TheSpicyChicken

Introducing Collaborate

Posted October 27th, 2008 by Spicy

Collaborate was an experiment in design to development.  I recently had the need to utilize a collaborate text editing program and used a rather nifty one named SubEthaEdit.  While this did allow a friend of mine and myself to edit a document collaboratively it was quite restrictive since it did not accept any Rich Text Editing.  You may be thinking, well yeah, then just use Google Docs, or some other shared document program.  However, sharing is not quite the same as real-time text editing and something more was needed.  I happened to be on Jabber at the time and realized that it would be even cooler if I could create a system that just used existing chat protocols to faciliate collaborate. A quick search for “cocoa xmpp framework” yeilds this very handy set of code.

I spent some idle time coming up with a basic OOP architecture that would be conducive to the task at hand and would also have the ability to be easily extended to other chat protocols.  From first thought to the product you see here it was about a week, however most of the programming was actually completed in about three days (with time for eating, sleeping, etc).  While this program isn’t the fanciest app out there it does allow you and friends to edit Rich Text Documents in Real Time over Jabber (GTalk) and is loads of fun to boot.

The first release (version 0.1.0) is available for download here.

Tags: app, cocoa, collaborate