Video, Conference, Chat & Collaboration Tools Roundup

Video, Conference, Chat & Collaboration Tools Roundup

Updated November 1, 2021. See this twitter thread for details.

Yes, there are alternatives to Zoom

I often joke that people spend the first few minutes of any online meeting discussing usability oddities of the collaboration tool itself. There are many solutions out there for online meetings, video conferencing, chat, and other modes of collaboration.

The myriad of challenges presented by COVID-19 has spotlighted technologies that enable remote, distributed, synchronous, and asynchronous communications for groups of people in both personal and business contexts.

Some features found across these various solutions include:

  • Video conferencing for personal groups or work teams
  • Webinars and Events
  • Education and classes
  • Chat messaging
  • Screen sharing
  • File sharing
  • Enhanced security options
  • Custom hardware plus software solutions

The Airtable list below compiles solutions ranging from simple consumer software products, to open source initiatives, to enterprise-grade and hardware integrated solutions.

If I missed anything, please get in touch via email or on Twitter.

Curious About The Broader Community Ecosystem?

If you are thinking beyond video and chat services for your team or work, here’s a list covering the larger spectrum of Community management and events tools.

Illustration: Video Conference by supalerk laipawat from the Noun Project

A Roundup of New Tools That Mingle Visual UI Design & Code

A Roundup of New Tools That Mingle Visual UI Design & Code

I’ve been intrigued by the potential endgame of a single environment that could satisfy the needs and modes of operation for both visual UI designers and developers. Convergence of tools has been a theme of my “Looking Ahead” new year blog entries for 2017 and 2018.

Typical UI Design tools still offer an excellent working model for quickly manifesting design ideas at any level of fidelity. Many of us know of situations where a well-executed mockup that took 30 minutes to render in a design tool (drawing pictures of screens) might get a dev estimate of many hours or days to execute (QA’d production code).

As long as that dynamic exists, many designers will continue to prefer WYSIWYG drawing tool interfaces over working directly in code – especially when they are early in the ideation process.

Popular tools like Figma, Sketch and AdobeXD continue to make moves toward exporting out to React and potentially other libraries. However, as of now, these are one-way, and the real deal will be bi-directional or zero-conversion options.

Here’s a roundup of new tools looking to shorten or even eliminate the distance between drawings of screens and production-ready code (in alphabetical order).

Alva

Alva – “Alva lets you design interactive products based on components engineered by your developers. And guess what – we are entirely open source.”

Haiku

Haiku – “Design components that snap into any codebase: Unlock your creativity with the world’s most expressive UI builder”

Interplay

Interplay – Fast prototyping that combines the power of design systems, production code components and live collaboration.”

Iterative.ly

Iterative.ly – “Iterate on top of your live app using your design system. Launch an experiment in under 10 minutes. Continuously improve your product.”

Modulz

Modulz – “The visual code editor for designing and building digital products—without writing code.”

Supernova

Supernova – “Design and development tool unlike anything you’ve experienced. #nomoresnippets – always a production-ready code.”

The State of the Stylus in 2016

Thanks to Mobile devices, 2016 may usher in a new wave of Stylus use among both professionals and consumers. The pressure sensitive stylus in far from new. However, the stylus as well as the range of software and devices that can now support them, has seen incredible growth. It used to be that Wacom was the big kid on the block, and their core users were primarily designers and 3D animators. Mobile hardware, more specifically tablets, have kicked off a new generation of stylus options for all skill levels. (more…)