BarCampOrlando is coming up next weekend. I registered, as my company is one of the event sponsors, and haven’t really giving it much thought… until now. My excitement grows as it nears and can’t wait to see some of the presentations. If you are coming to the event, please, introduce yourself, especially if you use Firedoodle. I’ll be the 6′8″ guy being really quite . I’ve got something I’d like to present, but I’d choke speaking to a crowd, so we’ll see what happens. In any case, I can’t wait till next weekend and if you are in the Central Florida area, you should register hang with us!

I really apologize to anyone that has gone to the Firedoodle Forums looking for help. Because Firedoodle is a side project of mine, I have virtually no time to manage the forums and respond to spam. With such, the forums became over run with ads.

Yesterday, I ran across Tangler.com. Tangler is really an amazing tool as it takes forums to a new level. It’s a forum, but it acts like a chat program… It’s a customer support management system… It’s a social network… It’s awesome.

With such a cool tool out there, and our current forums unusable, let’s give them a try. The link on the Firedoodle homepage has been updated to point to the Firedoodle Group at Tangler, but if you need the URL, it is: http://www.tangler.com/group/12534

I hope this works out better for us!

I’m very proud to announce Firedoodle version 0.6! Firedoodle 0.6 offers three major new features which include Focusing, Sticky Notes, and Drawing History. Let’s get right into the details!

Where’s Firedoodle?

First off, when you install the new Firedoodle, you will notice that it is not there. That doesn’t make much sense, right? Well, a lot of people didn’t like the idea of another tool bar eating up your valuable screen real estate, so now Firedoodle is closed, or hidden, by default.

You will notice that there is now a grayed out Firedoodle icon in the bottom right hand side of your browser. Clicking this icon will open the tool bar.

The Focus Tool

Now that you have the tool bar activated, you will notice that there is now a few more icons on it. The first set, after the usual drawing tools, is the new Focus feature. The Focus feature is designed to allow you to bring attention to a certain area of the web page. Clicking the new Focus Area icon will bring up the following:

This is the focus box. Mousing over it will display it’s controls. You can move it anywhere on screen and resize it as needed. Here, I’ve focused in on the main area of the page:

You can save and edit your Focus Areas exactly like you do with the drawing tool.

Sticky Notes

Firedoodle now allows you to add sticky notes to a web page so that you can create notes in finer detail than what is available with the drawing tool. Clicking the New Note icon will bring up a blank sticky note which can be modified.

You can change the color of the note, move it anywhere within the browser window, change it’s opacity, and add multiple notes to a page:

There is a hide button next to the Add Note button that will allow you to temporarily hide any notes on the page so that you can see the content behind it.

Improved Drawing Tool

The drawing tool in Firedoodle is really cool, but if you make a mistake, your only option is to clear the whole screen… well that has been greatly improved. First off, you can undo the last line you draw by simply hitting “z” while you are drawing. But say you want to delete the first line after you’ve drawn many…

Here’s an example where I’ve drawn the digits 1 to 6. Now, if I hit the “h” key (for History), I get a popup that lists every line I’ve drawn in this session.

Rolling over the line will highlight it onscreen (by slightly hiding the others). We can see here that we have the mouse over line #4, as it highlights behind us. Now, all we have to do is click the “X” on that line and that will delete the highlighted line.

In Conclusion

I hope you like the new features of Firedoodle. If you do not have the latest version, please visit Firedoodle.com and install it. I will work on creating video demos of these new features in action as I can. Thanks for your time!

The bug that was preventing people from logging in has been fixed. If you downloaded Firedoodle before 4-09-2007 @ 10:00 PM EST, you will need to upgrade to version 0.5.1 found on the firedoodle.com homepage.

Thanks for everyone’s patience during this. Your comments via email has really been helpful!

I wanted to share with everyone a screen shot of the sticky notes feature that is coming in the next release.

Have a great weekend!

I’ve added forums to help us better communicate. They are located at firedoodle.com/forum and should be used to report bugs and share ideas for new features and way to use Firedoodle. Thanks!

Well, it’s been an entire week since I announced Firedoodle on Emily Chang’s eHub, and the response has been AMAZING. I remember googling Firedoodle that day and getting about 65 results. Today, Firedoodle returns 233,000 results. WOW!

The feedback has been amazing. The first post that day was a very hurtful, personal comment not even related to the tool, which really got me down. However, the following day I had so many positive emails I felt like the king of the world!

The best response has definitely been from educators and students wanting to use this tool. I hadn’t thought of that application, but I am really honored that something I created will be used in education. That is super amazing!

So what’s new? Well, I’ve taken the most requested feature, and the coolest suggestion, and have started working on them. The most requested is the sticky note system. This is almost done and it’s looking real good. The really cool feature, well, I’m going to save that as a surprise. I think you’ll really like it.

There’s also bugs that need to be worked out. I’m working hard on those, and hopefully can have a bunch of issues resolved in the next release. I’m shooting to rollout the two new features and bug fixes in about 2 more weeks.

Following that release, I’ll be working on the second most requested feature which is sharing. Sharing has always been planned from the start and is going to rock. It’s going to make Firedoodle so much more useful. I think you’ll be really excited to see what I have planned.

Also, I want everyone to know that I read all the emails you send me. I do have a day job, a 14 month old son, and my girlfriend and I just had our offer on a house accepted, and Firedoodle on the side. I’m really busy, so if I don’t respond, don’t think I didn’t read it!

Thanks everyone!

Hello everyone. First I want to thank everyone out there that has installed Firedoodle and especially those of you that sent in comments. Firedoodle has become really popular, really fast, and due to that, the current hosting provider can not keep up with the requests from the server and has disabled certain parts of the extension, namely, the ability to pull up saved doodles and placemarks.

To fix this, I am currently looking for a new host and have capped the accounts. There are a few more slots left for people to register (so you can save your data), but not many. Once I get things more stable, I will remove the cap.

Sorry for the inconvenience. Please watch this blog for more updates. Thank you all!!!!

Update - Saturday 1:18 am EST

The new server is up and the data has been switched from the old host to the new. Now all we have to do is wait for the DNS changes to propagate… anywhere from 24 to 48 hours (hopefully sooner!). If you see the note about server errors on the homepage at firedoodle.com, then you are still hitting the old site (and so is the extension in your browser)…. just hang tight!

Update - Saturday 11:37 am EST

It looks like the DNS propagation is spreading, I’ve noticed that the new server is picking up a majority of the load. For me, however, I still see the old site. Hopefully the propagation will be complete throughout the web later today.

Update - Saturday 8:53 pm EST

I’m getting the new hosted site now, so hopefully the DNS propagation is close to complete. If you are still seeing the note on the homepage about server problems, you are still hitting the old site. Thanks for everyone’s patience!

Update: 4/1/07 - Please use the forums at Firedoodle for future bug reports. Thanks.

If you are using the Firedoodle Beta and run into problems, please note them in the comments here. Thanks! If you are interested in installing Firedoodle for the Firefox browser, visit Firedoodle.com. Additionally, I’ve create a demo video of using the add-on, which can be found here.

I’m proud to announce my latest project is now available as a beta release. Firedoodle is a Firefox Add-On that allows you to mark up any page as if it was projected onto a white board. You can download the plugin at Firedoodle.com and if you register an account, any highlights you created can be saved (and later shared).

I hope you like what I’ve created. Since this is a beta release, there may be bugs. If you run across any problems, please post a response here about them.

Thanks!