Like Google Wave for Developers: Real-Time, Collaborative Code Editing
Our startup-minded readers may remember Mike Trotzke, our good friend who, with a little help from his good friends Marc Guyer and Brad Wisler, founded a startup incubator called SproutBox earlier this year.
One of the latest sprouts to emerge from the box is Squad, Trotzke's gift to developers everywhere - and we mean everywhere! This web-based environment allows distributed teams to collaborate in real time, opening, editing and sharing code from anywhere with an Internet connection.
It's also beautifully portable — meaning you can work on projects from any location, whether it's your home computer, your laptop, your mom's vaccum tube-era model — any device with a browser can be your portal.
And because it's collaborative, it's great for conducting code reviews or paired programming. And it's a perfect platform for noobs and the poor suckers who have to train them. It's even got a built in chat module so you can discuss changes as they're made.
Parts of this app dimly reminded us of Lowdown, a plain-text collaboration tool for developers to communicate to designers and managers, and even more so of How's My Code, a resource for distributed teams to conduct code reviews and keep all the coders for a project on the same page. But those apps were relatively lightweight contraptions slapped together for the Rails Rumble a couple months ago. Trotzke offers a product of a different caliber altogether.
He wrote to us, "It has a unique approach to realtime interaction that even non-developer types would find interest in.
"Users follow each others actions (tab switching, scrolling, etc.) and then see each character they type. You kind of need to try it out to get the feel, but it's pretty sexy for instructional or code review use cases."
Sounds sexy indeed! Like a developers-only, less-crowded, actually useful version of Google Wave.
Check out the screenshots:
Pricing is competitive and ranges from free to $40 per month for teams of up to 5 users, with additional user support available for $7 per user per month. And the first month is free for everyone on a trial basis.
Squad supports a variety of languages, including HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, Python, SPARQL, Lua and XML. Squad works great as an HTML editor, a PHP editor or a plain text editor.
The startup also plans to add a Ruby syntax mode, enhanced search and replace functions; an offline sharing mode; a show/hide feature on the collaboration panel; and project handling functions.
It looks like a great, exciting product, and we look forward to reading users' reviews and seeing what else Trotzke and the Squad team come up with.
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Oh, man ... this app is exceptionally awesome. I LOVE the site design, and the app is dead simple to use. Seems perfect for helping my junior coders through rough patches, without having to resort to WebEx or other screen-sharing apps.
I really hope this is successful enough to justify continued development and improvement. I'd love to see some basic usability features like automatically closing brackets, or customizing indenting and syntax highlighting.
Those are just pet peeves though. There's just something about this app that I instantly fell in love with. Looking forward to seeing it succeed. Good luck!
BTW... I wanted to let everyone know that if you're interested in starting a company, we'd love to help you make it happen.
You've only got a few days to apply for this round of SproutBox funding. Apps close on December 5th. Apply at at http://sproutbox.com/apply
Thanks Warren! There are definitely some customization options we want to add. It's a first version and we look forward to improving on it!
This seems like an amped up version of etherpad.com .
Which is a .. Realtime Colaboration Editor
Sure, nice features, but not that innovative.
Christoph: Etherpad is great. I've used it before for editing copy a an alternative to Google Docs. In many ways, Google Wave is a Realtime Colaboration Editor as well. We've tried using Wave for code review too, but it just doesn't quite work out.
Squad takes a different approach to interaction. Squad has multiple tabs under the same share. You automatically take turns controlling the share and following each others work. It just seems to work well when you trying to show someone something. Squad also allows you to open and save local files, more like a desktop text editor.
I certainly wouldn't claim that Squad is the first ever attempt at realtime interaction on the web-- Just that for us it works well in practice for how we need to share code with one another.
Just tried to write some PHP code, but I'm missing a lot of features
like auto brackets, code snippets or a function reference.
I'm sure the chat function is a great idea for teams.
Sweet... I can't tell you how often I'll be using this. No more "Hey, come over here and look at this."
This seems really cool. I would have loved to have had this in school. I don't know how many times I had to have a friend or a lab instructor come look over my shoulder to help me with code.
Price is nice, but give me open source.
This seems very similar to the open source bespin from mozilla labs
http://mozillalabs.com/bespin/
or is it just me...
Collaborating on a large document is a delight. Squad auto-scrolls beautifully to the editing point of the person on the other end. Chat is just right - it doesn't take up too much space, but is there if you need it.
Looking for some developers to help me with a project. This is just what I needed. Thanks.
http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20091204/googles-checkbook-opens-up-again-this-time-for-do/?mod=ATD_skybox
Looks like Google just swooped up the Etherpad guys. So I guess that makes this either a really awesome or a really bad time to be building something like this. Either way, someone needs to make a product that makes collaborative coding easy. Hope you guys can continue to improve Squad to get there.
Posted by: winhamwr.myopenid.com
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December 5, 2009 7:36 PM