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Correct. And that leads to there being no live editing, which leads to sync conflicts.

Well, did I not also say this?

Even tracking cursor positions is simple, though; you just use a different mechanism for it, either a direct connection between users, or a connection to a central location, where the information is exchanged in real time. It's active state data, not persistent, so there's no need to store it.

And, from there, it's trivial to also pass other events, such as key presses and editor commands, in the same stream. Check out SubEthaEdit, which Panic used as a jumping-off point for Coda. If you think anything you're blathering on about is new and hasn't been solved for decades, your lack of domain knowledge is leading you to redo work that's already been done hundreds of times over.

Furthermore, the real-time collaborative aspect of iCloud is something new that's being introduced in Yosemite. It is still, and always has been, a file storage and retrieval service. Now, it's a file storage and retrieval service that also provides a real-time communication channel, but that's also nothing new. The only reason you think it's new is because it has the word "cloud" attached to it; it's been done since the 70's, though.

Google Wave is like subethaedit and etherpad, whereas subethaedit and etherpad are just applications that can't even talk to each other, Google is banking on the idea that these kinds of applications will one day become ubiquitous, and at the very least, it's trying to set itself up as the new leader of the pack in that area.

Now Google Wave is not going to replace email (thought, it may help decrease the actual number of emails in some situations). And Google Wave may not even be the final winner in this area (it's still way too early to tell in my opinion). But you've got to admit, Google Wave is much more lightweight, open, and cheaper, in that area than anything that Microsoft might have come up with -- thus far.

SubEthaEdit does collaborative coding on Mac, if I recall correctly.

http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/

What exactly are the virtues of proprietary software? It seams to me that it has to be your forced to do something you may not want to. want to use an ipod? Got to use itunes! want to use OS X? Got to use expensive mac hardware! want to work with people using the latest version of office? Got to use the latest version of office! If proprietary software has virtues why bother with lock-in, surely it could compete by itself on a level playing field?

Proprietary software can compete on a level playing field. Just look at SubEthaEdit. Where's the lock-in there? Its a text editor - no proprietary formats at all. Yet, it manages to compete by making things like collaborative editing significantly easier than its competitors, both free and proprietary.

Same thing with all the software you've listed. No one's forcing you to use an iPod, a Mac or even the latest version of Office. There are competing MP3 players, competing computer systems, and OpenOffice has handled all of the docx I've thrown at it, once I've run it through ODF Converter/Integrator.

If you don't like proprietary software, don't complain - vote with your wallet and buy hardware that does support the standards and formats you want.

3D Spinning Cube (Mac):

http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/goodies/ada.dmg

You're welcome.

This is not exactly a direct response to the question as asked, since it's not F/OSS. That aside, Mac users can use SubEthaEdit http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/, and share a single document with each user's focus and changes being highlighted with a selected color. It uses the Apple "bonjour" protocol, but the concept shouldn't be all that difficult to implement in other software. I'm not aware of any at the moment, however.

but subethaedit has some cool text editing collaboration functionality.

Very sweet solution if you have access to OS X. SubEthaEdit has very nice integration with iChat and will likely do much of what you ask right out of the box including multi-person live editing. Good luck

Basically, it's a realtime distributed editor, but has a native format that saves who authored what. Works really well.
http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/

For the most part I agree with you. However, remote access doesn't offer the realtime multi-user collaboration that's a part of Google's online office tools. Setting up centralized documents on the cheap is quite possible these days - I work for a company that sells that kind of thing, but for all intents and purposes it's an interface wrapped around a glorified subversion repository with some unrelated features that deal with the rest of that whole intranet thing. Hell, truly dumb it down and just have an FTP server. DropBox is one of those newer Web2.0 things that's basically a fancy wrapper around FTP (once again, we're starting to realize that user interface and ease of use is key to adoption); it's only meant for one user at a time and is more of a personal cross-computer document syncing tool. However, none of those to my knowledge deal with what happens when two people want to work on the same document at the same time. What we have at work has a check-in/check-out system, and DropBox would probably just give one user a read-only copy (since it treats it more like a network drive than an ftp server, and that's what happens on a local network). Google Docs/Spreadsheets, on the other hand, allows multiple users to edit the same document in real time and have each other's changes pushed to all other editors as they're being made, much more along the lines of SubEthaEngine.

Granted, not a whole lot of people need that kind of functionality most of the time. For what I do, it's actually a great asset - it sure beats the hell out of emailing a document back and forward a dozen times over the space of ten minutes. And the functionality, again for what I do, is plenty - I'm just sharing lists of ideas with colleagues and clients 95% of the time. All of your points against Google Docs are very much valid, and I was going to point them out myself. The accessibility during offline time is the real killer for me, as I don't have a cellular card for my laptop and can't be bothered to pay for wifi at hotspots, so it certainly can't replace a desktop text editor. Some combination of a desktop editor, the "push FTP" of DropBox, and the realtime collaboration of Google Docs would be THE winner, but that's asking for a lot.

At the end of the day, there's no one tool that's right for everyone right now. OOo is free, functional, and will get the job done for most people. Word is expensive, more functional and stable, somewhat faster, and has advanced features for power users that most people will never go near. Google Docs is free, limited in functionality, but doesn't require installation or local storage.

(Yes, I know I didn't really address the whole Word/Citrix thing; however, assuming you have VPN access then you're already able to get to the central repository and then there should be no reason to bother with the published web app through Citrix thing since you could just locally install OOo/Word - the file access is the crucial thing there more so than the app itself. Yes, this still isn't quite what you meant, but humor me)

I've used SubEthaEdit for years for this purpose.

Actually I am a home user. I see the advantages to what you describe, but the app doesn't have to be online to get it.

SubEthaEdit and iChat AV come to mind. Local apps that let you do collaborative viewing and editing (SEE more so than iChat for the latter).

So collaborative programs: potentially useful. Online apps? I still don't see a killer advantage and a whole lot of disadvantages.

For the multimedia impaired, here's the lyrics (sung to the sound of "a few of my favorite things")
http://codingmonkeys.de/map/log/xml/rss20/article/ 48/feed.xml

This "offsite word processing" crap is for chumps - anyone with sensitive data would be utter idiots to go there.

The reason is of course, that most games are barely optimised for dual cores, let alone four cores. It is not simple either as balancing several cores to get the most out of them requires a redesign of the game engine.

Or having a multi-threaded OpenGL implementation in your operating system.

I can totally see Apple hyping this when 10.5 ships. "They'll give you 4 cores, but we'll give you 4 cores that *get* *used*. Look, fast pretty pictures."

How fast do you think gamers and game companies will flock to Mac OS X when Apple starts demoing the same game running on Windows and Mac OS X on the same hardware and running 2-4x faster on the Mac?

I don't know about multiple users editing the same document at the same time.

So.. have you ever tried it? SubEthaEdit is one. Pretty darn cool.

SubEthaEdit was doing this back in 2001. It's a text editor, not quite a word processor, but the basic concept is there, and its design and implementation is far more elegant than Writely's. Cocoa-native, too.

Hmm, it looks like they've gone shareware, registration required. Pity that. Not that I begrudge them the scratch.

SubEthaEdit is invaluable for collaboration. I can't say how many times it has come in handy when I've wanted to help someone with code over the Internet or plan out code with someone. Not to mention taking notes with 5 other people in 'ole Computer Science lectures...

For years I tried to indoctrinate myself with vi, too.
Then i found SubEthaEdit for mac os x.
I've really found no need for anything else since. I highly recommend anybody on an apple try it out. I feel like it follows the philosophy of vi (lightweight, responsive, simple, functional), but integrates well with the rest of the OS (uses apple's spell check, plays well with os x services and keyboard shortcuts). and, though i know this isn't for everyone, it follows apple's emacs-style ctrl-f, ctrl-b, etc navigation.

The thing is that sometimes it's better to hve a big slice of a small pie than a microscopic slice from a big one. Take SubEthaEdit, for example: SEE is a nice editor, but in the Windows world it wouldn't sell that well because there's a whole lot of nice editors for Windows. Even the fact that SEE is a collaborative editor (which happen to be extremely rare on any platform) wouldn't make up for the fact that the Windows editor market is already saturated. The Mac editor market, on the other hand, is smaller but less crowded so it's still possible to come up with a good product and secure a bit of market share.
Some people are quite happy with making a decent living off their software. Not everyone wants to become the next Microsoft... And the size of a company is no indicator for the quality of their software.

I'm still waiting for a web based utility for real time code editing: As I type it changes on their screen and highlights distinctively what each person has edited that I can run next to IRC

SubEthaEdit. Older versions free for noncommercial use, does exactly what you say.

... but does it run Lotus Notes?

Maybe not by Apple, but in this particular case on Apple's OS.

SubEthaEdit is an awesome collaborative editor.

A laptop would enable me to do a number of things that a pen and paper wouldn't ( or wouldn't do as well):

I can enter my notes into an application like DEVONthink which not only allows me to keep rich notes with wiki-style linking, but also allows me to search my old notes, papers, etc. for similar content (or just some phrase/topic) and present me with the top matches in a snap. This is no more distracting than writing notes and drawing figures during class.

I can hook up a camera like an iSight (or other) to record portions (or all) of the lecture for review back in the dorms. This is less distracting than writing, as I only need to check the frame every now and again.

Ditto for audio recording.

I can have a window open with my OCaml/Lisp/whatever REPL open to try out concepts as the professor relays them. Looking at code on a board or screen doesn't help me understand it nearly as much as typing it and running it. Slightly more distracting than handwriting, but with a bigger payoff.

I can more efficiently annotate PDFs.

I can use an editor like SubEthaEdit to take notes in a collaborative manner with my classmates, possibly even having a backchannel discussion about the material without disrupting the class. Again, more distracting, but with a much higher payoff.

And of course, most importantly, I can watch porn.

Apple has specifically asked developers to not release builds with Intel code in them, until there is actual shipping Intel hardware.

Here's two! ;-)

Although I suppose they're both things more likely to be used by developers with the appropriate Intel development hardware to run them on - I guess Apple's edict is more of a strong guideline than a definitive rule. It would be silly to bloat downloads of consumer software and add confusion for 99.99+% of the market, anyway, I imagine.

I'm a huge fan of SubEthaEdit.

It's free for personal use and available at http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/

The collaborative text editing feature is cool, but I never really found a use for it.

"So they don't test anything? They just modify production code directly?"

Don't get Stuck on Stupid! Of course they test! RoR supports test, development, and production modes of operation.
In addition, it has a full unit test architecture built right in. The moment you generate a new rails app, you already
have unit test model templates ready for your tests. RoR supports all the development methods that preach code and test.
Including Extreme Programming.

Really want to get XP humming? Code on an Apple PowerBook and run SubEthaEdit - http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/ - This allows multiple programmers to code at the same time, so where XP recommends two or three programmers sitting next to each other working together, SubEthaEdit allows you to do that even over the Internet.

On Windows I use EditPad I think it was one of the first to support tabing in a text editor. On OS X(Another great way to pep up windows, get rid of it)I have been using SubEthaEdit.

http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/

I use this all the time on my PowerBook... can't wait until they get their RTF version out the door!

SubEthaEdit is pretty sweet. Free for personal use, 35$ for commercial use isn't too bad...

The one app that I use regularly on Windows, which has no Mac counterpart yet is Homesite! There is no Mac editor that will allow me to highlight code the way that Homesite will. Specifically, I'm referring to letting me mod the foreground AND the background colors, based on code syntax. Very disapointing, and I'm a very visual guy, and being able to do this is very important to me. Dreamweaver MX allows me to do this, but it comes with so much bloat that I really hate to use it when all's I really need is a decent editor. If BBEdit allowed me to do this, my life would be much happier!

SubEthaEdit is good (if you have a mac). The best part about it is the ability to take notes in a group via bonjour.

http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/

That is what we Mac users have been using for a while now. It is far more productive to have TWO screens collaborating than ONE screen shared. You wouldn't imagine what I can do with this thing. Take notes in class with other Mac users others on an ad-hoc Airport network, write up code, etc. I guess the screen concept is the next generation...
...but I worry some Dilbert's boss will say, "Buy one of these for 10 employees!" Which wouldn't work too well.

Do some research. Sophos admitted the the Cowhand/A is another 'proof of concept' virus that has been around for at least a year.
Good luck finding a single incident of 'AplS/Fromr-A' actually infecting anything or even existing and MP3Virus.Gen is a well-known proof of concept that also has not spread in the wild and does not cause any damage.
Some day there will be a bona fide, bad virus for Mac OS X that actually spreads in the wild and causes damage. That day has not yet arrived.

SubEthaEdit Site here! Absolutely incredible tool, useful as you would never think usefulness could be.

I don't think they want to launch a Windows version at all. "We love developing Macintosh applications with Cocoa and are determined to improve SubEthaEdit on that platform. We currently have neither resources nor experience to port our products to other platforms." So there you are.

This is some of the coolest use of the technology: SubEthaEdit lets a group of people work on a document at the same time using Bonjour. This is the way networking should work. If the boys there get their act together and create a Windows (and Linux) version, this app could be used everywhere!

Try SubEtahEdit. Oh, and its Free for non-commercial use.

Cheers.

OS X. Without question. I'm a recent switcher (thanks to the Mini, from KDE, which I thought was really nice, and still think is the next best thing) and OS X just blows everything else out of the water. Until you actually experience it, it's all too easy to underestimate the advantages of consistency and simplicity. But under OS X, everything just works the way I expect it to, and does so with a minimum of fuss.

Now getting used to things actually working the way you expect... That is a challenge.

(Okay, except for cursor navigation keys. Those have taken some getting used to, but that took less than a week.)

If you doubt the utility of OS X for programming, you've never used SubEthaEdit.

A.) It may be cheap and sexy, but it's hard to find apps for. Best Buy, for example, carries no Mac software.

This has more to do with the software retail industry being a big racket than anything else. Small players, if they can get on the shelves at all, generally don't see a cent of the profits. The costs involved in getting it on the shelves (all that packaging, shipping, etc.) can overshadow what meager returns they see.

All of the large Mac software producers I can think of also produce Windows software. Adobe, Microsoft, Blizzard, etc.

On the web, it's a different story. Some of the most interesting new Mac software available is only available online. OmniOutliner, Delicious Library, NetNewsWire, SubEthaEdit, etc. I don't think that any of these producs are really losing out not being on the shelves at BestBuy.

I don't see any shared documents. What's wrong?

Please check if you have enabled a firewall. If so, please allow SubEthaEdit to use ports 6942 to 6951. In case you are using Mac OS X's Click 'New' to the right of the list of predefined ports, choose 'Other' from the pop-up menu and enter "6942-6951" for the port number and "SubEthaEdit" for the description.

I'm behind a router. How can I work with others over the internet, that also sit behind a router?

One user has to enable port forwarding on his router. Port 6942 to 6951 should be forwared from the router to the computer. After that the other user should be able to establish a connection to him, which will be used to share documents in both directions. If you need to find out your dynamic IP, for example browse to http://whatismyip.com

SubEthaEdit sports quite a few different editing modes, including for the Inform language for writing interactive fiction.

Collaborative Interactive Fiction, anyone?

...this is SubEthaEdit. It's a rendezvous and network-aware text editor designed for collaborative coding that seems to be finding more use. Meanwhile, it's also just a damn nice text editor for general use, and is free (yes, I know that TextWrangler is also free now).

Nice quote, but (in all seriousness):

Multiplayer notepad is Moon Edit (Windows & Linux) or SubEthaEdit (OS X).

Older versions run on 10.2 perfectly and they are free.

Not a big surprise, really. With the exception of HTML editing, the crop of newer editors for OS X (TextMate, SEE, Smultron, etc.) were making BBEdit look like that smelly old t-shirt stuck at the bottom of the drawer. You used to love that shirt, but now there are a whole lot of new shirts for you to wear, only without all of the rips and stains.

Since BBEdit is underfeatured and way overpriced for general text editing, Bore Bones had to do something to keep their name recognition alive...

imagine if several networked users have a focus on an app at the same time... impossible ?

The version of KHTML that Safari relies on is part of OSX now. There are a couple of "alternative browsers" that rely on this for their rendering, but more interesting are other apps:

• xJournal, the LiveJournal client I use, provides a live web preview for very little code.
• Adium, a multi-protocol IM client, uses this for its message windows.
• Most every coder's editor offers live web previews. I think SubEthaEdit was the first. It's addictive to tweak your HTML/CSS in realtime.

The important thing right now is that we use this momentum, and that we continue to innovate. Here's some issues I believe are important:

• SVG support. It's incomplete - but I think it is unwise not to have at least some level of SVG support in mainline Firefox 1.0 builds. "Build it, and they will come": both web and Mozilla developers. SVG is really a key technology for next-generation web design based on open standards. As an example, Wikipedia has a nice extension called EasyTimeline for rendering graphical timelines. These are currently ugly, non-zoomable PNGs -- SVG would be perfect here, as it would allow timelines with a changing level of detail as you zoom in. Much of the stuff that is currently being done with Flash can be done with SVG.
• Leverage XUL. Whenever I show people demos like MAB and Robin, they tend to be impressed: easy, powerful, instantly deployable web applications. In my opinion, XUL should get a lot more exposure within Firefox - both the product and the website. Make a promise to XUL developers: If you use XUL to write open source applications, and it meets our quality standards, we will add it to the default Firefox bookmarks, and promote it on our website.
• New UIs. Tabs are great, but they're not the Holy Grail of UI design. For example, they don't scale - managing more than 20 or so open documents in one browser is not feasible because you just have lots of "..."s. At this point, I would rather have a vertical, scrollable list of open documents with a nice, dynamic (incremental) title search to instant-switch to a window of your choice, and some other cool navigation tools ("skip to next website from another domain than the current one" etc.). There's no reason why a modern browser shouldn't make it easy to manage 50 or 100 open documents.
• Better editing controls. Yes, I know what you're thinking: Keep Firefox lean. But having a good integrated text editor for things like wikis or even this form into which I'm typing into right now makes life a lot easier for the average user.

Now, if you really want a glimpse of the future, imagine, if you will, that a HTML textarea worked like SubEthaEdit and allowed you to invite other users to edit with your collaboratively, in real-time, a wiki page or weblog entry. But even this really just scratches the surface. The point is, the browser is an immensely important platform. With Firefox, we now have the chance to give an incredible amount of real power to end users. It's not "just a browser" - it's one of the key components of future information and collaboration devices.

Congratulations to the Mozilla project for getting us where we are right now. We still have a long way to go. I hope in 10 years, open source technology will be used by virtually everyone to access the rapidly growing digital commons.

If you're lucky and work on OSX you might want to try out SubEthaEdit.

You can browse other user's open documents via Rendezvous - errr... OpenTalk, grant them access to your open docs. And nice colors so you can see who is breaking what.