A couple of weeks ago we released Komodo IDE 7 Alpha 1 on an unsuspecting world. We want to get feedback on a couple of new features as early as possible so that we can incorporate the feedback in subsequent builds.

In other words: things might break, and things will change, but it’ll be fun.

Collaboration

One of the big new features is Collaboration. It lets you edit documents with other Komodo users in real-time, much like Google Docs but with a real editor instead of a web-based word processor. You could use this for pair programming or just getting advice from another programmer without resorting to pastebin.

Files are shared from the ActiveState servers so you and each of your co-editors will need an ActiveState single sign-on account. You configure these users as contacts in Komodo, then share specific files or groups of files as “sessions” with the contacts you choose.

This is new territory for us, and for any IDE as far as we can tell, so we need people to try it out. Is it intuitive? Does the sharing model make sense? Is it actually useful? Let us know on the Komodo-beta mailing list (archive, subscribe).