Creating a new chat: click the New Chat tab or navigate to http://watrcoolr.info/demo/watrcoolr.nsf/create.xsp. Set a topic, click the Public checkbox if you want the chat to be publicly visible and discoverable, then click Start Chatting. The new chat will be created, and you will be redirected to it immediately. NOTE: you must be authenticated to start a chat. Anonymous users may view public chats, but cannot post messages, and cannot create new chats.
Posting messages: if you have access to participate in a chat, a "rich text" field will appear at the bottom of the chat window. Type your message into this field and press Enter (or Return) to send the message.
You can send multiple lines in a single message by pressing Shift + Enter to add a new line without sending the message (or pasting in content that already contains multiple lines).
Messages support basic formatting, such as bold, italic, and underlined. These three formatting options also support keyboard shortcuts: respectively, CTRL+B, CTRL+I, CTRL+U. The toolbar includes an option allowing you to set alternate text colors. The toolbar also includes buttons for inserting pictures, URL links, and emoticons; the picture button is currently non-functional, due to a bug in Domino 8.5.3. URLs and emoticon text do not automatically become clickable links and graphical icons, so for these content items, be sure to use the corresponding toolbar button.
Two other buttons in the toolbar that are mostly useless at the moment are bullets and numbering. Ordinarily, these buttons are perfectly functional, but in this context, Enter sends the message, which obviously terminates the list. Similarly, lists treat Shift+Enter the same way this application does: a new line instead of a new item. So each list would have, at most, a single item. If you really want to be able to use lists, let me know and I'll add a user preference that disables the key listener and adds a "Send" button instead so that you can manually send messages instead of having them automatically sent when the Enter key is pressed.
Searching: Enter a search term or phrase into the provided field in the upper right, and press Enter or click the search icon. watrCoolr uses an "AND" search algorithm; if, for example, you search for "hello world", a chat will be considered a valid search result if it contains both words - not the exact phrase, and a chat that only contains "hello" or "world" will not be considered a match.
watrCoolr also uses message proximity to indicate search result strength. For example, suppose I search for "lotusphere abstract deadline". In one chat, someone has posted, "I'm considering submitting an abstract for Lotusphere", and someone responds, "better hurry, the deadline is tomorrow". This chat will be considered a strong search result, because the two messages that comprise the search result are immediately adjacent. If, in a different chat, someone posted in February, "it was great seeing everyone at Lotusphere... can't wait till next year"; in May, someone asked, "what does it mean when a Java class is marked as abstract?"; in August, someone says, "sorry I haven't responded to your question sooner... big deadline coming up". This chat is also considered a valid search result, because it contains all the terms searched for, but the distance between the first message containing any of the terms and the last is huge; as a result, it is unlikely this content will answer my question, so it will display further down in the result list. In the event that multiple results are found with the same message proximity score, the most recent results will display first in the list.
The search results screen will indicate the search phrase at the top, and display a list of any valid results in the middle of the page. Each result will include a brief excerpt (up to 100 characters) of the first message in the search result. This excerpt is a link directly to that message; if clicked, the chat containing the message will open and scroll directly to the message. Each search result will also indicate the time the message was posted, the chat containing the message, and the message author. In subsequent versions of this application, the message author's "reputation" will be a factor in the perceived strength of each search result. When hovering over the link to the search result, a tooltip will appear containing up to 5 messages from the search result. In the previous example where two adjacent messages satisfied all three search terms, there might be no need to navigate to the result in the context of the full chat, because if I was searching for this phrase because I wanted to know when the deadline was for submitting an abstract, this tooltip has now answered my question without even opening the chat that contained these messages.
Automatic translation when using Chrome: Google's translation services are built directly into the Chrome web browser. As a result, it uses various contextual clues in order to determine (or, at least, guess) the language used in the content of each page. If it detects that the entire page uses a language that differs from your primary language, it may even offer to automatically translate the content into your native language. In cases where multiple languages are used within the same page, however, Chrome also includes a context menu item allowing you to manually ask the browser to attempt to translate any foreign content into your primary language.
When any message is posted to watrCoolr, the application stores the "locale" code associated with the language settings of the browser from which the message was sent. For example, "en_US" for American English, "de" for German, "fr" for French, etc. As messages are sent back to the browser of each chat participant (including the sender), the content is flagged with this locale code. If Chrome has been told to translate the content, either automatically via your browser preferences, or manually via the context menu, the locale code tells Chrome the preferred language of the message sender, allowing it to attempt to translate it into your own language.
In short, a watrCoolr chat might involve participants speaking a dozen different languages, each posting messages written in their own native language... yet, any of these participants who is using Chrome to access watrCoolr would see each of the messages in their own language, regardless of who originally posted each message and what language they used.