New Features: WebRTC Video Chat, Nicer URLs

13 Nov 2013 by ggreer


WebRTC Video Chat

You may have noticed some new icons in our web editor. Google+ Hangouts are handy, but we don’t want to require Floobits users to have a Google account. That’s why we’ve built WebRTC video chat into our editor. It’s still in an alpha/testing state, but we use it daily in our own work.

To try out our new video chat, you’ll need to have edit permission in a workspace. Once you do, click on the video camera in the upper right:

WebRTC Video Toggle

WebRTC works in Chrome and Firefox, although Firefox still has some issues reconnecting after a network interruption. This technology is very new, so don’t expect it to be flawless.


Cleaner URLs

We’ve also cleaned up some of our URLs. We’ve removed the /r from floobits.com/r/username/workspace and taken the /u out of floobits.com/u/username. Old URLs now redirect to the clean ones.


Flootty Improvements

Finally, we’ve fixed some nagging issues with non-UTF8 data in flootty. Flootty now works even if a misbehaving process spews binary data to the terminal. Be sure to update by running pip install --upgrade flootty



That’s what we’ve done recently. Next up: we’re going to merge some big changes to our editor plugins for Sublime Text, Emacs, and Vim.


About the Author

I’m Geoff Greer, CEO & co-founder of Floobits.

About Floobits

Floobits lets you collaborate on code like you're in the same room. Think Etherpad or Google Docs, but in Sublime Text, Vim, Emacs, or IntelliJ.

If you're interested, sign up.