Real Time Comments 💬

[dimitrie]

Hey @Testers! We’ve got something new for you to go and break. As part of our efforts to make Speckle meaningful for everyone - from content producers, architects, engineers, etc. to managers and clients, we’re previewing real time comments!

Here’s a quick sneak peek video, or check it out live!

Speckle Comments Preview

Please read the doc with all the extra info & details linked below. It gives more insight in what our future plans and roadmap is around this front.

Notion – The all-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and databases.

All of this is now available on latest - so go break it and keep the feedback (& comments) coming

[jsdbroughton]

For a privileged few?

[teocomi]

Guess we have our first bug report

[gokermu]

I was just gonna say it would be great to track statuses of comments and assign attributes but then I saw you are already planning an issue management system. Woohoo

[dimitrie]

Humm, that is strange - works OOTB for me in an incognito window, and the stream is public. I might wanna poke at this to reproduce (remember you were using Brave as a browser?) I’d expect other errors, but not an auth one!

[JdB]

I get the same error, in Firefox.

Awesome to see these type of features being added! Great stuff!

It works if I create a stream (Speckle) and add some comments.
In Firefox I noticed an issue (in chrome it works like a charm). When I make the stream public and try to access it from private mode, the 3D model doesn’t load in the viewer. If I click on the X (blue X at the bottom or gray X in the centre of the screen) then I just see an idle light blue loading bar.

[gokermu]

Same in Opera Incognito mode.

[dimitrie]

Okay guys, thanks for reporting! I’m slowly getting back to work & adjusting to life with a baby in the home office - will look into these permission issues next week!

Keep stuff coming. Besides this

@gokermu

track statuses of comments and assign attributes but then I saw you are already planning an issue management system

which will be implemented in issues, any other things that come to mind that could be easy wins?

[JdB]

I’ve shown the comments feature to colleagues and they loved the direction! They provided some great feedback, which I think would be good to share:

• The 3D web viewer by itself is already great for site inspections (easy access to model with a tablet). To improve Speckle for site visits, would it be possible to attach a photo in a comment?
• Would it be possible for a user to have an option to attach the comment to a Speckle object?
• Can a user pull in the comments in Speckle software?

[gjedlicska]

Hey @JdB

thanks for the feedback, happy to hear that you like where things are going.

Regarding the second point, the comments themself are already attached to your active selection plus the commit and/or the loaded object that is in the viewer context. Thats why, whenever you share a comment the viewer focuses on the given context. (probably we could give a visual clue, that this is happening)

[dimitrie]

Adding to @gjedlicska’s reply - i think selection info is yet to be attached to a comment, but it will come. Combining that with point (3) - pulling comments in connectors - can be quite powerful. This also helps us spec things better - initially was thinking to just store the speckle ids as selection info, but capturing the applicationId as well will make it easier to implement a useful integration in connectors (e.g., click on a comment, get the offending object selected).

Attaching images or other stuff (e.g., pdfs?) is doable. We’ll add this to our planning session next week!

[tomasmena]

is it possible to include links in the real-time comments?

[dimitrie]

Not yet but we should add that! Curious what you’d link to? We’re planning support for referencing commits and streams easily + mention!

[tomasmena]

Hi Dimitrie!
I was thinking to include links to external sites and also to streams and commits.
I was thinking to have an speckle view frame for the landing of our Mapping Changing Ecosystems Course.
We could have an Earth Globe (Such as google earth) with several comments that will show the location of each case. Each comment would contain a description with a link that would redirect people to a Miro board and to an Speckle Stream that Show each case study.

I think It would be a really nice “hack” to provide a more dynamic storyline of the course.
What do you think? could it be done with the current state of the tool?

[dimitrie]

Nice! I get it - you’ll probably want comments being displayed in the embedded viewer too then. I’ll add this our internal laundry list

With the current state of the tool, links are not supported - but we can add that soon. It’s a bit more difficult than it sounds due to security concerns. We’ll probably want to add a subset of markdown parsing in there. One easier way that might require less legwork is that if a comment only contains a link, we can transform that into a preview and display it appropriately (the way discourse does things when you paste a link like this:

Real Time Comments

[Screenshot 2022-03-22 at 20.32.23] Hey @Testers! We’ve got something new for you to go and break. As part of our efforts to make Speckle meaningful for everyone - from content producers, architects, engineers, etc. to managers and clients, we’re previewing real time comments! Here’s a quick sneak peek video, or check it out live! [Speckle Comments Preview] Please read the doc with all the extra info & details linked below. It gives more insight in what our future plans and road…

[tomasmena]

That Would be amazing for what I want!
Thanks you for your reply!

[jsdbroughton]

I’ve added a PR to add webhook activity triggers to comments. Partly for consistency but mostly telegraphing what I might be interacting with in the hackathon

[dimitrie]

@tomasmena, just a quick heads up as I forgot to mention this earlier - links are now supported! Check this comment out for an example.