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Implementation Spotlight: Kohive

September 01, 2010 | Jay Robinson

What is Kohive?

Kohive's logoKohive is an online collaboration tool for teams to work together. They can create separate virtual desktop workspaces called hives where they can share and interact with each other in real time.

Kohive brings several services in a simplified form into one place and is heavily focused on design, usability and experience.

When we came across Ext JS we decided to scrap six months of previous work and redesign everything—it was the best decision we ever made.

After joining Kohive, the user is greeted with what looks like a computer desktop. They are shown a list of applications on the left and a tab panel at the bottom. Each of these custom tabs, or “hives”, provide the user with a completely separate workspace from which to invite people, communicate, share and work around the web apps.
  • A web designer could create a hive for each one of his projects, invite his clients and start sharing files, ideas, tasks, events, contacts etc.
  • A teacher could create a hive for their classrooms to communicate with students outside of school and allow them to share links, files, images, educational videos, essays, etc.
  • A family could create a hive to share photos, videos, recipes and communicate with each other.

Why did you choose Ext JS?

Ext JS allows Kohive to take the user from a page-driven reality back into the more well developed desktop window interface found in all of today’s operating systems. This means that content loads quicker, navigation is smoother and users have the flexibility to look at different information side by side instead of going back and forth different pages. Screenshot of Kohive desktop online collaboration We initially had a completely different interface, it was still not page-driven but it was less than impressive. When we came across Ext JS we decided to scrap six months of previous work and redesign everything—but it was the best decision we ever made. Ext JS gave us a unique selling point in the online collaboration market.

What makes Kohive unique?

Screenshot of Kohive user interfaceDesign, usability and toolset is how we differentiate ourselves. We are also thinking about enabling developers to create and sell apps to our users. We're very excited about that. We think Kohive follows a similar mentality to the iPhone. It repackages older web services in a new user interface to give functionality without sacrificing usability. The site mimics popular and familiar user interfaces and icons and follows the best technologies, practices and standards for user navigation. By doing so, we ensure that users can always get from A to B with a minimum amount of effort, increasing their productivity and reducing frustration.

There are 37 responses. Add yours.

Loiane

1 year ago

Wow! Beautiful! Great job!

Awesomee Bob

1 year ago

What she said…

Totti

1 year ago

What Bob said..

Rachmat Kukuh R.

1 year ago

What Totti said…

Andy L.

1 year ago

Hmm, what DB said…

JF Cambot

1 year ago

Qu’est ce que Andy L a dit ? wink

Damian Poole

1 year ago

....... What Andy said

Tof

1 year ago

I agree with Damian.

Animal

1 year ago

Ditto!

Stavros K.

1 year ago

Ohhhh, what Animal said ...

Remeez

1 year ago

.... What Stavros K said.

Christian

1 year ago

What Remeez and all other said. Rock on.

Thomas

1 year ago

Its what Christian said smile

gevik

1 year ago

What Julain and others said smile

abudhahir

1 year ago

What gevik and others said

Brad

1 year ago

Very slick!

cnelissen

1 year ago

I agree with what everyone here has said

Jay Robinson

1 year ago

Thanks for all the great comments, guys. You can try out Kohive for yourself at http://www.kohive.com/.

Edward

1 year ago

And I agree with cnelissen completely!

Alex P

1 year ago

What Edward said.

Wedson

1 year ago

Muito bom esse aplicativo, várias funções e o mais importante esta muito leve.

Edward II

1 year ago

I tried http://www.kohive.com/ but was unable to create a new hive. The website takes a request for a new hive name, but doesn’t do anything after that.

baby clothes wholesale

1 year ago

ohhh…what the animal’s answer was?

www.danikids.com

Mike Smith

1 year ago

What Alex said?

Fran

1 year ago

I agree with everyone here… it’s great job, beautiful, showing what we can build using this framework… although… useless in my opinion. But hey!! I’m sure the developer’s had a great fun implementing it.

Andres

1 year ago

this is best, Great job

Micha

1 year ago

Wie Mike schon sagte! (What Mike said)

Aron

1 year ago

Wie Micha schon sagte smile GREAT!

Krakatau Engineering

1 year ago

as whoever here said!

Pat

1 year ago

There is hardly any source code available for this is there?

Mike

1 year ago

Ok I’ll be different - fancy but clunky.

David Gildeh

1 year ago

Looks very nice, we have also built a collaboration platform using GXT (EXT-GWT) instead of Ext-JS because of all the advantages of GWT over JavaScript when building large AJAX applications.

Its focussed on business users rather than consumers like Kohive, and is top of its class for content management and (coming soon) project management and we’d love to get your feedback! Please check it out at www.sambajam.com/signup. We’ve also done a few blogs on improving performance of GXT applications which we learnt along the way at www.sambastream.com/blog. Would love to share our experiance with GXT on a future Implementation Spotlight too!

Kevin Cho

1 year ago

Incredible! Wish I knew how you guys made that.

liberar movil

1 year ago

What Remeez and all other said.

Tom

1 year ago

When the first simple html page of a project fail to display with the most common and used browser (IE), we could guess the quality of the most complex pages.

MiguelMich

1 year ago

I want to know why Kohive windows are deployed even faster than the desktop example (from ExtJs examples)

Lena

5 months ago

You put the lime in the cooncut and drink the article up.

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