qCollaborate aims to provide a simple collaborative editing solution targeted to electrical engineers / students. It will at least provide a chat panel and a whiteboard, able to be created / modified at the same time by a group of people. In other words, changes made by one user should be immediately conducted to all users connected to the server application. In the future, features like simple schematic entry and LaTeX formula embedding could be added. Such a program could be useful for studying online with your colleagues, or simply using a diagram to explain an idea to a couple of friends online.

I just learned how to make .deb packages and found a very handy program to build windows installers, so I thought I should make an early release for anybody who wants to test what has been done, but does not want to bother with checking out the code from SVN and building it. Also, the user pane has been added and logins / logouts are shown in the new event log pane. So, even the code still needs cleanup (bigtime) and no save functionality is implemented yet... You can grab the release from the project downloads page and play with what has been done.

OK, network communication tested and critical bugs fixed. Responsiveness is pretty good also. Completed text entry and added delete operation as an option in a context menu. Now the priority is to clean up some code up and give proper names to some variables. After that, the most likely additions are:

• Some sort of user list, so as to know who is logged on in the server
• A way of notifying a user of changes (user login / logouts, who did what to the document, etc)
• A save system

Implemented basic chat functionality (you send a message and everybody logged in on the server receives it). The user is also able to draw rectangles and ellipses (squares and circles if holding the Shift key), and move them around. Also, basic text input is almost done. Finally, the shapes one draws are sent to all the other clients, but the speed and resposiveness has not been tested yet over the net (tested only with two client windows on the same screen). Testing and additional functionality coming soon, I hope.