Working together with someone else can be rewarding, certainly, but it can also have its challenges, especially in the modern world where we don’t all live next door to each other.
QikPad is a handy online program that will let you collaborate on projects, letters, code, and anything else you can work with through text, and keep it all in sync.
It’s super fast and easy, requires no installation or sign up, and does not cost anything to use.
Whether it’s for school or work or some other personal enrichment, your collaboration and how it’s accomplished can be the difference between a good or bad final product. I can remember working an occasional school project with a classmate, over the phone.
The Internet was not the behemoth it is today, and the phone was our main staple to keep in touch so naturally we used it for any joint projects we wanted to accomplish. Later, we began using instant messenger programs to communicate and even collaborate on things, which was a major sight better than the phone since it allowed us to exchange visual information as well as audio on a headset. The problem with the IM programs is that they don’t always have an easy time communicating with each other, and there are so many of them out there it is not always likely that everyone in the group will have the same one.
Much later, and only in recent years from what I can see, it became almost commonplace to seek out programs on the Internet that would allow collaboration (more often on work projects but school still has a place there) between people who weren’t right next to each other. This brings a whole new facet to the concept of working from home or taking your work home with you. You can put your head together with someone who lives and works in Frankfurt Germany even if you are smack in the middle of Colorado. The biggest issue I have found with those programs is that they all want you and each of your collaborators to register and sign up for an account. This means, at the very least, that you’ll be seeing more spam in your email over time. No matter how vehemently a company says their privacy policy doesn’t allow for spam, the real fact of the matter is that most of those programs will wind up sending unwanted emails to you at regular intervals. They don’t consider it spam in the legal sense but that doesn’t mean it isn’t useless filler for your inbox.
QikPad is a web site that will allow you to collaborate with anyone else who has access to the page, without signing up or registering for anything at all. It’s supremely simple to use and takes about four seconds to get started. You simply go to the web page and type the name of your project into the QikPad and hit Enter. From there, you will be instantly taken to the collaboration page, which consists quite simply of a single document that can be edited live, on the fly, by anyone else logged into the project. Each person in the project can be represented by a highlighter color of their choice, and they can put their name into the page as well if they desire to do so. Everything typed on the screen by any project member is immediately shown on the page. One of the nicest features of QikPad is the ability to go back and watch the whole thing develop over time using the playback feature, which can be incredibly useful in determining when and how a certain event may have occurred during the project. You can also share the editable or the read only link to the project, to allow anyone you want to see it or participate.
While some services (like Google Docs, perhaps) can offer some of the same kind of collaboration options and even offer some more advanced features for such, QikPad’s real value is in its simple, quick, no-sign up process to get started on your project collaboration without hassles or slow-ups. Go to the page, put in your project name, and you’re already there. In a world measured in nanoseconds, any time-saving program solution is a welcome one, especially when it comes to collaboration across distance. Until next time, my friends.
Get started using QikPad here.
