Don't forget to pack your android when you go on a stargazing field trip to escape the city lights. I relearned all the constellations I knew as a kid after playing with SkyMap for a week.
It's probably more important to have a good set of coding guidelines when writing C++ code than with other languages, but there's no reason not to write new projects in C++ if it's the best language for the task and team.
Voxli is built on C++ and boost. We make liberal use of scoped_ptr and shared_ptr where appropriate and we have yet to experience resource leaks in our client.
Glad to hear you find it useful! I would recommending binding it to a key you rarely use, like the right control key on Windows, or a weird combo like Control-Shift-A on Mac.
We require an install program because gamers require push-to-talk outside the browser. This cannot be accomplished with any amount of Javascript or Flash coding. The only way to break out of the browser sandbox is to write a piece of native code and install it as a browser plugin. This is why we have separate mac and windows plugins, for instance.
I agree that the MSI is pretty annoying. I don't really like to install random binaries either. At the end of the install, the browser should take you into your room without any user interaction -- which is why we don't show a "install done" dialog. But as it is confusing and not how most other apps do it, we'll look into making it more clear. The only other alternative for Windows was to use the Mozilla plugin installer as we do on Mac -- but that requires a browser restart and it was very confusing to users in our user tests. Overall I agree our install process has a lot of room for improvement and continued user feedback such as yours will help us refine it going forward.
You must hold down the push to talk button to talk. While you are holding it down, it says "ON AIR" and shows the waveform of your microphone recording. Agreed, we should probably add some help text to say that it is a push-hold button like a walkie-talkie and not a toggle button you click once.
If you want background noise, just click the 'always on' checkbox and the mic will stay on, giving you all the background noise you want. We don't default to this state because we are tailored for large groups. The background noise from 20 people would be pretty distracting, so we default to radio silence. Sometimes we think of it more as a walkie-talkie system for groups than a conference call.
The "Add Rooms" feature is definitely a work-in-progress. To clarify, people who aren't in the same "room" can't hear each other. This way, large gaming guilds can all be in the same channel and know who's online and what's going on, but still be broken up into smaller teams for communicating on specific tasks. One way we are working on improving this feature is to allow string names for rooms: for example, "PVP Group 1" or "Room for Bored People" instead of just a number. Also, you can only be in one room per browser tab. If you want to be in multiple rooms, open another tab to the same page.
Thanks again for the feedback! Seems I should start a FAQ on the website, or maybe add some help tips to the interface.
We in fact are using swfobject.... Could you please file a bug report from inside any chat room by clicking on "feedback" so we can capture your browser information? Thanks. I'll double-check to make sure we've got the latest code.
Glad you find it simple. We don't like installing plugins easier, but gamers need certain features that we couldn't provide with what's built into Flash--like push-to-talk from any application.
http://www.google.com/sky/skymap.html