Last night I spent more than an hour or two looking around the community for new contributions and adding a couple of pages into "my stuff" At the end, I felt that a lot of time and effort had passed with little acheived really. So now I have a page of 'useful' links and a new piece of jellyART ;-)
I'm still not exactly sure who is in 'my group' and who isn't, but that's not so important.
There are several fundamental problems with the use of Flash for a web board and community like this, but the process which seems to be happening now is that people who are getting very frustrated with the poor functionality of the discussion boards and the page editing, are finding out work arounds and requesting short cuts which can make them happy in the short term, simply because the problem is then not quite so bad as it appeared to be.
I shall list the problems as I see it in two categories
1. Problems of the specific
a) Speed of typing, editing and browsing discussions is unacceptably slow.
b) Lack of a functions, eg 'your recent discussions' 'view unread messages' 'go to latest discussions' , that sort of thing.
c) Need to use the mouse too much, and too heavily.
d) When editing a page, there are some intermittant faults, such as the disappearing pallette, text boxes zooming off to the right hand side and strange things happening with the scaled vector graphics when you make a large object and rotate it.
e) Double clicking on a discussion icon sometimes brings up the page requested, but sometimes doesn't.
f) You can't tell how many pages or how many posts there are in any particular discussion without paging and scrolling all the way through. ( see b)
2. Problems of the Fundamental
1) JellyOS appears to have been specialy commissioned by ultralab, and the decision to build it on Macromedia Flash means that it doesn't build on any existing tried and tested community software. Everything has be designed and programmed in from scratch, so what we have now is an extremely immature system, lacking even the basic functionality which an internet discussion taking place in 1985 would have had.
2) Running in the Flash Player plugin within a Browser page and attempting to simulate a windowing operating system seems to place places a massive processing burden on the client computer, which is one element of the slow response problem. The other aspects may be caused by using Flash actionscript to communicate with the host server, or problems with the contention ratio at the server itself, it's difficult to say from here.
3) For the users, learning to use JellyOS is a heavy investment, since we cannot use existing techniques we already know from existing similar technologies, and the knowlege we gain is virtually untransferrable to anything else.
4) It could also be said that jellyOS breaks the existing internet protocols and flies in the face of carefully contructed conventions. This can only lead to a fragmentation and weakening of the wider community.
And now for some positive points :-)
1) Being a closed private community, the atmosphere is more open and trusting than out in the wild world. This means people are happy to talk about themselves, their jobs, families and hobbies and so on, and will even upload photos. ( This would happen anyway, within a community isolated through login mechanisms and hidden from search engines no matter what technology was used. A private newsserver, linked to web based email and a simple online webpage builder would do the trick for a fraction of the cost with a massive increase in efficiency and functionality)
2) It's fairly easy to upload files. This last one was pointed out by Denise Binks, whose webpage holds many useful tips and links as well as providing a model for displaying the coursework
http://www.denisebinks.com/
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