, signing up for services and getting demonstrations just to understand the product. This is why we believe we are the only true "Instant Collaboration" tool in the marketplace today.

Happy Yakkling in 2008 http://www.yakkle.com

Yakkle Goes Worldwide

When we embarked on building an application that we thought everyone could use, was viral in nature, and that fit in with the trends in social and business collaboration, we had no idea how to market it on essentially a zero budget. We got advice from VC’s (venture capitalists) and former CEO’s that we would need to drive users to us by embracing open standards and by connecting with existing user communities. So we spent 2007 completing our features, fixing our bugs, honing our message, and wondering if our product “had legs.” We launched an alpha program with our closest friends and family members and were pleasantly surprised with how well we “got it” in building an easy to install, simple setup and “one-click-to-use” product. We then took a bold step in going public with the launch of our web site http://www.yakkle.com and with the general availability of a beta version of our product. Then the fun began! We started getting downloads, web hits, email, we even got included in a California company's newsletter even though we had no prior contact with them. Very cool.

We found a neat web site tool call Feedjit http://www.feedjit.com which tracks where web site hits are coming from. It uses Google maps to give a relative location and will track your last 100 hits. We decided to put it on our web site one day. Within 24 hours, we had our 100 hits and we were global. San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Canada, Rio, England, France, Germany, Sweden, even China, India and Taipei had found us. “Amazing” was all we could say.

Now a month has gone by and the viral nature of our product is taking hold. We were featured in a German web site write up on our product, we were featured in a French web site write up and someone took screen shots from our web site and wrote a “How to Use Yakkle” article. We continue to submit our product to various web sites to be listed as a free download or to have someone evaluate our product. We’ve sent pointers to our web site to Realtors, teachers, tutors, and so on.

With 2008 upon us, we want to provide some insight into what's next for Yakkle. Given the feedback we are getting, we are moving quickly into enhancing Yakkle with meeting recording and playback features, easy to setup collaboration sessions with invitations, and a feature rich IM portion with fonts, colors, and emoticons. We are also looking into tighter integration with Google including new email notification, offline chats, and shared status messages."

We don’t know where 2008 will take us, but if it is anything like the last month of 2007, our journey will be wild, vast, global, and unknown.

Discover Yakkle for yourself. Come along for the ride!

The Yakkle Difference

Imagine all the people who use instant messaging everyday. It’s a staggering number and it’s growing all the time. There’s literally millions of users online right now sending messages.

Now imagine if you had a product that could take a basic IM session and supercharge it. What do we mean by that? Say you are at the office and you are IMing with a colleague. What if you were one click away from connecting your voice to them to have a discussion and connecting your desktop to them to share an idea? What if you were another click away from bringing in a third or fourth person into the mix and having an instant conference call? Each of you now speaking with each other using crystal clear sound and each of you being able to share your desktop with anyone in the meeting.

Who could use Instant Collaboration?

• A real-estate agent wants to speak with his clients and show them house listings from his computer to theirs.
• A teacher wants to connect with her students for an extra tutoring session.
• A salesperson wants to present his product to customers all over the world.
• A customer support person that needs to connect with their customer and remotely fix a problem for them.

We call this instant collaboration and we think there is an untapped market for a cost effective chat, talk and desktop sharing product that does not require a central server to host these sessions.

Our company is ZenViva, our first product is Yakkle, and we welcome you to “share your ideas, your world, yourself.” http://www.yakkle.com

Collaborating Locally

When we think of collaboration software, we think of IM (instant messaging) from our computer to someone else's wherever they are, which is usually at a different location than we are. But what if we could use collaboration software when we're in the same room with our co-workers? You may ask, "Why would I want to do that? I'm in the same room?" Well, we have all been in meetings where a topic is discussed. Usually it's a brainstorming session, or design review, or even a demo being given. We've been in those meetings where everyone brings their laptops to take notes as well.

In comes Yakkle. Now we can connect to everyone in the room and each participant can share their own desktop.

What does that mean? We might be the one with the design document, so we open it on our computer and share it to the group. Others might have supporting documents or marked up copies of the design document that they reviewed the day before. They can share their desktops as well. Now we hold our meeting. As the document is reviewed or ideas are discussed, we can capture them in real-time and everyone can see our edits instantly. If someone thinks we entered the concept or idea wrong, they can comment on it right then or better yet, give them control of our desktop to make the edit themselves. If someone else has some idea to chime in with, everyone in the meeting can jump to their desktop and see it. Imagine being able to capture everything being discussed in real-time and having our participants see the document come to life on their own computer. Rather than hand editing a hardcopy of the document, we don't leave the room until all the edits are made and everyone agrees with them. The design review is done AND there's no follow up review to be held to make sure the edits were done right. There's no need to.

So the meeting ends, but first we want to give everyone the latest copy of the document, so we use the built-in file sharing and push our document out to all the meeting participants. Yes, we could email it to them, but then they’d have to weed it out of their email, maybe they'll misplace it, maybe they'll say they never got it….

Now that's what I call a productive meeting!

Try this for yourself at http://www.yakkle.com

Oh, and while the meeting is going on, Yakkle will create a conference chat tab to allow a group chat, but will also let us send private messages to anyone in the meeting as well….

Master Mouse Control Feature

In the just released update to Yakkle (v0.5.3), we added a feature called "Master Mouse Control." This feature allows the person sharing their desktop to more easily regain control back from a remote user that has been allowed mouse and keyboard control.

With Master Mouse Control, all the desktop sharer needs to do is move their mouse and they will regain control back from a remote user. Control is automatically retained by the desktop sharer for 5 seconds... which we feel is long enough to allow the sharer to be able to disable control previously granted to a remote viewer, but not too long when you want to again allow the remote viewer to have mouse and keyboard control.

In addition to Master Mouse Control, the following enhancements and fixes are included in v0.5.3:

• Improved desktop sharing efficiency. We have improved on Yakkle's already efficient screen capture algorithm to give even more CPU cycles to your applications when desktop sharing.Improved voice experience over jittery networks.
• Improved voice experience over jittery network connections. We have tweaked some parameters on our proprietary voice over IP algorithms to provide an even better voice experience over jittery networks (all while continuing to provide lossless, 16 bit audio).
• Fixed several bugs reported by our user base. We have fixed several bugs reported by our user base in the chat window area when chatting with multiple users at the same time.

As you probably already have experienced, when you fire up Yakkle it will automatically detect that a new version is available and give you the option to upgrade right within the application. You can also update your version of Yakkle by re-downloading it from our websiste http://www.yakkle.com/.

Building Yakkle (Part 4: Object Design)

As stated in our last Building Yakkle post, we (the ZenViva Guys) first outlined four of our primary distributed objects. These objects were derived by using a Top-Down Design approach.

Defining Yakkle's Distributed Objects
We identified the primary components: User, Texting, Voice, and Desktop; and then our secondary or helper components: Supervisor, Operator, and Session (a.k.a actively yakkling).

We separated our objects in two categories to help focus our efforts. First, the primary objects had technology requiring some prototyping and proving out (i.e. was it possible to do). The secondary objects had organizational and managerial responsibility and thus could be implemented later.

Since the “ZenViva Guys” are composed of server and user-interface (UI) guys, the server guys defined the distributed object interfaces (a.k.a our API) to be used by internal services, as well as, the Yakkle UI. By defining the objects and interfaces first, we created a development process that allowed for the guys to work in parallel.

The defining of the User and Texting objects went through some interesting design evolution. One of our fundamental design choices was to integrate with the popular XMPP Instant Messaging protocol. As a result, the User and Texting objects are not distributed objects with state and behavior, but distributed interfaces since XMPP provides all the state and behavior we needed. So our design was to objectify the XMPP services and make them available in a distributed sense.

Our voice and desktop objects needed a bit of prototyping. We had questions on whether the Java platform could be use to create high quality voice and remote desktop services in real-time, whether distributed objects are a good medium for real-time environments, and lastly, whether we could use the UDP connection less protocol for some of our connection oriented services.

In Our Next Post
In our next building Yakkle post, we'll discuss how to write user-interfaces using distributed objects and in subsequent posts we will continue to describe our design by diving deeper into the world of distributed objects. Until then, if you would like to experience the result of our works go to www.yakkle.com and start Yakkling today.

Introducing Conference Tabs

When using a typical collaboration or chat tool, you get to send instant messages to someone who can then reply back. In practice, our Yakkle users are connecting with 2 or more users simultaneously and requested the ability to send one message to everyone in their session. We already had the "Send All" button for sending one message to everyone, but users were forgetting to press it and were just entering their message and pressing "enter".

Introducing Conference Tabs.
When you start Yakkling with someone on your Contacts list, you get instantly connected to them, a Conference Tab is automatically created, you hear their voice and you can see their desktop. You can then bring additional contacts into this session. Now you all hear each other and you can all see each others desktop. Here's a screen shot of a 3-way Yakkle session:



At the top of your Yakkle tab area, your fellow Yakklers are listed and your user icons will animate when someone is speaking so you can see who is talking. At the bottom of your Yakkle tab area is the IM/text messaging area. Entering text into this tab is sent to everyone in your session, similarly incoming messages from your Yakklers are placed here. However, should you want to send a private message to someone you are Yakkling with, you can go to their tab, enter your message, hit return and only they will get the message.

Try it out yourself. Go to www.yakkle.com and get your free download now and let us know if there's a feature you want to see...

Building Yakkle (Part 3: MyOODB)

So you've decided to change the world by writing the coolest Internet application and you'd like to hear how we built ours. This and the next several posts will focus on what makes up Yakkle and will be geared towards software programmers.

Nowadays there are so many off the shelf software components to help you implement your idea, some commercial, but many are Open-Source and free. Since most reading this blog will be building their application out of their Garage we're recommending you choose open-source. Open-source software has a large community and can be really good. You just need to know what you need and where/how to look. Yakkle for instance, gets many of its components from open-source. Even our development tools are free and/or open-source.

Like we mentioned in a previous post, Yakkle uses a Distributed Object Architecture. This differs greatly from traditional client/server or even peer-to-peer applications. Distributed object software requires a new way of thinking that changes the very nature of the design. Now such architecture is not the Holy Grail, but it does change the way one approaches design. It puts an emphasis on information theory and data modeling. In fact, it extends object-oriented design across application boundaries; a holistic approach to software design.

The MyOODB Framework
For Yakkle, we based our Framework on the MyOODB project. MyOODB is an open-source, Java based software framework. Some of our Design Patterns were derived from the open-source txObject project.

Both projects provide a framework, design philosophy, and Software Components. It is important when designing your own architecture that you add such concepts into your development.

Distributed Object computing can be seen as Object-Oriented programming without bounds. Therefore our first step was to define the objects a Yakkle application would need to share in its world. For Yakkle to be a collaboration application, it needed things like Users, Voice, Desktop, and Text Messaging characteristics. So our first step was to define theses objects and their behavior. Just like a standalone object-oriented application design, but with the unique understanding that these objects would also be used in a distributed sense.

In Our Next Post
In our next post with will go into detail on how we design and implemented these objects, as well as, their user-interface interactions. Until then, if you would like to experience the result of our works go to www.yakkle.com and start Yakkling today.

New Yakkle Website

When we first had Yakkle ready for testing with the user community, we knew we would need a web site and we would need to communicate - What Yakkle Is?

We're proud to announce that our web site is up and running, complete with a "What's Yakkle" slide show and commentary to take you quickly through the product so you can see how easy it is to use. Our goal all along has been "click and go" and we think we've achieved that.

In designing our web site, we wanted to achieve simplicity, elegance, ease of use, and extendability. Being developers, we think with objects and repeating any code more than once means the design has flaws.

Enter style sheets. Yet another syntax to learn, but the effort is worth it!
We've actually ended up with just a few lines of html for each of our pages and the rest is common across all the pages. With the style sheets we can now change our web sites look and feel with just one edit.

A word of advice. If you are designing a web site, you are sure to get lots of feedback, so make sure you organize your pages, your thoughts and can easily make changes via your style sheet. Oh yea, and use Yakkle! You can share your browser to your coworkers, clients, family or friends, and let them give you instant feedback on what they like, don't like. Then make your edits, refresh the browser and collaborate until everyone is happy with the results....

....we do this every day and so can you. Come experience Instant Collaboration for yourself, check out www.yakkle.com and start Yakkling today.

Let us know how you like the web site too!

Yakkle Beta Update is Ready

The next time you start up Yakkle, you may see a message that a new version is now available and you have the option to download it. What’s in this new version? Here’s the list:

• Want to quickly see how many of your contacts are “online”? The Contacts Group label now shows an online count, for example, if you have 6 contacts in your Family group and 3 are online right now, your group label will read: “ Family (3/6) “.
• Want to insert a carriage return while you are typing an Instant Message to someone? Today, pressing the “enter” key will send your text message. Now, press “shift” + “enter” and you’ll insert a carriage return into your message.
• How do I know if someone is sharing their desktop to me? The desktop tabs, located on the right hand side of the Yakkle application, become active when someone is sharing their desktop. With this release, the desktop icon will become animated when someone is sharing their desktop. This should grab your attention and let you see quickly and easily which desktops you can go to.
• Want to control the sound effects? With the Yakkle->My Configuration menu you can turn on or turn off sounds when a Contact connects to you, when a text message arrives, and when a contacts status changes.
• When using Yakkle, you will get popup messages in the lower right hand corner of your PC screen when someone adds you, deletes you, wants to Yakkle with you, etc. These message will automatically scroll off you screen after a few seconds. Now you can close them immediately by clicking on their title bar “X” button.
• There are a few other minor tweaks and bug fixes with this new beta version as well.
  
  Want to let us know about a feature request, defect or issue you are having with Yakkle? Use the Help->Feedback form and we’ll consider your feature for our next update.
  
  As always, come experience Instant Collaboration for yourself, check out www.yakkle.com and start Yakkling today.

Building Yakkle (Part 2: Design Philosophy)

In our last post we talked about the first steps in building a next generation, Internet based application: finding a problem you feel passionate about solving and picking a software architecture. This post will focus on our belief in object-oriented design and our implementation choices.

Have a Design Philosophy
"Oh wonder! What noble objects these are! It must surely be a brave world that has such objects in it."

Through our experience in building large scale management systems, we have seen the benefit to applying an object-oriented design paradigm. These are well documented so we don't need to repeat them here.

For the development of Yakkle, we developed a new, slightly expanded object-oriented design philosophy: "Don't stop programming with objects when high-performance applications cross computing boundaries."

We believe that distributed object computing should not send developers running for the door, but enable them to build the next network based "killer app" by allowing quicker, more agile development.

We have found that distributed object applications are certainly not impossible, but do represent leading technology that requires some investment in thought. And like all good investments, will pay dividends in the end. Our request is for you to come along with us as we show how Distributed Object Architectures make complex network applications easier to build, understand, and deploy.

Pick a Framework
Having a philosophy is important to guiding your implementation decisions, but in software the proof is in the implementation. To deliver on our idea, we needed pick a distributed object-oriented framework that could provide the high level design concepts we desired with the low level performance we demanded. We started by basing our architecture and design around two open source projects: MyOODB and txObject.

In Our Next Post
In our next post we will talk more about myoodb and txobject and how they can be used to build distributed object-oriented applications. Until then, if you would like to experience the result of our works go to www.yakkle.com and start Yakkling today.

Building Yakkle (Part 1: Getting Started)

Now that we have introduced Yakkle, we would like to share how we built both the application and infrastructure around it. We hope that by sharing our experiences and lessons learned we will help others who also have the desire to participate in what we feel is a golden age of self inspired, self supported software development.

Find a Problem You Feel Passionate About Solving
In our full-time jobs we have been forced to endure many, shall we say, sub-optimal collaboration experiences with existing for-purchase online meeting and desktop sharing products. We also frequently see our peers combining a variety of free tools to collaborate, but still struggling due to the lack of “live” visual interaction.

So we asked ourselves, “Can we combine the best aspects of all these applications and tools to create a best-in-class collaboration product, and can we do it in a way is essentially free?”

We found that the answer to our question is yes, and the result is Yakkle.

Get Started By Picking a Software Architecture
Of course, Yakkle didn’t just happen, it had to be built. The first thing we needed to do to create it was pick the right architecture to create the application. We needed an architecture that would allow us to develop quickly at a high level of abstraction, but yet have the performance to achieve the demanding network centric operations of remote voice communications and desktop display.

With our background in distributed, object-oriented design, we knew that it would give us the agility to quickly develop any application, but we didn’t know if it could give us the performance we needed. With that question left to be answered, we decided to forge ahead.

In our Next Post
In our next post we will pick up with more on our distributed, object-oriented architecture and implementation choices. Until then, if you would like to experience the result of our works go to www.yakkle.com and start Yakkling today.

Welcome to the Yakkle Blog

Yakkle is the first product brought to you by the ZenViva guys (a.k.a. Zenviva, LLC). We created this blog to let you know about exciting things going on with Yakkle and with us. Along the way we also plan on sharing knowledge we have gained during the creation of Yakkle as a software application.

But first a bit about us...

We are a small group of technologists looking to develop the software applications of tomorrow. We bring together a diverse skill set of system architecture, high performance distributed object expertise, Java development experience, industry knowledge, web, graphics and branding know how and go to market strategies. We pride ourselves in working on and solving technological problems that others say "Can't be done."

In subsequent posts we will talk more about Yakkle and all the innovative things you can do with it, but it you can't wait until then you can go to http://www.yakkle.com/ right now and watch a demo, or even better yet download it and start Yakkling!