I'm conducting an enjoyable dialogue with the guys at <a href=http://www.awasu.com/>Awasu</a> who make my Newsreader, about what I really want all this new software to do. Awasu wants to be the glue between various bits of software that work together, which is understandable from their perspective, but as a user I really don't want to wind up with half a dozen more applications cluttering my drive, even if they all work together seamlessly. Well, maybe if they work seamlessly, but I want them all to arrive and install as a group, not to have to source each one separately. I don't have the time or knowledge to do that.

The posting <a href=http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?journal=rlmrdl&itemid=35153>here</a> talks a bit about what I want from a news reader and the discussion has thrown in other stuff as well which must be really frustrating for developers. The truth is that I don't want to "see" the applications that make stuff work, every time I have to be aware of them, or change from one to another, is just a nuisance.

However, this link to <a href=http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20030220.html>Cringeley</a> talking about castBridge is very interesting. The idea that a tool can be developed to import information into a document from wherever that information is located, procided I have permission to access it, makies sense to me.

I tried Groove networks but it is plainly an enterprise tool and probably runs best over a LAN or with fast connections, run over the net, even with cable/ DSL at both ends, it is sluggish and takes control of my documents by locating them on the remote server, ensuring that, unless I am logged in to Groove, i have no way to edit with the native software or sync the documents with others that are sharing them. The Internet is about giving me control, i don't want someone taking that away to provide a minor benefit.

The most important thing is that the design is not end to end. It doesn't allwo the intelligence to reside on my machine or my partners' machines, it locates the intelligence in the network and forces me to open the documents across the network. With all the work being done on metadata right now I would have thought that all I should need to do is know what changes have been made to which document and to be able to have my version synched by that information. Much less bandwidth for a start.

My reading of CastBridge is that it does something like this and my experience with stuff like Awasu and Blogroll and other web services like LibraryLookup tell me that it must be possible.

<a href=http://www.downes.ca/files/what_we_want.ppt>This posting</a> on Elearnspace is important to the discussion. It sets out some basic requirements for us users;<blockquote>1. Make things possible, not necessary
2. Create choices
3. Make room for innovation</blockquote>
Especially I like the link to "What we really want, A PPT file that pleads for simplicity and openness. Damnit, I want to be able to create and organise and manage information and not even decide about the mode of presentation until I've finished. I want something that lets me create a document and then say, I want this as a slide show, email it as a WP document to these people and put it on my website as well, without changing a damned thing. I want to lift the information out of its container and be able to drop it in anywhere.

More. <a href=http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200302/msg00609.html> this thread </a>has some interesting thoughts about how real people read electronic documents, and create them. You would have trouble finding a better statement of the problem than this.<blockquoteA lot of developers see XML editing as
filling structured containers with appropriate content, and the
containers should more or less guide you as to the content. This can
mean that a huge amount of detail needs to be dealt with at one pass,
and it often has meant that developers create interfaces which are
actually more difficult to use than paper forms. Leaving markup for
later lets people focus on the information as they see it rather than
forcing them from the outset into someone else's preferred boxes.</blockquote>
Exactly. There is more, it keeps reminding me that we have to start where people are, not beckon them from across some river that they don't find interesting to cross. <a href=http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200302/msg00652.html>This post</a> says a lot about non tech approaches as well. I love outlines, my wife uses them grudgingly. To me they give structure of the document while to her they give format for the meaning which she can obtain by using bold or larger fonts. We are both right, we just work in different ways. Software has to meet both sets of requirements, then find ways to find structure in documents by "reading them" the way people do. Parsers have to be able to see that keywords are indicated by <b>bold</b> or <i>italic</i> or by <u>underline</u>, that if most of the text is in 12 point, the bits in 14 are more important, and 14 bold more important again and 20 point at the top of a page also has meaning. Because we <b>will not</b> spend our precious creative or operational time assigning superfluous meanings to information. Its superfluous because <b>we already know</b> what it means.

Push technologies don't work and can't be trusted, that's why RSS is so attractive.

More later.