What is SupraSphere?

Filed under: overview

To put it very simply: SupraSphere is a universal remote for accessing and adding personal data in the cloud. You can host all of your data in one place on one server, access it securely, and share it as you wish. It incorporates multiple message types including threaded IM, bookmarks, email, and rss feeds, as well as a full Mozilla based browser. But, let’s break it down more. Read the rest of this entry »

Sharing Documents

Filed under: cloud

By today’s standards, the office is not really where a lot of us work anymore. Work is more a mindset than a location than ever before, and especially in the Information Technology field, where collaboration and working with others takes place. There are amazing tools and programs that we all use to get our jobs done, especially when it comes to documents and spreadsheets. When going through the planning and writing stage, I’ve already highlighted how SupraSphere shines, but there is a wholly different aspect to the sharing and working together that can be achieved.

Much like email, adding an attachment to SupraSphere itself is really simple, and in doing so, you are left with several options after the upload. In compliance with internet standardization, SS automatically converts documents into .pdf format. This is a benefit for users without an office suite, and turns the document into an ultra-portable ‘read-only’ document. This especially closes the door on any malicious code (macros, anyone?) in a document form, continuing our philosophy of being secure.

But, what if what you attached to your sphere is something still in the process of editing? Well, as long as you don’t upload a .pdf, you can keep the original form as well. This then enables several options, opening the document, opening the document for editing, opening as a .pdf, saving it as a .pdf, a ’save as’ option, and a delete option. I really like the ability to open for editing, as it will open the default program installed on my computer (such as Microsoft Word or Open Office), and then I can edit it, and click save. Instead of saving to my hard drive, it saves as a reply attachment to the original on the sphere.

SS is transformed into a portable file cabinet/email/messaging/bookmarking/rss manager-thing. I love it. I’m sure you will too.

RSS and Filesystem Monitoring and Alerting.

Filed under: bookmarks, feeds

Within SupraSphere you can have fairly granular control over different notification and alert levels. You can decide that in certain spheres, you want to have a new tab open when a new message arrives (push) or that you want to be able to check messages only periodically (pull). The latter is particularly useful if you subscribe to numerous mailing lists and want to check them only every couple of days or so, but also want to make sure that you have a readily searchable archive of the the list in the event that you don’t check them for a period.

In the event that you haven’t checked messages in a long time, there is a convenient directory that shows, for every sphere, how many new messages since you last checked, with the ability for each sphere to “set all read” as well as “show all new” across all spheres.

For desktop notification, you can also set system tray preferences, with parameters such as “notify to the system tray when someone replies to one of my messages” or “always notify to the system tray for the first message opened in the sphere when a new tab is opened”.

How does this relate to RSS and filesystem monitoring? Well, these are two areas of the application where we are working diligently to improve notification and alert preferences. We are currently developing a mechanism to monitor all assets in a given sphere for keywords or keyword tags. When RSS is selected as an asset type to be monitored, we will poll feeds (or sets or sub-sets of feeds contained in a given sphere) for new messages that contain either specific keywords or sets of keyword tags. Because we have historical tags (and keyword searches saved as tags), we can do queries such as “monitor my top 5 most used spheres and only notify me if an article matches at least 2 recently created tags from any of my 5 most recently created contacts”.

Furthermore, once we are monitoring RSS, we will also be able to search RSS feeds. While this is a more common capability of many RSS readers and services, we don’t want to add that capability until we add more powerful mechanisms to manage the large volume of new information that it will create.

As far as filesystem monitoring, we are adding the ability to monitor a specific directory for new files and have them automatically transferred securely to the server, where they will get indexed if they are PDF or common office document types. Furthermore, SupraSphere will prompt for a new file dialog where tags can be applied and where the sphere can be selected.

We might eventually allow transferring the contents of an entire directory, but this will not be a high priority for the coming release. There are already products that will index the contents of your a hard drive, so we are focusing on areas where we can create immediate value. Furthermore, this will create a strong temptation for me (and others) to use SupraSphere to share media files files, which I don’t want to do until we have the economic model a bit more figured out. :)

Email and Messages.

Filed under: email, messaging, sphere

It’s now common knowledge that Mozilla wants to do an overhaul of Thunderbird. As for the progress they have thus far in fixing email and messaging, it’s too soon to tell. Don’t think I am a Thunderbird hater, I actually use it to manage my Gmail accounts when I’m on my laptop. However, my personal opinion is that you can’t fix email (and clients for that matter) if they aren’t broken.

Gmail as a web-based client is really nice, I must say. I’ve never really used Microsoft Outlook (except in college) so I can’t really voice my opinion on that. Evolution mail was nice considering Ubuntu integrated it into their desktop edition, but it was lacking in many areas, including the lack of Gmail support. Given the fact that the Thunderbird project is now being headed by Mozilla Messaging, could this mean that in the future, IM is incorporated into their email client? That has yet to be seen, but it’s beginning to look that way, considering the vision statement on the official website and news items like this. Funny thing is, there is this quote of interest:

“We’d like Thunderbird to do searches across common archives and have a better focal point and search system,” said Asher.

We are already there with the wonders of SupraSearch.

Now, the beauty of SS is the amazing *fanfare* email capabilities. Not only is SS an email client, but it is also mail server as well. Having this ability makes it that much easier to set up custom rules for mailing lists, automatic forwarding, and you can even forward mail into different spheres. The idea is that you can set it up to forward any message created in a sphere to forward either to all contacts, all members, or specific other email addresses. The cool thing about that is that when people reply, the reply will go directly into the sphere. It’s sort of like a shared “Sent Mail”, where all members of a sphere can see the sent mail at the same time, and when the person replies, it will show up in the sphere in real-time for all members to see. Attachments are easy to send, also enabling saving documents directly to the server. Interestingly, SS auto-converts all office documents to PDF format to make them fully searchable.

It just goes to show we do messaging differently.

Real-time Webpage Highlighting.

Filed under: bookmarks, commenting, messaging

Most mornings, I get up and go through my routine, which usually ends with me drinking Mountain Dew, and sitting down at the dining-room table. Substituting the normal coffee intake and newspaper reading, I opt for soda and news via the web. My generation is the one that wants and usually gets everything that they want instantly. That being said, usually after about a half-hour of reading various CNN, Routers, Lifehacker and Wired posts, I begin to get a positively torrential amount of mail in my inbox with people cyber-shouting at me: “Quit sending me the same link over and over again! You sent it eleventy-seven times already!” To which I usually reply with: “But did you read the different comments I left for you?” *puppy dog eyes* Call it the caffeinated rush, but I have a lot to say, and to make matters worse, I expect comments back.

…Well, scratch that. That was before I started using SupraSphere. I’ve told you about spheres, terse messaging, and the supra search features. With the terse/bookmarking feature I alluded to, you can visit sites just like any other browser (tabbed no less) or insert bookmarks in terse messages an d in your different spheres. When you bookmark in a shared sphere, things get very cool very fast: everyone can comment on the bookmark.

One cool thing is that you are able to tell when someone reads the message. Their name off on the left hand “people” bar will go from blue to green. That way you won’t have to beg them to read it. ;) Of course you could prod them with a terse message to the bookmark, but once their name goes green you’ll know that they are reading it. You can simply reply to a bookmark via the terse messaging system, although there is another really cool feature to utilize.

What if there is a specific thing on the website that you want someone to see? In shared spheres, there is this big space where most of the time it shows terse messages in-line. However, when you click on a bookmark, a preview will show up in that large space.* At this point, you can still reply in terse, but the feature here is that while looking at that page, you can highlight just about anything and contextually select text to comment on. Simply highlight, right-click, and comment on the content you want them to read. A window pops up, allowing you do do that. If someone comments back, you can read their comment and reply to it. Contextual commenting really makes for some interesting conversation!

In SS, this comment feature is not just limited to bookmarks; email and messages can be commented on too! This along with the many other features of SS make it a truly innovative environment to work in!

*double-clicking on a bookmark will open it up in a new tab.

The Last Mile of Search.

Filed under: search

“Oh, just Google it!” is the answer I often get when I can’t find something online. Sad to say, even with Google taking over the world, it can’t find everything. I could easily spend all day searching the wonders of the internet but where do I store what I find? What happens if I find something that may seem irrelevant, but I need it later on down the line? Sure there are web services that enable you to customize search (Rollyo and Google Custom Search come to mind) which are all “personalized” to some extent. I’m all for social bookmarking sites, using various add-ons to Firefox to quickly add to del.icio.us or Digg or what have you. But still there is something big lacking.

There is this term, “last mile”, which although has to do with actual physical connectivity, it also has to do with end users of the internet since it’s the part that affects individuals most directly. Even if you have no problem with Google owning your browsing history, bookmarks, and identity, there are still strong reasons why there should be a “last mile” of search. Without a high level of control over the search and browsing environment, allowing *bottom up innovation*, search will only get more personalized, it will never get personal.

And thankfully, that’s exactly what SupraSphere does: complete control over your searches.

I was talking to David today, about Dell of all things, and then I did a “SupraSearch” to find absolutely everything involving Dell that we had ever talked about for as long as I’ve been using SS. Here is what I thought was cool, the fact that I could choose what type of communication to search through. I set it to search for “dell” through all available message types, and up popped a dozen or so matches, including a few bookmarks and an email. Now I could have narrowed it down more, but since I’d never *really* used it, I just wanted to see what would come up.

If you take a look at the image to the left here, *points enthusiastically* we have the search box that comes up and you can see the options I have as a user to do the search for Dell. This way I can find the exact instance I want. If I just wanted to see the bookmarks, I could check just the bookmark option. Now, what happens with the results? A new tab is opened up revealing the results that have hyperlinks back to the original communication.

This will vastly improve web-browsing in general because of the easy searching of literally thousands (at least in my case, lol) of bookmarks, not to mention the logging of all messages in your various spheres. I happen to lose things easily, but this way we’ll never lose any communications!

Simultaneous Messaging.

Filed under: messaging

Well, since I am a complete geek, I love being able to IM my friends. The problem though is that I can’t ever seem to find the important stuff they say while instant messaging. Often my conversations get garbled up because we’ll be talking about something and go so fast that we are actually discussing more than one thing, and we reply, but not fast enough. It’s the trouble with living in constant fast forward. :D

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying SupraSphere is an Instant Messenger, *but* SS incorporates and improves on IM. How is this even possible?

Well, first, let’s travel back in time to 1996, the birth of the modern message board. Back in the day absolutely everyone used message boards, because they had and still have some really great features. Threads were started and then replied to. Even though everything was organized, conversations were not held in real time. The problem was that we’d reply, but never fast enough keep up with the constant stream of communication. The meaning of what we replied was then lost to a swarm of other comments.

Ah, remember the days of chat rooms? Chats took the form of IRC and web based rooms where it was *almost* instant messaging. Good luck trying to reply in a room of 10+ people, as inevitably an entire page-worth of nonsensical multi-colored words were thrown down in literally a few seconds.

Now we have GTalk, Yahoo, AIM, Windows Live, ICQ, and other instant messaging services. Mostly I use mine for a more social aspect, considering I really don’t think it’d be appropriate for a co-worker to see my awesome new icon of the day :P or to see what my status says. Certainly these clients have more useful aspects of them, including SMS messaging, file transfer, image sharing, and direct to email capabilities in some, but these are lost in the over-all “web toy” feel they give off.

SS improves on all three of these forms of communication, with something we like to call “terse messaging”, which is easy and intuitive to use, but somewhat difficult for me to explain. :) It’s reminiscent of a web forum given that it’s threaded. Terse also reminds me of instant messaging and IRC seeing as how it’s real time and can be addressed to more than one recipient, so the meaning of messages is not lost. It provides a much-needed way to communicate the same message to different people, while still allowing you to expound on other trains of thought with other recipients; it could be said that it is “chaordic“. Essentially, I’m saying that SS becomes like an extension of our brains! ;)

Welcome to the Start of Something New.

Filed under: welcome

• Instant messaging
• Message boards
• Feeds
• Chats
• Email

Where do I begin? Honestly I use every single one of these great tools every day. I’m sure that classifies me as an internet junkie somehow, but as my day rolls on, I check out some news feeds, read my emails, ask for help and assist in the Ubuntu forums, chat on a quite a number of social networking sites, go on a rant in my blog, and kick back IMing my friends in the evening. Yes, that’s right, I’m just the average Jane, the woman who uses the internet for EVERYTHING. The issue though is that for the amount of things I do online, I have equally as many applications launched, and this gets to be quite
tedious and sucks up a lot of RAM on my computer.

About a year ago, I met David Thomson, who shared with me this amazing idea of how to use many different forms of communication in one application. My head was spinning in possibilities (shamefully including “why didn’t I think of that?” and other such thoughts) and then he brought out the big guns: how this project of his could turn the corporate world upside-down. Holy cow! But it gets better, he even showed the project to me. *blows party favor horn* It was like a dream
come true for me.

SupraSphere is the name of this truly innovative product. Now how can one program change the world you ask? First, here’s a tiny sampling of what it can do.

• Browse the internet
• Email
• Hold real-time threaded conversations with groups of people
• Contextually highlight any message, email or web page and comment on it
• Instant confirmation for when your messages are received
• Read and manage RSS feeds
• The power of Supra Search which will allow you to look for anything in the system

And my personal favorite:

• Spheres

Now as what everything does, and what everything looks like, *sparkles* that’s what this blog is all about! David and I will be updating constantly, to keep you informed on everything SupraSphere, in addition to having guest bloggers come visit. Are you ready to jump into the sphere? I’m already in one!

Andria