News.
Feature Requests
The most frequently requested feature, by far, is a transcript of a room: a chronological, decently formatted review of what happened. I am planning on doing this, and have been for a while. But, I’ve been busy lately, and, if you didn’t know, Today’s Meet is just me.
Another great suggestion I had was shorter, classroom-based room lengths. I’ll probably be adding 8- and 2-hour expiration timers at the same time I add the transcripts, if not before.
So, for you readers, I have two questions:
1. What formats should be available for the transcripts? I want something someone can save to their hard drive as a single file, so I’m thinking along the lines of plain text and plain HTML (with abusive semantics, but not requiring stylesheets or images). Possibly RTF if it’s not too much trouble?
2. What other features would you like to see?
There are two features I do not plan to implement, or at least not without some other drastic changes. Deleting or clearing a room and extending a room’s “lease”. Deleting or clearing a room would require some type of user authentication—I don’t want just anyone to be able to do it—and extending a lease sort of defeats the purpose. I may add “infinite” rooms as some sort of premium or special deal in the future, but for now, it’s not happening. I think the ephemeral rooms are what sets Today’s Meet apart from the competition.
Given a little time, I’ll get to work on Today’s Meet. For now, let me know how it’s working, and what else you’d like to see!
July 1st, 2009 at 2:26 am
Hi
A simple ‘copy to clipboard’ would suffice. Normally at the end of a backboard session one wants to record the session and email out to participants. It could then be pased into an email.
Alternatively to rtf or html , you could provide a PDF download.
It really doesnt matter what the format as long as the facility exists. It really is a priority to make Todaysmeet successful.
August 14th, 2009 at 7:32 am
I too agree with Alec,
-A copy to clipboard feature would be great.
-Additionaly, is there a way to alter/maniplate text size, colour. Ever new user may have a different colour, to identify the points made, over a time. just make sorting the messaging easy and fun.
-Also If the number of particicpants are more than 8 -10, Can the room be exclusive and password protected atleast for a week?
Rest is perfect!
Thanks for your efforts
August 14th, 2009 at 8:33 am
Copy to Clipboard is not trivial to implement. For security reasons, there are obstacles to accessing the clipboard from JavaScript. Imagine if any random website could read or write to your clipboard. Kind of scary! (It’s worth noting that it is relatively easy in Internet Explorer. Like I said, scary!) Most sites that have this feature provide it through Flash, and only copy plain text, like from a form field.
Password protected rooms are on my roadmap, but there is some underlying platform work that needs to happen first. Hopefully that platform work will make it easier to implement new features than it is right now. Password protection was something I intended from the beginning, but there have been issues with implementing it.
PDF downloads are something I would love to do but there will have to be some load testing first. I don’t want to add an extremely useful feature and then have to remove it as usage increases. Conceptually, it’s easy enough to do using LaTeX–finally something from my math degree is useful! But practically I’ll need to see where we are performance-wise.
September 9th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
We’d love a way to password protect our rooms. We give the link on our 5th grade classroom blog, so folks can come to our room – the problem is that anyone who reads our blog has access to our rooms. This can be nice, but it can also cause problems. We could give a link on the blog, and distribute the password to our students in the classroom. Thanks!
September 26th, 2009 at 12:49 pm
Hey yeah I think that these are great ideas (ability to transcript and password protecting). I would like to use this site as a part of my biology class and the ability to obtain a transcript of the convo would be very helpful in assigning grades after the fact, especially if there are disputes over the amount of times someone responded or if someone says something inappropriate. I also agree that password protecting would be useful to keeping out people who aren’t supposed to be there.
However don’t look for any suggestions from me on how to actually do this since I’m not very familiar with the background knowledge to know what to do!
Good luck and thanks for the great site
November 10th, 2009 at 6:25 am
I just used Todaysmeet.com in my classroom for the first time. It worked wonderfully, my students enjoyed it and were very engaged.
I would also put a vote in for a transcript, the format is unimportant, but I need to have a record of the conversation to use in assessing my students.
Great job! Keep up the good work.
November 17th, 2009 at 11:41 pm
Good morning,
Thanks for providing a great tool for all if us, but something happened:- I can´t write in swedish anymore.
November 24th, 2009 at 10:45 am
Any chance of integrating voting options like SAPweb or PollEverywhere?
January 19th, 2010 at 12:19 pm
can I send a txt message from my cellphone directly to todaysmeeting room not through twitter? ie. using sms
January 22nd, 2010 at 11:08 pm
Hey Rob,
Unfortunately, no. SMS short codes are prohibitively expensive, but that’s only part of the issue. TodaysMeet is designed to provide two-way communication, and doing that via SMS could cause someone to receive (and pay for) hundreds of text messages. That’s not a very good way of interacting with the room.
James
February 9th, 2010 at 4:31 pm
This is a great tool. I would like to use in my class. I can copy and paste into a word document right now but with constant legal pressure I would feel more comfortable with the ability to print or get to clipboard easily. And absolutely have password protection.
February 15th, 2010 at 8:22 am
I’d like to see a PDF, .doc, .rtf, e-mail, post to X website, etc.
The option of saving period will be great. I could use this frequently if the transcript option was in place.