With a retail price of $229 USD the tool is not cheap – but depending on the usage and potential productivity gain this can be a bargain.

If you are ready and able to write some export templates one can export almost anything to XML or HTML and turn that into layouted documents, presentations or websites.

The “magic” of Tinderbox is that it allows visual unstructured brainstorming and turn that into structured documents over time. But does not stop there like other mind mapping tools: by adding text notes, metadata, agents and actions that perform queries and manipulate data. So you can make your document smarter and add some automatism to it. There are endless ways to use Tinderbox and to make it fit to your brain.

After watching some screencasts you can read some examples of what people are doing with Tinderbox.

You can’t expect from Tinderbox: online collaboration, custom import of any data, direct export to MS Office documents and the like, table editing within notes, a programmable enviroment (alhtough actions and agents can do a lot already), a Windows version (supposed to be in the making).

Here is a software review by Natan Matias from Sitepoint.

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(see a demo on their site)

Google Wave is an integrated set of technologies (with protocols that allow semi-synchronous editing of outlines and their federation across several servers). With this approach Google Wave solves some difficult technical and infrastructural problems.

But it also generates some new problems that need to be solved to make Google Wave a success — otherwise I think users will not adopt the system (which in case of Google will set the seal on this project I suppose!).

1. Misty horizon

Google Wave is a frameworked solution for things people did not ask for and communication processes that no one is practicing yet (but no one has really “asked” for the mouse as input device either!). It is hard to see where Google Wave is going to be. This breeds creation, but it also challenges the non-developer. There will be best practices, but it will take a lot of time to identify use cases that people can learn “to wave” with.

So Google Wave challenges the imagination – and few people will be able to answer the “What is it all about?” question easily. The horizon is schrouded in mist.

Possible approach: A potential solution to this is to start with guided tours (a LOT of them) showing very common and powerful use cases for different scenarios. This is probably going to happen when Wave gets closer to the public beta.

2. Asynchronous patterns

We have learned to communicate in a turn taking fashion. It is polite to let someone speak until he has finished before starting to respond. It is not polite for everyone to speak up at any time. Waves allow people to reply or edit without obeying to the turn taking pattern. This can cause “stress” and also a lot of misunderstanding. People could reply to a text, that is going to change without them noticing that. Their reply suddenly become nonsense – the playback feature could become the only way to percieve a conversation properly. But playback is new – people have learned that the threaded view is a chronology – but in Google Wave it is not (or not necessarily).

Even with the playback feature, people need to become aware of the asychronicity in Google Wave – and learn how to recap conversations correctly.

Possible approach: Find a very good way to understand the chronology of a wave (e.g. making the playback as fundamental for navigation of a wave like scrolling)

3. Information (over)flow

While Google Wave may integrate many messaging systems – it also generates a lot of density. Means of communication that were apart from each other – using different URLs and applications for each – are now combined. The crucial part of that is to understand which option is suited for what purpose.

With Waves being set to “updated” by displaying them in bold typeface and sorting it to become a top item in the inbox, this also means that things are brought to my attention that should remain buried for a good reason. Google Wave users would have to learn how to manageund understand the “Inbox” and the “Active” areas properly, to be able to get the most out of it.

Possible approach: Allow users very powerful and fine grained control over the way they are informed about updates.

4. Scattered spaces and framgmented scopes

One of the things that really can make things too complex to be comprehended properly is that people can read & write to waves – but replies can extend or narrow the scope (e.g. who may read and reply to a new item. Who is reading? Who am I replying to? Is this part really private or not? Am I releasing a secret to the public accidentally?)

With a view from a different angle: What I can see within a wave may be different to what someone else is seeing. To make my communication appropriate to the situation I need to be able to “read” from a different standpoint. It is required to understand when communication could fail on the recieving end.

Whenever I want to understand the perspective of someone else – in need to be able to represent his/her view in my mind. The change of scope for parts of a wave within that wave can make this difficult.

Possible approach: Make any changes of the scope (e.g. recipient list) within a wave very visible and allow users to navigate them.

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See audioboo.fm…

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This is the result: Blogsphere activities by Oliver Wrede [also as RSS feed]

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Scrivener just seems to be a superb tool for people that collect material and thoughts to finally create a text from that.

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The files Pathway creates are XML. So it should be very easy to transform it into anything else with an XSL Template or script. E.g. a Tinderbox file or an OPML file…

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Winer called that idea a World outline. People with a pre-WWW Internet experience may call it the “revenge of gopher“.

In any case Grazr is a slick little flash app that really connects the dots. This idea has bee around for years, but somehow no one ever took care of developing a simple tool for it. It was overdue.

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More generally thinking I asked myself how many people actually do Paypal donations on “donationware”? Would these little applications make a better profit if they sell for $10 instead of $25?

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I have tested the prior releases (up to 0.5.X) and decided these versions are not ready for daily use yet. The 0.7.0 release (the first Beta) seems to be much better, but it still consumes a lot of RAM.

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Michael Robertson presents his view of AjaxOS. He claims that moving software into services is going to be successful and a way to compete with Microsoft. Besides he admits that they never will clone Office completely.

I don’t agree with that claim. I think the principle idea of software being delivered through the web is going to be succssesful, but I don’t think the success factor will be AJAX as such. I think the success factor will be simple collaboration and a low enty barrier (just a browser needed).

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Metafy’s Anthracite Web Mining Desktop toolkit gives you the tools you need to build powerful data processing systems with an easy-to-use visual interface that makes complex manipulations quickly possible. Anthracite is built for people who need to transform internet sources and/or large data sets into integrated information quickly and easily without scripting.

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This is what it looks like:

It also offers some del.icio.us integration. The UI has still some usability issues, but generally Performancing seems to be a slick little add-on for Firefox.

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The ZServer has been replaced with the Twisted server. The Twisted server supports all that the ZServer supporting has well has HTTP over SSL natively and SFTP (disabled for now because of error handling problems). Also in the future it brings a better chance of other non-HTTP related protocols from being implemented for Zope3, like SMTP-in and IMAP.

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Backpackit is aimed to be some kind of simple groupware. Writely.com and Jotspot Live are aimed at collaborative writing. I personally found the visual feedback and the interaction of Jotspot Live much better: it is far more synchronous when several people write on a document. But I guess neither one of these application could compete with SubEthaEdit, where you actually can see other people typing single characters (I haven’t heard of a feasible Windows counterpart to this BTW).

I didn’t have a chance by now to actually use this synchronous writing for any kind of productive work. I am just dreaming Tinderbox would support this! What a killer application this could be!

Update: Tim Bruysten pointed me to Gobby and Zoho Writer.

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