The Owlfred Chronicles » Shadowfiend

Multiple Groups, Take Two

Shadowfiend — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 15:58:27 +0000

Several weeks ago, we released some big changes to OpenStudy: you could now be in more than one group at a time, on the same page. Moreover, you could ask a question of multiple groups at the same time. Overall, people liked this, but it quickly became apparent that most people wanted to focus on one group at a time—even if they were in more than one group. In addition, people were abusing the ability to ask multiple groups questions more than using it—many people were just asking questions to unrelated groups, thus obscuring on-topic questions.

To address some of this, we’ve tweaked the way groups work just a little bit. You are now only viewing the questions and online users from a single group at a time. Every group you’re a member of has a corresponding chat at the bottom of the screen. There is a drop down at the top of your screen that lets you switch between groups you’re a member of, and see how many unread questions the other groups have. This drop down also lets you leave your groups if you want to.

See your groups, how many are online in them, and how many unread questions in each.

Moreover, you can only post a question to your current group. This makes it easier for moderators to delete off-topic questions, keeping groups more focused.

As always, let us know what you think of these changes at the OpenStudy Feedback group!

Also, if you’ve been missing achievements and levels a bit, don’t worry, they’re coming back with a vengeance Real Soon(tm)…

Viral Testimony

Shadowfiend — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 22:38:07 +0000

At OpenStudy, we’re big believers in studying with other people. It’s why our purpose is to let every person make the world their study group. We think other people make studying easier, more fun, and more interesting. And we think being told when you’re being super-helpful is the best reason to help more people.

Now Testify

Last week, I mentioned OpenStudy’s ‘fans’ feature. If someone is consistently helpful, you can become their fan by clicking `become a fan’ on their profile. This is a one-time thing, and indicates how much you appreciate them. We recently made it so that your fans that you are also a fan of are listed separately on the list of online users in a group. We still thought there was more room to grow this relationship.

Starting today, you can tell the people you’re a fan of *why* they’re so awesome. If you go to a user’s profile and you are their fan, you can now fill in a message to rave about their help:

We hope you’ll use this to give people the credit they deserve for being awesome OpenStudy users.

Spread the Love

Right now, we have OpenStudy widgets on some of the top sites for open learning on the internet. But what’s been missing is an easy way for you to bring your friends on board to study with you and with the other people helping and chatting on OpenStudy.

That ends today. You can now share any OpenStudy group with your friends on facebook, twitter, or by email by just clicking on one of the three buttons that appear on every group page:

So spread the word, tell everyone where you’re getting the best study help, and let’s continue making the world one big study group!

Feed That Back

Remember to let us know how you like these new features in the comments, or by posting in the OpenStudy Feedback group at http://openstudy.com/groups/OpenStudy+Feedback . If you have ideas as to how we can improve anything on OpenStudy, feel free to post them in the same group, or in our UserVoice, which you can always get to by clicking the red Feedback button on the left of all OpenStudy pages.

Bordering on Mutual Fandom

Shadowfiend — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 21:03:44 +0000

Last Friday, another OpenStudy release went out with some improvements and changes. I wanted to mention three in particular.

Borderlicious Viewers and Chatters

I posted about our new avatar decorations last week. People who were viewing a question, however, did not have any avatar decorations; nor were avatars in chat properly rewarded for the awesomeness of their posters. We fixed that right up, so now the small avatars that indicate who is viewing/replying to a question and the ones next to chat messages get the right border color, just like reply avatars:

\cancel and \bcancel in the Equation Editor

The OpenStudy equation editor supports a lot more functions than just the one that it has buttons for. Indeed, thanks to the MathJax technology that it is based on, it supports a full range of LaTeX math typesetting. However, there are a few gaps from specialized packages. Last week, we implemented two macros that had been requested, \cancel and \bcancel. These are used to indicate that two parts of an equation are being ‘cancelled out’ during a calculation. \cancel goes bottom-left to top-right, while \bcancel goes top-left to bottom-right. You can use them like this:

cancel and cancel indicate canceling in a math expression.

Mutual Fans

We’ve been thinking about ways to bring people who help each other closer on OpenStudy for some time now. There are a bunch of ideas that we have brewing and churning away, but we’re so excited that want to get them into your hands as soon as we can finish them. The first step is to give some love to fans. When we introduced medals, the concept of fans, which is the oldest concept on OpenStudy next to questions and chat, kind of fell by the wayside. You can become a fan of any user who is particularly helpful or fun or whose chats you enjoy. Any user, basically, that you like. You can become a fan either by hovering over their avatar and clicking ‘Become a Fan’ or by going to their profile and doing the same thing:

The first improvement we’re adding to fans is to give special attention to situations where you are a fan of someone and they are also a fan of you. These people are what we call ‘Mutual Fans’. For now, the special treatment is that your mutual fans appear separately in your online users list, so that you can know when they are online. When mutual fans are on, you get an extra section at the top of the list just for them:

We hope this will let you develop some closer ties with those people. But don’t worry! We aren’t finished giving fans (or mutual fans) attention. There’s more to come in the near future.

In the meantime, let us know how you like these new features in the comments, or by posting in the OpenStudy Feedback group at http://openstudy.com/groups/OpenStudy+Feedback . If you have ideas as to how we can improve the social ties on OpenStudy, or how we can improve anything else, feel free to post them in the same group, or in our UserVoice, which you can always get to by clicking the red Feedback button on the left of all OpenStudy pages.

Draw, Decorate, and Dance

Shadowfiend — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 18:13:36 +0000

There’s been a request near the top of our UserVoice for a long time — pretty much since this version of OpenStudy debuted — for a drawing tool to complement the equation editor that we have on the site. For geometry, a drawing tool is perfect for drawing shapes, angles, etc. For physics, a drawing tool lets you sketch a free body diagram to help someone along. For chemistry, a sketch of a molecule’s structure could be critical to understanding why it bondds the way it does.

Draw Dat

We know it took us a while (we have so very many ideas and features that we want to bring to make studying better for everyone), but it’s finally time to deliver: say hello to OpenStudy’s new drawing tool!

A brief overview; we’ve kept things nice and simple. The pencil tool can be used to draw freehand lines:

The line tool can be used to draw straight lines:

The ellipse and rectangle tools let you draw those two shapes. If you hold down the Shift key while drawing, you’ll draw circles and squares instead.

You can use the selection tool to select shapes and delete them. Once you have shapes selected, just hit the Delete or Backspace buttons on your keyboard to get rid of them.

We’ll be adding some more features to the selection tool in the future, like the ability to move the objects you’ve just selected.

You can also undo and redo your changes using the undo/redo buttons. These work just like undo and redo in other programs.

Last but not least, every drawing has a `Reply Using Drawing’ button in the top right. This lets you copy an existing drawing into a new one, so that you can make any modifications you want.

The old drawing will be in a different color, so that other people can understand what changes you made.

You can also use the `Copy Previous Drawing’ button to pull a previous drawing into one you are working on now. You can use that to copy multiple drawings in, and each will get its own color. When you click on Copy Previous Drawing, the page will be faded except for any drawings in the current question. You can click on any of these to pull it into your drawing.

Drawing things for others is awesome. It’ll let you get medals for questions you could only have half-answered until now. Those medals, as you know, will get you points, and those points will get you to higher and higher levels, and those levels will give you different titles on OpenStudy.

Decorate Dat

But what are titles, really? Text! If I’m a Superhero, that’s all I am. Just a Superhero. No cool stuff to my name. No cape, no funky S on my superhero costume. Lame.

We have a cure. Starting now (actually, starting last week), various ranks can get you some serious bling. It’s time to show off how awesome you are on OpenStudy.

I won’t go into detail on what decorations all the ranks get you, but here’s the deal: initially, you’ve got a simple white border on your avatar, and a nice blue level circle:

As you progress, your level circle starts getting some colors:

And then your avatar’s border:

And then your border starts getting cool:

And finally, your level circle… Isn’t quite a circle anymore:

As the decorations progress, you eventually also get colored backgrounds on your reply. High-ranked users are easily distinguishable.

But that’s not all! If you’re the #1, #2, or #3 user today, you get a cool owl medal instead of a level circle, and your border color changes accordingly:

So show off your levels. Pick an avatar that looks awesome with your new bling. And don’t worry, we’re not stopping here. Ranks matter to us, and we want them to matter to you. So look for more bonuses for getting points soon!

Dance Dat

All right, honestly, we didn’t add a dance tool. And your avatars won’t dance. We did dance, maybe, a little bit, when we got these features done and in your hands.

Let us know how you like them in the comments, or by posting in the OpenStudy Feedback group at http://openstudy.com/groups/OpenStudy+Feedback . And if you have more ideas, feel free to post them in the same group, or in our UserVoice, which you can always get to by clicking the red Feedback button on the left of all OpenStudy pages.

Er… This is an M&M?

Shadowfiend — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 23:59:09 +0000

OpenStudy’s Latest Features

Shadowfiend — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 17:12:08 +0000

We pushed several new features to OpenStudy today, and I wanted to give a brief rundown of a couple of them really quick.

Public Access

First off is what we call `public access’. Almost all content on the site is now accessible without logging on to OpenStudy. For a few months now, since we first started our beta, OpenStudy has been a login-only site, where login is required to view any of the study groups, studypads, or users on the site. When we were in closed beta, this made sense, and in the run up to our open beta we had a ton of other features we wanted to get in for our users to play with. Now, it’s time to throw the doors open even further.

When you aren’t logged in, you will see a banner on every page:

You can interact with the page as usual, or click any of these buttons to log in, sign up, or connect with facebook. Moreover, if you want to join a study group or follow a studypad or user, you can go ahead and click the appropriate buttons and you will be prompted to log in before the action is taken.

Facebook Like and Tweet Buttons

With public access also come facebook like and tweet buttons. Now, if you are on a study group or studypad, you can like it on facebook or tweet it to your followers. Just look for the two buttons in the sidebar!

Everyone who sees the links will be able to get to the page and have a look around before deciding whether they want to sign up or not!

Help

We’ve been working for a while on some great help videos to explain some of the features of OpenStudy and how they can be used. Starting today, you’ll find a link to the help videos in the OpenStudy header on any page:

Click on the link to view our 6 videos about OpenStudy (with full HTML5 video support, thanks to Vimeo).

We’re always working on cool new stuff, so keep an eye out for the next batch of new features!

The equations are coming! The equations are coming!

Shadowfiend — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 19:54:36 +0000

Ok, so an equation editor is not quite as climactic as the appearance of the Great Eagles in Tolkien’s The Return of the King, but we’re pretty excited about getting this on the site for you to use.

It’s been about six months since we first put OpenStudy out there in its current form, and about a month since we left closed beta and let in anyone and everyone who wants to sign up. Since less than a month into the beta, we’ve heard from you that you wanted a way to put equations on our real-time studypads and questions. We’ve been refining our vision of what OpenStudy can be and what it can do to connect people in the meantime, but we didn’t forget that request, and now it’s finally here!

Inserting Equations

From now on, whenever you want to insert an equation, you can click wherever you want it on the pad and then click on the equation button in the toolbar:

Click the Sum symbol on the pad toolbar to insert an equation on the pad.

Once you click on the equation button, you will get a dialog that will let you create and edit your equation:

The equation dialog after entering an equation.

You can type your equation directly — we’ve tried to make typing an equation as natural as possible. You can also use the input buttons on the right to insert various mathematical characters and functions. Just expand a group by clicking on it and see what is available:

Clicking on a group in the equation dialog’s symbol toolbar expands it; above, the group containing math operators has been expanded.

Whenever you’re done inputting your equation, you can click the close button or the X in the top right of the dialog to close the dialog. As with everything else on pads, everyone sees you develop your equation as you type.

Editing Equations

Whenever you want to edit an equation that is already on the pad, you can click on it to bring up the equation dialog again:

To edit an equation, click on it on the pad to bring up the equation dialog.

You can edit an equation as many times as you want. You can also undo and redo your changes to equations while the dialog is open and once you have closed the dialog, just like your changes to anything else on the pad.

Future Directions

We waited a while to put out an equation editor because we wanted one out there that integrated well with everything else on OpenStudy. We wanted it to work in real time, like everything else on the pad, and we wanted the interface to be straightforward to work with.

A lot of dedicated work by our designer Siddharth and his intern Alan have ensured that the equation editor looks as great as the rest of OpenStudy and works as naturally as possible.

There’s still work to be done, though, and we’ll be working on improving the equation functionality over the coming weeks and months, so keep an eye out for new improvements coming near you!

Technical Underpinnings

For those who are interested, here’s a brief rundown of what underlies our equation functionality.

We’ve had our eye on the awesome open source library MathJax for some time. In particular, we wanted its enviable ability to take most LaTeX commands and typeset them beautifully in the browser. What we’ve built is an editor that leverages both our pads’ ability to push changes to every viewer in real time and MathJax’s beautiful math typesetting. The side-effect of this, for those who are familiar with LaTeX math notation, is that you should be able to use most of your knowledge to your advantage within our editor.

We’ve gone out of our way to make equation input natural by adding an extra layer of processing on top of LaTeX input, however. For example, most if not all LaTeX macros need not be prefixed with a backslash in the editor — they are automatically detected and the backslash is inserted on the way to MathJax’s processing. This does currently lead to some limitations. For example, the matrix environment isn’t supported — you should resort to the more antiquated matrix command from straight TeX. We’ll be fixing some of these issues soon.

Currently, the majority of our simplification work has gone into this aspect. Soon, however, we’ll be doing a few more things to improve equation input for both regular users and LaTeX power users who get to type less:

Automatic large parentheses, brackets, etc. Instead of having to use \left(, \left[, etc, you’ll be able to just type ( and a \left will automatically be inserted.
Smarter bracketing: we want sqrt(3x^2) to have roughly the same effect as sqrt{3x^2}.
Easier matrices: we want (1 & 2 \ 3 & 4) to create a matrix, without having to define an entire matrix environment (though this will obviously happen in the background).
Easier fractions: 1 / 2 will produce the equivalent of \frac{1}{2}.

We’re combining a lot of concepts for our actual implementation of equations. Pads already exist in a two-layer nested iframe context, with the outer layer containing the line numbers. Now, the outer layer also contains the rendered equations, while we’ve taken some ideas from CSS image replacement to keep the content on the pad matching what you type into the editor. The editor dialog exists in the main page, so there’s a lot of inter-iframe communication, too.

The good news is, this has let us explore the abilities of our pads in a lot more depth, and should open the doors to more tool improvements for pads on the site.

Feedback

We’re always looking for more feedback, so let us know what you think of the new equation functionality, and the site, in the comments.