GChat Blog

Looking for a professional new layout for your chat that’s slick and modern, and simple skins aren’t doing it for you anymore? Then this entry is for you. GChat Labs are pushing ahead with the second phase of Visichat development announced at the dawn of Visichat 3. You’ll be pleased to know the team has started work on what will become the next major release of Visichat that will include a brand new user interface. But that’s not all. The reason the team is gunning for a new look, is to take advantage of the wonderful recent developments that have occurred in the way Flash renders and supports its content. In short, the much anticipated ActionScript 3 support for Visichat is coming! It brings to the table not only a redesigned layout, but a slew of other handy features for customisers, DIY webmasters and ordinary chatters alike. Did we get your attention?

ActionScript 3 isn’t just a gimmicky word. It’s actually quite a significant improvement that makes Flash source codes easier to work with and extend. It takes full advantage of the latest Flash runtime, which features support for modern hardware like multi-core processors and swanky graphics cards which accelerate rendering of widgets and media. For the end user this means improved performance, greater responsiveness and stability. Overall the performance can jump up to 10%, and that’s without any major optimisations which GChat always does to get the most of its software on any platform. Moving up to the latest Flash runtime compatibility additionally brings the benefit of a much improved full-screen mode – excellent for animation, cool GUI effects and additional widget room; giving GChat developers much to innovate with.

Streaming features will definitely get a big boost. We are looking at real-time HD webcam, voice and video streaming – not just a slight compression tweak! With solid RTMPT protocol implementation newer Flash versions now enjoy, the development team thinks it would be a cinch to achieve flexible peer-to-peer connectivity, taking off the processing load from the server and sharing it evenly among chatters of an online community. Less load on the server means your community can support a greater number of streaming connections. More chatters, more stable links, more quality! All this while the interface sings beautifully along in the background, letting your community enjoy a truly responsive design.

The upgrade work to be done is considerable, although the team anticipates it will take less time than the groundbreaking server-side changes which took place in Visichat 3. Still the next major release will take longer than our more rapid minor updates. This is due to the sheer number of features to be added and the team desiring to give their usual top quality polish to the final product. It should be possible to implement the planned changes to the interface by the end of this year.

In the meantime, we will continue supporting the latest current version of Visichat with further minor updates and patches. We have more functionality to add to it, such as further admin panel tools and options, which we will carry over to the next version as well. Stay tuned and check back in the future for any upgrades. The new demo will be launched nearer the release date for you to beta test. Just don’t forget to keep your Flash plugin up to date!

If you’re a hosted chat customer with us, then you have probably experienced some unfortunate disruption during the past week due to underlying service changes on our end. For which we would like to unreservedly apologise. We’re sorry to say that after several small, but persistent DDoS incidents against our servers, our data center company – OVH – was unable to offer us a viable way forward to stay with them. Attacks we’ve weathered were risking to get out of hand, and we felt that we had to act quickly to protect our customers. OVH was unresponsive to our needs and couldn’t offer the company any suitably secure solutions.

As a result of these developments, we are moving all hosted chats to new, better servers which were hardened with additional DDoS protection options. This will be done as quickly as possible and free of charge for all hosted chats in our care. The development team will also work hard to do as much as possible on the software side of things to minimise any possible direct exposure of the chat server components to this sort of attack going forward.

So far the transition is going smoothly and we’re seeing good results so far. The new protection should be a step above CloudFlare, and the new infrastructure will be able to absorb much more punishment than before. We will keep you posted on our progress. There are still a few more chats to move, but the work is expected to be completely very shortly. You may still experience some minor, occasional disruption as we switch over various services to the new data centre, but don’t worry, in the meantime you can still access and use your chats as normal, as they will be kept running on the old servers up until the final switchover.

Once again, we would like to apologise for any inconvenience the current situation may have caused you. Regrettably, OVH failed to live up to our expectations and business needs. Lack of effective SLA terms with this provider, inconsistent and low quality support, and poor track record of the security options offered by them was starting to reflect badly on our service goals and our vision for the future of our customers. As such, we felt that the move to a better provider was necessary one. New hardware and greater protection should improve everyones’ experience in the long term. Stay tuned.

The update 3.0.2 is here. And the team is pleased with both the turnaround time on the major fixes and performance improvements on it. The guys in development also hope you will enjoy the little extra something they added in the admin panel. From 3.0.2, webmasters will have direct access to admin panel account permissions, giving them the power to provide moderator-panel-like access to the additional admin panel users, which have been introduced in 3.0.1.

But enough about the technical details. The title of the post is probably what brought you here and piqued your interest. To celebrate the new software release and the commencement of the spring season, GChat is happy to announce the start of its first ever springtime sale event.

Until Friday, 22 March, you will be able to grab the Standard license for just $199 – yep, $199 – that’s not a typo. Each Standard license comes with six months of free updates, is loaded with features, which already set Video Chat 3 head and shoulders above its predecessor, and gives you access to all Flash source codes required to modify your chat interface.

Hosted chat customers haven’t been forgotten either. Not only will they be able to get the Flash source codes to customise their chats with, they will also find a nice 10% for short-terms renewals of 3 months, which has also been launched.

Finally further work has been done on improving the update procedure for the script. Two whole steps – the chat files and data migration from versions 3.0 and 3.0.1 – have been automated. If you’re upgrading, please don’t forget to take a quick look at the official Wiki, to get a heads-up on how to update Vide Chat.

Stay tuned for more. In the meantime, we look forward to serving you during the sales period and beyond.

On demand, real-time content has been a growing web consumer demand for the past two decades. This focus became increasingly important for chat products because, put quite simply, the modern consumer doesn’t like to wait for content to be delivered. So, if it isn’t streamed, on tap so to speak, it’s dead in the water and is seen as archaic. What me mean by this is of course the traditional client-to-server communication model where
the client makes a request and gets served a well formed reply to this request, communication ends, and the server idles until the next request is received and so it goes on. For instant messaging of any kind this a big hurdle to overcome, since there’s an inherent need to keep the connection live between two or more parties for as long as necessary with few interruptions.

For years there existed a huge variety of ways, some more arcane than others, in getting close to real-time feedback from web applications, but it certainly wasn’t a walk in the park, although the essential ideas emerged as early as 1990. Certainly the idea of push behaviour and a server that actively seeks to supply content isn’t new in itself; however, with the advent of HTML5, HTML5 Push Notifications and WebSockets API, things are about to get very interesting. Finally there is a promise of standard or at least a set of web standards that will make a working developer’s life a whole lot easier!

HTML5 is a breath of fresh air in this arena. It’s still the mark up we know and love, but with a sharper definition, less legacy fluff and sights firmly set on Web applications. W3C, WHATWG and other involved interest groups are trying to bring about changes from the trenches of working developers’ projects to the new specification, visibly taught by experience of futile and bored exercises with HTML 4.01 and XHTML that preceded their current work.

This is great because everyone can recall the chagrin paper standards (that is with few practically sound uses), dictated from the top caused previously. Yes they may have been comprehensive and theoretically sound, yet they often missed the point, as is often the unfortunate end of big standardisation efforts. Honestly, who can raise a hand to loving the XML way of doing the web day-to-day or delving deep into the bureaucratic bowels of the Java monster? Not many takers for that one, that’s for sure! Advantages of the HTML5 standard are that it’s open, easy to work with and doesn’t require anything beside good web browser compliance.

So, the million dollar question, as always, is what’s new? HTML5 Push Notifications is something we at GChat particularly like. It’s a simple and elegant way of keeping a client supplied with content, by tracking application state changes on the server side and making new content rapidly available to the client, that subscribed to the service previously. For chat it offers the means to implement different multi-user scenarios with less software overhead per connection than ever before. And the best bit is that the server in this model takes care of worrying if everyone is seeing the same overall state – the user doesn’t have to worry about a thing.

WebSockets API is also a recent new development to come out of the HTML5 world. It provides with chats with traditional, sockets-like behaviour over the web using the standard port 80, to provide a full duplex data communication mode which works seamlessly across many platforms and firewall configurations. WebSockets can be utilised to build traditional client/server apps or distributed peer-to-peer solutions, which we found to be both helpful and liberating as a software developer.

Last but not least, HTML5 brings with it new elements, forms and 2D/3D graphics capabilities which can drive dynamic, responsive interfaces with a modern look, accelerated by the latest computing hardware technologies on mobiles and traditional computing environments. Heterogeneous, flexible and scalable – what’s not to like?

Of course, web is a fast paced race track and there have been plenty one-trick ponies around. Let’s say we’re cautiously optimistic. The standard looks good, the support for it is growing and GChat developers are most certainly keen on trying something new. Whilst the commercial release of Video Chat 3.0 is still fresh with its robust security measures, dynamic control panel and exceptional performance, GChat research and development effort is already expanding to experimenting with new HTML5 goodies and looking for future market applications of the technology to boost the company’s already impressive portfolio of products and services. It’s still GChat ambition to grow in the mobile sector without sacrificing quality of the experience its clients have come to depend on and expect on the PC. HTML5 might just make that possible!

As we’re collecting feedback from the Video Chat release, patching up some initial teething issues and looking forward to the next update in a few months, we’re are exploring the possibility of launching a few new products to study the feasibility of HTML5 for different chat and multimedia applications. GChat development team is also interested in the collection various online feeds and social networks integration possibilities presented by the current and upcoming open standards. It’s likely the software development and updates schedule will get quite busy as all these great ideas come to fruition. So stay current with GChat news, and if you haven’t subscribed yet, it might be a good idea to do so now.

After a brief winter break, GChat team is back, refreshed and renewed, for the start of another busy year ahead. And what a start it’s proving to be! The Video Chat 3 demo has proven itself a big hit, and naturally the development team received plenty of constructive feedback from first-hand user experiences. What is happening now is a major push to put as much final polish on the final software release as possible. Guys in development are also doing their best to please by sneaking an extra feature or two in a middle of their perpetual, caffeine fuelled marathon – that’s right – it’s crunch time! Technical and customer support is also catching up with a number of ongoing and new queries that came through over the holidays, but fear not, everything is still on track.

From Monday 14 January hosted chat customers will be able to order an upgrade for their existing chat. After some deliberation, it was decided that first come, first served basis was probably the fairest way to prioritise the update schedule. So, mark the date in your calendars. For all current hosted chat customers the upgrade is free, as always. A technician will ensure that your data is safely migrated to the new software release and your updated chat is ready to go within 24 hours. Don’t worry if you are happy with version 2.6, or want to wait until 3.0 release settles down, that’s fine too. However, the team has great plans for the new platform, so don’t wait too long.

By now you probably already had a go at talking to the Chat Robot in the demo, but it isn’t the only plug-in in the works. As promised, resources are being allocated to create a new theme and interface front-end for Video Chat. This is important not just for aesthetic reasons but also is a required next step in our product development. After all, form should follow function. The new skin will be designed to be more flexible and will take the best advantage of the new underlying software platform and control panel features already available in version 3.0. GChat’s long term goal is to make the GUI accessible and portable, to allow the product to grow into new markets whilst keeping its top notch desktop experience.

Following on from the development of the Chat Robot, another plug-in that’s on the books is a dedicated Trivia Bot. The chief difference between the two will be the Trivia Bot’s capability to run fully automated quiz sessions in one or more rooms. It can live alongside the Chat Bot, act separately or be used in conjunction with it. Trivia Bot does not depend on the Chat Robot and will be available separately to buy from gchat.com. The torrent of plug-ins won’t stop there. The development team is keen to work through the customers’ suggestions, pick the best and roll them out as plug-ins for immediate deployment as soon as possible, so stay tuned for additional news and pricing details nearer the time of release.

The team also made progress on the documentation front. We went with a dynamic media wiki to meet your needs for self-help guidance, chat tips and installation information. Have a look at the GChat Wiki and let us know what you think. The wiki is a repository of wisdom from the technical team. It’s part reference, part tutorial guide for the technically inclined webmaster, who would like to learn how to handle his chat himself from the server side and pick up on chat management tricks which he may not have been aware of previously. It will eventually cover all GChat products. The wiki is a work in progress, but the team hopes you will like what you see and return for frequent updates.

As we head towards Christmas, we felt it was appropriate to take a moment to reminisce on the passing year, our ups and downs, and consider what the future holds for us and our customers. The year 2012 certainly flew by quickly and there was plenty of work to do. Re-branding, accelerating development on the much-awaited successor to our Visichat software and re-aligning our business model to better address the ever evolving needs of our customers – was just the tip of the iceberg. Indeed, at times challenges were great, demanding both of our time and fine balance in introducing needed change while not forgetting to add extra polish to the things that already set us apart from the competition. So, without further ado let’s sit down by the fire, albeit a virtual one, and recap.

First, there was a quiet spell at the start of the year, when our development team worked hard on adding a centralised customers portal to the GChat website. It took some time away from other GChat projects, including the latest update, but the team felt the benefits of a centralised account management system were worth the delay. The portal is easy to access, use and has everything you need to know as a GChat customer in one place. It made technical and customer support much easier to manage, too, as our customer base rapidly grew. And the best thing about this tool was the fact that our existing customers were already registered by default. Their order and account details were imported from previous transactions – meaning all they had to do was reset their password and presto – they were in straight away, with full access to their profile, software downloads and technical support.

Following the introduction of the customers portal, we decided to proceed with a full re-brand and associated domain change, which was long planned. We anticipated some disruption to our business during the changeover, but overall are pleased to say it went rather well. Sure, there were some search hiccups, as Google never misses an opportunity to keep webmasters and SEO gurus on their toes, and we’d rather leave those behind us, but we pushed through.

The team certainly learnt plenty more about the Google ranking algorithm than it ever wanted to know! There was a lot of late night logo swapping, text replacement, link checking and tidy-up work – all good fun. Of course, our customers were shielded from all this and our forums saw healthy traffic throughout, regardless of our Google adventures. We hired additional staff, introduced phone support and extended one year’s worth of updates service subscription to make life just a little bit easier for all our current licensees.

As we refocused on the new version of our video chat software, GChat homepage got a steady stream of rolling improvements. FAQ section for Video Chat was added, making quick answers to common questions searchable and accessible to all visitors to our site. A dedicated features page was also launched for the product. It’s dynamic, which means any new additions to the software or its existing features will be highlighted straight away, making both easy to spot. Additionally, there are now highlights of the top Video Chat features directly on its product page, for easy of reference. You can now also enjoy the newly simplified ordering process with comparison tables for key product editions.

Thing certainly got more hectic in late autumn, heading in to winter. The company blog went live, following popular demand, and on 14 December we were pleased to allow public access to the Video Chat 3 live demo beta test, which proved very successful so far. Plenty of useful feedback and excitement about the upcoming software release was communicated back to HQ. The team thanks kindly those who took the time to also forward truly touching words of encouragement and patiently waited for this event. All feedback was greatly appreciated. The wait itself is almost over, too. Our hosted chat customers will receive the latest software release round 14 January 2013, followed by official commercial launch shortly after. If you haven’t tried the demo yet, look for it at Video Chat Demo. Dynamic custom user groups, moderated hand raise, dynamic languages, skins and more, is already live, and it is being patched daily up to the point of official release.

And GChat story doesn’t end there, next year, after launch of Video Chat 3, we’ll be busier than ever. The restructuring of our business and software model is almost done. We will strive to bring more frequent updates, modules and products to you, whilst further improving our site and services. In particular, you can look forward to a detailed manual for Video Chat, great value packages and a new front-end chat skin.

Once again, we would like to thank all our customers for supporting our products, contributing valuable content to the community forums and of course using the software that we build.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year
GChat Team