getPolka goes Live

Submitted by naughty_david on Sat, 03/24/2012 - 19:40

Collaborate

It has always been difficult to talk over Designs. And when the players are from entirely different backgrounds then they would sound Alien to each other.
While working on Projects for the web and off it, we have always faced this issue.
Designs and Revisions were a head ache for the Guys who design it and for those its being Designed for.
And as most of the communication happens over emails and sometimes over a phone call, people always seem to loose track of things.

When

Two years back we wanted to have a system to clean up this mess. We code named it Sharable. A tool that would allow players to communicate over designs.
Being a Drupal company it was Obvious that we would want this tool to be built around it, both because it would be easier to Implement and everything that we wanted was already in place.

We couldnt really work on this Idea until late last year. And by then we had decided to make it a service which every one can use. And it was also given a new name getPolka

getPolka exploits the the best of HTML5 and CSS3 on the Browsers and Drupal's Content Management Framework.

NOT Flash

In the world of Creative collaboration suites Flash has been the best solution. But we all know how difficult it is to build a tool like this in Flash and how well they run in Browsers.
So we decided to try out hand with HTML5 and CSS3. In getPolka we have used almost every bit of Awesomeness offered by HTML5 and CSS3. From Canvas to History API to CSS3 Transitions and Animations.
Along with this Drupal Comes with built in jQuery Support.

What

getPolka has 3 main sides to it.

Account Management
Project Management and
The App

How

The first 2 items in the list would explain why Drupal. Here we have exploited Drupals User account management and Content Access control as much as we could. Drupal has already
proved itself at being used to develop a Project Management and Collaboration too, which is OpenAtrium.

Apart from this we have also used Drupal's Powerful File API. Collaborating over Images or any media would require a lot of storage space, either its email or any other means we will have to store every bit of data.

And all of which should be protected and at the same time it should be Delivered as fast as it can be. To deal with this we tuned to Entity API.

Drupal has evolved a lot through the years and the good thing about it is that it just keeps getting better. The Entity API is a just an example, which brings in a level of abstraction to any data or literally anything in Drupal.
Be it Content, Tags, Images, Users or something custom. Everything is treated and acted up on as Entity, with its own fetching and delivery and access control. Just what we were looking for.

NO IE

And then the App. Here we needed to make a decision. IE or NO IE.
And things went really well when we decided we will go with NO IE. This choice opened up a lot of possibilities for us. From HTML5 Canvas to CSS3 Animations and much more.
The use of CANVAS was obvious but there were many more things that we have done and are still trying to do on getPolka.

This is also helping us go mobile. The mobile version of getPolka for iPad and iPhone might just not be a Native application, but a web app which could work quiet well on any mobile device which runs a modern Browser

The Beta release is an ice breaker. And we are working hard to bring a stable version to the market.

The Free accounts offer 10 Projects plus a GiG of Storage. Try it out getPolka.

Where

getPolka is on the Cloud with getPantheon. getPantheon is the last word for Drupal hosting unless you get your own cloud Instance and still you have to setup a server like getPantheon did.
We have been working on getPantheon for a while and were really impressed by the Drupal hosting work flow. They have the most ingeniously created server stacks tailored for Drupal.
On top of all these they have a well dedicated team supporting everything Drupal.

getPolka is going RealTime, Real Soon. We are working on real time features which will allow users to interact with designs on a Real Time Canvas. Support for Real Time Annotations and Comments
are going to be added in the next Release.

We need your help for that. You could try out getPolka and let us know what you think, what we are missing and what you would love to see in getPolka.

getPolka
Collaboration Made Easy
-- getPolka Team