Whats new:

We reworked our interaction libraries to improve drawing and touch performance for all browsers, but mainly focusing on Edge and Internet Explorer.

For all Edge users:

Be warned touch is disabled by default now, so please ensure you enable the flag. To do this browse to "about:flags" to access the flags, in the section named "Touch" change the dropdown item from disabled to automatic.

New features and updates

File sharing, nice looking links and screensharing means all new ways to collaborate. Read on for details on the highlights:

File support

Sharing files is now finally possible. Just drag and drop from your system or pick the File option from the insert menu. You can still import images as images as well as they are supported under the file handling, thereby doing away with the old insert image menu option. Files can be downloaded by selecting them and hitting the 'open in tab' for common files like PDF or MP3 or 'download file' for complex type files like 'zip'. As you would expect files are secure and may be moved around the canvas just like any other object.

Share files anywhere on your canvas

All new links

Improving on our video function now called links, you can link any website and Collusion will display a pretty card preview of the link including any image, title and description. You can open the links by selecting the card and clicking 'open link in tab'. Links can be added from the insert menu at the top.

Links will show helpful previews and descriptions

Screensharing

Screensharing capabilities have been added to the video conference. During any video conference, mouse over your own image or video box on the right and you will see an 'start screen sharing' blue icon, simply click it to start, select a window or screen to share. With collusion you can keep your video shared along side your screen sharing. You can also fullscreen a shared window by double clicking it.

Share your window or screen with screensharing

There of course have been countless other changes. You can keep informed by keeping up with the blog. As always if you have any suggestions or questions please do so on the forum.

Michaeling down our vincents

Lots of good stuff in the new year, we've been busy making under the hood changes to secure your work and empower you further. We've taken a big security stance. Lets get into it:

Security

We've taken the time to seriously harden all of our infrastructure lately. Under the hood we have made significant changes to all aspects of our system to keep your data safe and sound. Changes should mitigate most popular forms of attacks, XSS, CSRF/XSRF, injection, replay attacks type attacks. We've patched and upgraded for recent SSL vulerabilities, limited DDoS potential on our proxies, updated our backup system, upgraded a few libraries, hardened the session schemes & their validation, and last but not least even updated our own policies and procedures just to keep ourselves in check too. Phew!

Conferencing

We've attempted to make our video conferencing solution play a little nicer, its much more robust and 'pops-out' to be less fiddly. We've also enabled audio only calls and introduced voice detection. Apple has recently started working on supporting WebRTC more fully, so this could also be great news for our cross platform support. Lets hope they include iOS this time... There will be more minor video conferencing updates soon to continually address its robustness.

Updated video conference (audio only shown)

Chat upgrade

The chat function has seen some upgrades, now complete with a emoji picker lets you pick from hundreds of different common emoticons, we've increase their size a little as well. You can also now drag the chat side-to-side as you like, so you can get it out of the way if necessary. You can also copy from the chat using ctrl+c or right click copy and you will get a cleaner log of the chat.

Emoji picker

Ping

We are trialling a new feature, which allows you to draw attention to a particular place on the project. You can send a ping anytime by double clicking or simply point your cusor and hitting the X key. Other colluders should receive a notification and sound and will be drawn directly to the location. Try it out and let us know what you think!

Send a ping to colluders with double click

There of course have been countless other changes. You can keep informed by keeping up with the blog. As always if you have any suggestions or questions please do so on the forum.

More power to you

We were kind of dissapointed losing video conferencing, boo.. So we now we have our own solution! - and a whole bunch of other goodies.

Video Conferencing

Have a quick call or meeting with your fellow colluders

Object info & Screenshots

Rotating images using the context menu

Bug Fixes

More power to you

We noticed you all needed some more tools to help make templates so, here is some features to help you be more productive!.

Object Locking

Tip: You can of course unlock your objects the same way, the context menu will indicate the current state of the objects you've selected.

Change object lock state using the context menu

Rotation

Rotating images using the context menu

Templates

More power to you

We've added some powerful new tools at your disposal.

Z-Index (Bring to Front, Send to Back)

Change object order using the context menu

Notifications

System level alerts as well as sounds

Shapes

Transform lines into shapes from the context menu

With the Apple iPad Pro likely still on track for an early November launch, we thought we'd give an update on whether we will be supporting it and the Apple Pencil.

I wanted to assure you all that we'll be working hard to make sure that Collusion will work on the iPad Pro and Pencil on launch in the browser, Safari and Chrome will be targeted primarily, and we may endeavor to revive the native iOS app - if there is enough community support for it.

As it stands, you can already use Collusion on your iPad, whichever one you might have and will work with any stylus that already works with browsers. We are hoping that the Apple Pencil, is no different. Of course we will work on getting more tight support for the Pencil specifically once we are able to get one in our labs!.

We are keenly interested in what you'll use your iPad Pro for, don't hesitate to let us know on the forum - especially if there's anything we can do to improve your productivity.

Here are some examples of what we might see.

Designing

Planning

Annotating

Whiteboarding

We've changed!

As some of you may have noticed, public projects are now featured on our website over at the explore page where you can already see some of our own and your projects already on display. If you haven't seen it, then go there right now!

Explore

Website and new Pricing

Video feature

As always if you have any comments or suggestions please head over to our user forum or drop us a line.

Stay tuned as we have more updates coming very soon!

Collusion is full of secret features. I am an engineer at heart, so I'd love to liberate them all to you, but for now lets keep it simple and begin with some shortcuts. Here goes:

• Panning:
  • Keys: Up, Down, Left and Right or W, A, S and D.
  • Just like your favourite games, arrows will let you pan around the canvas freely.
  • Holding shift will reduce the amount panned to a single unit.
  • Using W, A, S and D instead of arrows will free up your mouse hand to do the clicking.
  • If there is a selection, this will instead move your selection around, hopeful for precise positioning - without your cursor in the way.
• Fullscreen:
  • Keys: Alt + Enter, F.
  • Just like those old school shooters. Great for getting some screen real-estate, immersing yourself in content, or simply doing a presentation.
• Switching tools:
  • Keys: 1 through 5, Q and Esc.
  • Toggles through draw - 1, pan - 2, select - 2 and different object add types. Esc will take you back to pan mode.
  • These are useful for switching modes quickly or when your menus aren't visible and you don't want them to be!
  • You can cycle between tools with Q.
• Toggle the menus:
  • Keys: Tilde / ~.
  • Show and hides the menus, very neat.
• Switch to default mode:
  • Keys: Esc.
  • Takes you back to pan mode.
• Select All:
  • Keys: Ctrl / Cmd + A.
  • Selects everything, as you would expect.
• Cut:
  • Keys: Ctrl / Cmd + X.
  • Cuts the selected objects, removing them but adding it to the clipboard.
  • This works cross project and even between windows and tabs.
• Copy:
  • Keys: Ctrl / Cmd + C.
  • Copies the selected objects, adding them to the clipboard.
  • This works cross project and even between windows and tabs.
• Paste:
  • Keys: Ctrl / Cmd + V.
  • Pastes the objects in the clipboard, adding them to the canvas, but keeping them in the clipboard.
  • This works cross project and even between windows and tabs.
• Undo:
  • Keys: Ctrl / Cmd + Z.
  • Reverses the last action.
• Redo:
  • Keys: Ctrl / Cmd + Y.
  • Undos the last undo.
• Delete:
  • Keys: Del and Backspace.
  • Deletes the selected objects.
• Navigate back to home (the centre of the project):
  • Keys: Home, H and Space.
  • Will reset your pan and zoom to the exact centre of the project.
• Zoom In:
  • Keys: PageDown and Minus.
  • Zooms in. Check.
• Zoom Out:
  • Keys: PageUp and Plus / +.
  • Zooms out. Check.

Its no mystery that bigger and higher quality screens were a new frontier in the last five years as we moved from the old cathode ray tube screens we used to use, but the big flat screens that now dominate are still innovating and continue to grow in both size and quality.

Only a couple of days into 2015 and already several consumer electronics companies have showcased their new 4K offerings using new Quantum Dot technology, meaning better colour and sharpness. These improvements appear to be really dominating the CES announcements, well in front of internet-of-things appliances, wearables and VR.

Although it might seem natural that displays would keep getting larger and better, there is a growing concern from the companies and the consumers that content producers like the movies and games industry simply cannot keep up with these devices, and so the need for these improvements are being questioned. Many of the big TV makers seem confident that the lack of content probably won't be a problem given their bold support for 4K this year.

Samsung unveils an 88" curved 4k television at CES 2015, Las Vegas.

An interesting twist though is that these new televisions; just like our phones, are getting increasingly more 'smart'. They run full operating systems with internet connectivity, browsers, video streaming apps and complete development kits (like Tizen). As this unfolds and the performance and functionality of these devices improve, like built in gesture support and even pen support, there is a growing opportunity to make use of these screens for things other than just catching that latest movie or TV series.

Large format displays, equipped with browsers, like Google Chrome, or paired with a smart device like a ChromeCast make them naturally excellent presentation devices, that can simply blow viewers away like a projector once did. Their large surface and crisp resolution make them excellent to present Collusion projects, providing an astonishingly immersive experience.

Later this year, we expect Microsoft will also announce interactive televisions for commercial purposes (currently named Perceptive Pixel). Our tests have included additional interaction support over ordinary televisions, like stylus, multi-touch and tablet interoperability, ensuring these large screens will be useful as whiteboards and interactive presentation devices.

We at Collusion can't wait to get our hands on these devices to unlock their potential for productivity and help bring your content to these new displays.

Happy New Year everyone! As some of you may already know, 2015 is not a leap year. But do you actually know how to check if a year is a leap year? I bet a lot of you are quite confidently thinking the year has to just be divisible by 4. Well guess what, there's actually more to it than that! Leap years, leap seconds - why do these occur?

Earth, our moon and all other astronomical bodies in our solar system don't move in whole-numbered intervals. However, for simplicity and easy comprehension, our dates, months and years have always been measured in whole numbers. This presents us with an interesting challenge because a full earth rotation around the sun is actually about 365.25 days and so we have 'Leap Years' with 366 days to compensate for the annual 'fraction'.

Additionally, there are also the unpredictable speed ups and slow downs in the earth's rotation that we compensate for by inserting or removing one 'Leap Second' from UTC (Coordinated Universal Time). Between their adoption in 1972 and June 2012, 25 leap seconds have been scheduled, all positive. Earth's rotation speed varies in response to climatic and geological events making it impossible to calculate leap seconds and so in this post we will only focus on how to check if a year is a leap year.

Pan and zoom around the Collusion canvas embedded below for steps, a flowchart, examples and more.

As the year winds down and we're all getting ready to stuff ourselves with festive foods and drinks, I'd like to take the opportunity to wish everyone a safe and merry Christmas :)

I thought I'd throw together a list of 10 Fun Christmas facts that you may not have heard of before! Check them out in the Collusion canvas below.

Merry Christmas everybody and I hope you liked my X-mas kitten!

It is an old proverb that we've all heard before. 'Working as a team' in many types of tasks can more easily or more likely be accomplished working as a group. While it might seem obvious, many of us are not applying it fully or understandings its limits, so here are some thoughts and tips you might not have considered.

1. The infinite heads theory...
   What if there were ten heads, or a hundred, or everyone on the planet? It goes without saying there would be an incredible amount of noise and argument; this could be counter-productive and have diminishing returns. Having too many points of view and ideas can create organizational and social problems, it becomes difficult to curate information and come to critical decision points, communication and feedback can be critical to collaborate effectively, and this breaks down with volume. The good news of course in small groups for everyday tasks, having a couple of friends or colleagues help out can be very productive!
2. Work as a team remotely...
   With the power of real-time collaboration, like Collusion, your colleagues can be right there with you as you work or vice versa. The old problem of communication and the benefits lost of not being face-to-face are slowly fading away. You can whiteboard, video conference and contribute instantly, not just increasing the amount of time you can spend, but more affordably too.
3. Let's start at idea inception...
   Why not outsource your thinking at the very beginning, including others in your work from the very beginning can not only help with the dreaded writers block or blank page syndrome, but also provide unique perspective and de-risk your plans from the very early stages. This can be really powerful, especially as we move onto number 3.
4. Choose the right heads...
   Selecting the right people to collaborate can be sink-or-swim. If your project is really important, carefully select the team you work with that has the right skills to contribute in a way that suit your needs, this means knowing who is actually going to provide the different thinking you want and enabling them to effectively contribute. You are more likely to want to collaborate when you can easily access and perceive the ability of your potential collaborators.
   
   Have the courage to be selective; sometimes collaborators may become toxic to your process and other team mates, removing their write access to contribute or perhaps removing them altogether can sometimes be necessary.
5. Why not always work together?
   Pair working & especially pair programming has long proven in engineering to be indispensable in improving team work and productivity. We need to learn from its powers and apply it to our other activities. Pair working has taught us that working side-by-side on our tasks has huge benefits:
   • Work is reviewed by default
   • Learning due to sharing
   • Removes bad habits and reinforces good ones
   • Knowledge redundancy
   • Team building
   • Team ownership
   • Diverse solutions
6. Reward your collaborators, tit-for-tat...
   Create a reward system for those who help, incentivising collaboration can lead to better satisfaction on both parts, which creates a great positive feedback loop. We will want to collaborate more since we get better results, and your collaborators will want to help as much as possible in all the ways they can since they see many benefits other than just your success. Simply involving them in the results, by sharing your final work with them can be enough!
7. Include passive collaborators, like your mentors...
   You shouldn't collaborate with everyone on everything; but why not include your thought leaders, mentors or other passive collaborators on your projects have them watch your work. They can be passive most of the time but unexpectedly give you some critical piece of insight to your work which may change your thinking altogether.
8. Keep a sense of authority...
   Sometimes its better to not de-centralize ownership of your projects. Having some control over the group helps resolve social issues through structure. Whilst everyone involved might have high level permissions, retaining ownership and authority also helps keep your project on the track that you want it be on.

Hopefully these insights will be useful; if so, then the proverb still holds true. Two heads are better than one!

Big screens, internet connectivity, special effects, virtual reality to name a few; these are all advances we have seen or will see in our entertainment. It seems entertainment always gets all of the attention, of course that's because we service our human need for amusement, which is seemingly greater than many of our other needs.

Video gaming have year-on-year pushed the envelope of what technology can do for us, it immerses us in diverse and rich worlds where we can experience almost anything imaginable. Role playing games allow us to pop into virtual medieval worlds where we can slay dragons and build homes. Absolutely amazing.

For a long time these games have been able to be connected to large screens, the internet and any controller you might have, they teleport you into an online world where anywhere from your best friend, to everyone playing that game on the planet might be alongside you on your television, computer screen, phone or tablet ready, able and excited to help.

Most of us are not new to this concept, but I think we need to ask ourselves; why hasn't this happened for our work related activities?

With the rise of MMORPG's and games like Minecraft, we see gamers collaborate in all kinds of new ways ranging through creativity and socializing, building social groups and achieving feats that are seemingly insurmountable.

Working together on these online systems, users are able to communicate and collaborate, exchanging ideas and executing them into almost tangible products that we struggle with our productivity tools we are familiar with. There is certainly a lot to learn from games and entertainment for work productivity.

This is really one of the reasons we started this company, we wanted to bring all of that knowledge, that technology and dream that drives companies to make these great games, and bring it to productivity.

We should be able to collaborate on projects between teams geographically spread around the world, we should be able to see and hear each other's ideas and show them off whenever we want, whether we are there or not, we want to be able to make changes instantly, and get feedback instantly, we want to be able to communicate in every possible way to break down the barriers to collaborate.

It's time we expected more from our tools we use for work. It's time to bring what we have learnt from our play and adapt it to our work to help move us forward.

Earlier this year we released the Collusion web app - allowing you to create, present and share your ideas right from within your browser on your computers and mobile devices. We are now happy to announce the release of a new feature - Web Embed. Web Embed allows you to embed your publicly shared Collusion projects on webpages everywhere on the Internet. It works a bit like embedding YouTube videos.

Check out my New Zealand vacation plan below. I created this a few months ago in Collusion and am now able to share this with you, right here in this blog post, all thanks to the new Web Embed feature.

So why is this a big deal you ask? Well, the possibilities, that's why! It is now possible to do stuff that people could only dream of before, for example, you could embed:

• A Collusion project and draw a fresh comic strip live for your audience (because Collusion canvases are dynamic and real-time).
• Your brainstormed ideas on the web for people to view (typically you would upload a picture of the whiteboard) and add to the canvas as you get more ideas, without touching any HTML or CSS.
• A custom sized Collusion canvas on your website where you hand craft a new variation of your logo everyday just like Google Doodle!

So essentially, you can embed Collusion canvases on web pages, update content on these canvases from your phone, tablet, desktop/laptop and electronic whiteboard, all in real-time.

This is a big step for us in pushing your ideas into the digital world. Give it a try and tell us what you think. We look forward to seeing how you use the new Web Embed feature and hearing your feedback!