ReadyToPresent

Have you ever broadcasted a lecture using a laptop?

If so, you probably brought in a laptop, webcam and, if you were really adventurous, a speaker phone to the class. However, these extra components adds additional minutes setup time for a class. Plus, you have to carry everything as well.

Users using BigBlueButton to broadcast their lecture to remote students like the software, but they would like to reduce the effort to setup their equipment.

Enter ReadyToPresent, an industrial design project in which we are experimenting with ways to simplify the setup time. It's still early days, but you can already see some of the ideas from the various design sketches.

Multicore with PureMVC

We recently finished a big refactoring of the BigBlueButton client using PureMVC framework, a very clean implementation of the Model-Viewer-Controller design pattern.

We chose PureMVC over Cairngorm because it was less verbose and its design facilitated smaller partitions of code (read: easier for others to understand).

Right now, we're working on making BigBlueButton modular, and we've been adapting the Multicore capabilities of PureMVC to enable dynamic loading and unloading of client modules. Looks like others are picking up on our efforts.

A good analysis of BigBlueButton's current UI

Thanks to the great work of Tegan Lang and Tyler Copeland for analyzing the current BigBlueButton UI and designing improvements to its interface.

The results of their analysis are available here