The Obsessive Collaborator

I saw over one Kolabora that a new real time collaboration "web conferencing" system had a press release. The service is called Yugma (which according to their website means "the state of being in unified collaboration" in Sanskrit, but they could just be making that up). The main service of Yugma is screen sharing in real time via a Java applet. One person is a host and starts the meeting, which generates a session ID.


That session ID can be shared with others who simply go to the website, "Join a session" and type in the session ID. This of course means the session is public, though the ID is likely to be hard to guess. It also provides a conference call number to supplement the text chat. In the free version, up to 10 people can collaborate, with any one sharing their screen at a time. Only the current presenter has access to the mouse and keyboard in the free version. I tried a brief experiment with Yugma, collaborating with myself across two computers (what is the sound of one person collaborating?). Yugma supports both Macs and Windows, so I tried collaboration across these two platforms. Sharing the Windows desktop with the Mac worked just fine. The screen scaled nicely, and speed was adequate. But you can't choose which windows you share, only the whole desktop. Sharing in the other direction didn't go as well. The Mac desktop came out with the negative colors on the Windows machine.


It is convenient to be able to share screens from an applet, but the UI needs work. No native widgets are used, so the Java applet could use some aesthetic improvements. There is an explicable signal meter in the upper right of the applet, and once you go into "annotation mode" it is not apparent how to get back out of that mode. Overall this seemed like an application that could work in a pinch from time to time, though I've been more enamored with Vyew, which I actually have tried with more collaborators than just myself.