Have you ever tried to brainstorm, plan, or otherwise think online with other people? It can be tough. You could use instant messaging, but what if you want to do something visual? What if you want to share an image? You could send a link or transmit the file. What if you wanted to draw something? Open up Paint, draw, save… well, maybe not. Up until now, there hasn’t been a good way to think collaboratively while online.

Enter Thinkature, a new online collaboration tool. It’s got a few tricks up its sleeve that I’ll bet you haven’t seen yet. Here’s a description from the horse’s mouth:

Thinkature brings rich communication to the web by combining an instant messaging system with shared, visual workspace. Use it as a collaboration environment, a meeting room, a personal web-based whiteboard, or something entirely new.

I’ve been meaning to write this post ever since our good friends Jon and Drew (fellow Olin grads) launched their baby about a week ago. They’ve been working on it for a while, and it’s finally ready for showtime. There are still some loose screws and jagged edges, but it pretty much redefines how people can share ideas online.

How Does It Work?

The concept of Thinkature is fairly simple: go to the website, create an online workspace, invite friends, and then collaboratively edit, organize, and chat in real time. However, it’s the execution that’s really exciting. The entire application is implemented in the browser, seamlessly communicating with the server in the background to save your changes as you make them and keep everyone using the workspace in sync with each other’s changes. It’s a pretty impressive technical accomplishment, but once you’re in, you kinda just forget about all the crazy voodoo going on underneath and enjoy the experience. I think that’s a mark of great software.

In order to show you how Thinkature works, I decided to use Thinkature to brainstorm the contents of this post in advance. I took screenshots of the process along the way that I’ll use below. How delightfully meta!

Creating a Workspace

Once you create an account and log in, you’ll be able to create a workspace to start playing in. Simply give it a name and invite some other users to work with. (Or don’t. Thinkature can be used just as well individually. It’s just even cooler when being used by multiple people.)

The Workspace Interface

Once your workspace is ready, just hit “Save Changes” and click on the title to enter. Wait for the interface to load (hey, that’s a nice loading animation!) and then you’re ready to begin. The bottom left of the screen is where you’ll find your four tools as well as the chat and user windows. Typing in the box and hitting enter will send chat messages to everyone using the workspace. If you want to recall the chat history, just hit the button to the left of the box at any time. More users can be invited from right within the workspace as well, so you don’t have to bother with loading pages in order to include another person.

Using Cards

The main tool for transferring your ideas to electronic canvas is known as a card. Just double-click with the arrow tool anywhere on the canvas and a new card will pop up. You can type in the cards, change their size (by dragging the bottom corner), adjust their stacking order, and even change their color. Selecting a card will bring up contextual buttons around the upper-right corner that accomplish all of these operations. In general, Thinkature’s interface is very polite, unobtrusively showing the relevant options for the current situation. Otherwise, it’s gets out of the way of you and your ideas, as any good tool should.

The nice thing about cards is that organizing them is relatively easy and intuitive. Want to get rid of a card? Just select it and click the red X or hit the Delete key. Want to move cards around? Just drag. Want to select groups of cards and move or delete them all at once? Drag-selecting or shift-clicking will get the job done in short order.

Adding Images

Ok, so I’ve got cards for words, but what if I want to illustrate something with an image? Clicking the Image button near the bottom-right of the screen brings up a handy window that lets you search Yahoo for relevant images (if you need a quick picture of a donut, for example) and also lets you upload your own images (if you need a picture of your grandmother, for example.) Once added, images behave almost exactly like cards: you can drag, resize, multiple-select (together with cards), and delete them.

Adding Drawings

Now I’ve got images in my guide, but sometimes I’d rather just make a quick sketch of something. Luckily, the next tool on the toolbar can help: the drawing tool. Just clicking the pencil and then drawing onto the canvas with the mouse will create freeform lines limited only by your artistic ability. Each time you lift the mouse button, the pixels are whisked away to the server and antialiased into a nice transparent image which can then be treated just like any other card or image. Neato!

Virtual Pointing

Moving down the toolbar, we come next to the pointing tool. When using a Thinkature workspace with multiple users all chatting and editing at the same time, things could get hectic. The pointing tool helps to cut through the fray and show people what card, image, or drawing on the workspace you’re talking about. Selecting the tool and clicking on an object causes a narrowing targeting box of sorts to fly in and surround the object. Click multiple times to really get your point across. You don’t have to click on objects either! Clicking on a blank section of the canvas will “mark the spot” for everyone to see. Pointing boxes disappear after a short time, getting out of the way and allowing you to continue working.

We Got Your Flow Charts Right Here…

The final tool on the toolbar is the connection tool. Selecting the tool and clicking on any two workspace objects will connect them with an arrow. Move either of the connected objects around and the arrows will follow, keeping them connected. You could use connecting arrows to make flow charts, graphs, or to illustrate any other type of directed connections. It’s better than drawing arrows with the drawing tool because you don’t have to redraw them every time you reorganize.

The Final Product

Once you’re finished with your workspace, you can admire it in all its glory. My finished workspace for brainstorming this post is below. It went through quite a few iterations and reorganizations while I took all the screenshots.

Once you leave your workspace and return to the workspace listing, you’ll notice that all of your changes have been automatically saved. In addition, the Thinkature system has generated a tiny thumbnail reminder of your workspace’s current state (including tiny images and drawings!) so that you can easily remember where you left off at a glance without having to enter the workspace again. Awesome!

Features I’d Like To See

When anyone sees Thinkature, there are usually two reactions: they get excited and they start suggesting new features. Because the tool is so flexible, it has an awful lot of edge cases. I feel like the Thinkature guys have done a great job of balancing general flexibility with specific ability so far, but I have a few suggesstions for small features that I’d like to see next:

1. Working copy/paste keyboard shortcuts for all workspace objects.
2. A grouping shortcut that lumps selected objects into one single object that can be broken apart again later. (Think Macromedia Fireworks’ Ctrl-G.) This would really help to simplify complex workspaces.
3. Lines made in rapid succession with the line tool should all be lumped into the same drawing object instead of creating many small (and unmanageable) line objects. This is a hard threshold to get just right…
4. Allow me to open my workspace up for public viewing without giving away public editing access, or allow me to otherwise publish what I’ve done in some way. (Data portability!)

In Conclusion…

Thinkature does a bang-up job of providing an online tool for collaboration and brainstorming that’s just the right amount of flexible and organized. I strongly recommend that you give it a try (with some friends, if you have any.)

In addition, why don’t you try using it for a school project, trip planning, room layout, or something totally new? If you do use it for something cool, let the Thinkature guys know. After all, the number of possible uses for the tool they’ve created should be somewhere close to the number of ways there are to think about things.