Other interesting OSX apps
I'm guessing that Boris has already come across these products, but they are very interesting:
http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/
"Tinderbox is a personal content management assistant. It stores your notes, ideas, and plans. It can help you organize and understand them. And Tinderbox helps you share ideas through Web journals and web logs."
http://www.usercreations.com/spring/
Imagine that you don't have to go to five different applications to communicate with the same person. Imagine that booking a flight or train is as simple as opening a canvas with a map and dragging between the two cities. Imagine inviting someone to a favorite place is as simple dragging a line between the person and place.
Spring Desktop Innovations
* Concept-Centric Desktop
* 1-Drag Actions
* Drag and Drop Icon Management
* Folderless Groups
* Drag. Drop. Act Web Integration
* Desktop Web Personalization
* Web Refresh
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Comments
Kind of what Apple is trying to do
In some ways, this is sort of what Apple is trying to do with its various iApps, how they auto-magically connect to each other but are separate programs. I don't use iChat (they *really* need to add gateways to other systems if they want wider acceptance), but there's the people concept, although AddressBook does that as well.
Standards like vCard and vCal make it easy to drag contact and date/time/event info between any application.
Spring is an interesting concept, but it really is nothing more than that at this point -- a concept.
Tinderbox looks...interesting, but also expensive ($145). I think that for certain kinds of work, and certain kinds of people (your tools have to work the way you do to make them useful) it might be good.
Spring
I tried Spring. Couldn't get my mind wrapped around the concept and the fact that it was incredibly slow on my ibook added up to a "Baaaah-leted" after I got frustrated with the speed.
I found Spring to be 2.5-D so bear with me herein. (the zoom in / zoom out metaphor of more detail / less scope and vice versa).
Some neat concepts but I tend to find that 3-D doesn't work well when represented on a monitor. the symbolic links involved in turning my head equaling rotating my mouse are not intuitive. this is why we need VR goggles. :)
I can't speak for everyone but I find that I can spatially organize objects much better if when I turn I physically turn.
Man, i would kill for a whiteboard right now to explain the diagram I am thinking of right now
In ascii art: (m == monitor, E == me, o == thing of interest (in virutal space), O == thing of interest (in real space) -> == direction of view (real) => == direction of view (virtual)
To start off: (easy to find stuff eh? its all "in front of you")
E -> m O
E => o
Now, say I want to get something "behind me"
E -> m O
o <= E
Oh, oh. Now I have to think about what something means to be behind me in Real space and thus have introduced a layer of translation / comprehesion. Not good.
The diagrams get even more fun as you get into the concepts of Above and Below. The mapping is wrong for the presentation. The brain has to do more work and be taught what "Above", "Below", "Behind", etc mean in Virtual space all the while you are still looking forward.
Prolly a MSc in there somewhere. In psychology tho....
Spring needs some work
I agree - Spring does need some work. On a PowerBook it comes up as five different windows the first time you load it, so it does suffer from info-overload when you start it.
Also, to BYO Spring database, you have to enter all the information. And gosh it's a hassle having to switch programs and enter information all the time. Hopefully semantic technology and XML will one day make it as easy to add information to an object as AutoFill in Internet Explorer. Then you drag and drop associations to objects that are new, like a new word processor. Drag Boris info to Boris' latest movie, XML meta tags added to file. Meet random person on Internet, drag movie file to their online presence, unknown person, don't want to spend ages entering info, so software prompts you "Do you wish to enter info? Yes/No" you hit no, all software does is create new contact entry with the information that it can get from the online presence - name/nickname, profile maybe.
I think Spring is onto the right track with this idea, it just needs a better way of representing info, and making more of its components 3D while still presenting information to us in 2D so we can read it all, and still be able to navigate hierarchies without rotating.