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Hydra: Rendezvous-Enabled Text Editing
Tokerat writes "It's incredible what some people dream up. A recent post on MacSlash brought this little gem to my attention, and I have a feeling some of you fellow /.ers will be screaming to get your hands on this: Hydra is a Rendezvous-enabled text editor, which allows several people to edit a text document at the same time. Imagine doing some extreme programming with this, with one person writing code and another following the first and correcting their mistakes & making optimizations simultaneously? It already works with Apple's Project Builder, supports syntax coloring, and the ability to manage access on a per-document basis. Future improvements will include support for RTF and much tighter integration with Project Builder. It looks to me like these guys are really on to something here."
For the sake of completeness, in Xemacs, the command is:
M-x make-frame-on-display
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you
That's just plain sick! (In a good way).
Nearly as cool as the hack to have iTunes stop playing when you walk away (Bluetooth).
-psy
That's very cool. Rendezvous is really coming into its own. I wrote up instructions on how to Rendezvous-enable pretty much anything you'd like, using any Unix box and a bit of C code and shell scripting.
.@.
Multiple programmers editing the same files at the same time?
>> It looks to me like these guys are really on to something here
More likely on something.
Imagine doing some extreme programming with this, with one person writing code and another following the first and correcting their mistakes & making optimizations simultaneously?
What..? Optimisations are SUPPOSED to be done only when the code has been thoroughly checked and tested, not 'on the fly'!
Oh dear. No wonder most software is crap these days when people adopt that attitute to 'extreme programming'.
Although it is not used for programming, the wiki is an excellent method of collaborative editing. Take a look at the wikipedia. There are lots of other wikis around on the web. The great thing is that you don't need any special software, just a browser.
So if you had any reason to attempt to get things right the first time, there is no excuse now. This might just usher in a new breed of lazy writers.
If you can't fix it ask the 3 year old down the street.
Rendevous is a 'framework' that enables an amazing array of functionality in many different applications. For instance, in iChat I can use rendevous to converse with others on my local network, devoid of going through a central authority (server) on the internet.
Rendevous is also open source. I think it has to be said that Apple is making great strides with open source for a commercial company with roots in strictly proprietary technology.
How would you intelligently coordinate multiple editors of the same document, be it a C source or a legal draft? I can see nightmares of delete-key wars.
If there was a privelage system in place, where certain editors could only modify certain text, that would help things, but at the same time complicate the editing process greatly.
I just don't see a need for this, anywhere. Collaborative editing is definetly a good thing, but not like this.
__________
Love conquers all... except CANCER
Now everyone can know the fun of multiple personality disorder!
Shut up jerk! ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
No, it's really a good ^H^H^H^H crappy idea!
Quit doing that! Ack!
You mean a freedomword.
Having someone change my code after the fact is bad enough, at least then they can tell (if they're paying attention) what I was trying to do.
Having them change it *WHILE* I was working on it would be horrid. Collaborative projects are one thing, but the example given I don't think is a case I'd like to see anytime soon!
-- If it ain't broke - overclock it more.
Future improvements will include support for RTF
Someone left off the "M" at the end.
Vote for global prefs bug
I am skeptical about doing pair programming remotely... From my (limited) experience you need to be physically next to the other person, and in fact the whole point is that there is one keyboard that you take turns on, not simultaneous typing.
In fact Kent Beck (inventor of XP) was at my school recently, and I asked him what he thought about this kind of "remote pair programming" stuff. His answer (paraphrased): "Forget it. You need to be able to smell the other person's farts".
Better yet, use screen -x with multiple coders connected to the same machine. Works fine for pair programming, as long as the people working together can agree on an editor. ;)
Actually, pair programming was how I learned more than rudimentary emacs skills--- figuring that it's easier for me to learn emacs than for anyone else to learn vi.
I thought they meant this one which we use a lot. Now a text editor which talks over the tib would be truly cool, as it would be multiplatform, not just Mac.
:)
Oh well, maybe I should write one
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) [...] I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs
But did you actually try any model built after, say, 1998? So you discovered, that multitasking in OS 8 was hopeless. And you are right. But how exactly should this be relevant to MacOS X and Mac machines built in this century?
Okay, you could maybe do the same thing with emacs but .. it looks so aqua, mac-like, pretty. For companies who are not afraid of the people enjoying their work? ;-) probably it'll take some time before getting used to coding with a program that looks like iChat, but it looks enjoyable.
Why don't we have this in my office? Being locked out of text doccuments that I share with a half dozen other network users for the better part of a day has cost me a lot of productivity..
dreaming of a mac-equipped office.....
Just to name a few of their more recent ones: 802.11b, 802.11g, IEEE-1394, ZeroConf
dude, 20 minutes to copy a 17 meg file onto a different folder on the same hard drive? there is something seriously wrong with your computer. my performa 6200 (75 mhz) isnt that slow. maybe you should run some hard drive diagnostic program or something. i'm sure if your computer were running proberly, it would take about 5 seconds...
"NO! the for loop starts at 1, not 0!"
"@$%!!!! Steve would roll in his grave!"
"Loudest fart wins..."
*everyone in the building dies*
It works. One of the surprising results was that you don't actually need to 'pass the keyboard' explicitly: you wait for the other person to stop typing, a bit like you wait for someone to stop talking. If the rare case that you both start to type at the same moment, it still works out usually. The funny part is that you can see each other's typos in real time. It's a bit eery but fun to show around. :-)
We've speculated that using this with VoIP would make it even better, but it worked out pretty well. The shared account was in Finland, by the way; I logged in from Germany and it was still fast enough for interactive typing (ping between 50ms and 100ms).
I daresay it's not the same as face-to-face pair programming, but it's still pretty cool. And the morale is: Don't wait for Hydra! Use Unix tools today!
(We have not yet, I should note, found a way to make this work for collaboration between an emacs and a vi person-- that's a topic for future research... :-) )
I just downloaded Hydra and fired it up... and I'm really, really, really impressed. The program itself is very fast and clean, with an intuitive interface. Yes, other programs are capable of multiple users editing a single file, but I don't know of any programs that allow for this with a single mouse click.
We'll see how useful this actually is in time, but it is a neat little program.
-agent oranje.
YHBT. HAND.
Is the ability to have multiple people editing the same text file at once really all that exciting?
Of course, this also means the two programmers have to be on the same
LAN segment. Rendezvous doesn't route.
Doug Alcorn
Twice the errors, half the time and everybody can say "someone else must have done that"! LOL
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
if he has an 8600, he should be running OS 9.1...
One guy types the code, 50 other sprinkle it with bugs
Hydra appears to have been developed by a group called "Global Software Engineering." Apple isn't taking credit for anything here, except for their idiot-proof implementation of zeroconf as Rendezvous, and their rapid development tools.
Can you name any modern computer company that INVENTED, not just built off of, any technology?
Depending on how you look at it, not many have.
emacs/xemacs have been able to do it, but that's like saying "it's possible to shove your leg down someone's throat."
It may be true, but it's not something you want to do normally.
Herbert Van Thal writes "Rummaging through
VersionTracker, I stumbled across a release note for version 1.0 of Hydra, a beer-free Rendezvous-enabled text editor. I'm not in a position to test the Rendezvous features, though they do sound very interesting - but Hydra certainly does run well as a Cocoa-aware text editor with extensible syntax highlighting - maybe a suitable replacement for BBEdit Lite? I couldn't find a previous mention on Macslash, so here you go. I'm impressed." I'm amazed at the sorts of applications people have thought up for Rendezvous that don't appear obvious at first.
What's worse than a buzzword? a buzzword in French.
Call it Zeroconf then...
Could someone tell me how rendezvous is important to this process? I don't understand. In this context, aren't the same things doable just as easily with standard network sockets?
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
Yes, this idea is great, this system is not perfect and it might fit into some purposes. Does this program deserve more than this sentence?
Btw. someone has states somewhere in this discussion that this is some kind of wiki: It is not. Wiki is simultanious but not real time.
Not quite the same.
You need to brush up on your knowledge of Zeroconf / Rendezvous
http://www.oscast.com/stories/storyReader$160
Our php programming class has just started using this. It is going over pretty well, and easily works with the 20 students in the class all working on the same document. The teacher can pose questions to certain people in the group, who can then type the answer directly into the document.
This is one of those applications that can really show off what OS X can do. It's not only what's possible technology wise, but how simple it is to set up and use. It took all of 10 seconds to use Apple Remote Desktop to copy the Application to 24 machines in the room.
What, me worry?
Imagine doing some extreme programming with this, with one person writing code and another following the first and correcting their mistakes & making optimizations simultaneously? Oh, great, not only would the moron be breathing down my neck while I was typing, he'd be changing my code to! What a recipe for disaster, even when ignoring my revulsion to the idiocy that is Extreme Programming. Someone should not be making changes to your code while you are writing it. That's what a peer-review is for: when you have time to study at it in its entirely and understand the whole scope and logic of it. Second-guessing what you "think" he meant in a code fragment is a piece-o-crap wait to be written. And premature optimization has been proven to be very, very bad time and again! *shudder*
Anonymous Cowards suck.
since vi doesn't have it!
Geek1: *Types some code*
Geek2: *Makes a few changes*
Geek1: 'wtf you doing??!!!'
Geek2: 'ure code is shiat, my variables pwn'
Geek1: 'stfu steve!' *deletes other geeks function*
Geek2: 'ben you bastard that took me 15mins to write!!!'
Geek3: *types 'PWN j00 BASE!!!!' 15 times*
"It looks to me like these guys are really on to something here."
In the immortal words of Arthur Dent:
"How soon can we get off it?"
No, seriously,... I always applaud people trying new and different things, and I'll keep an open mind, but my initial feeling toward this is "Nahh..."
Colaborative programming requires much more than just a text connection. There is a great deal of information conveyed in pacing and tone of voice that just can't be easily communicated through typing.
I'm thinking that without simultanious audio, such collaboration would be more of a hinderance than a benefit.
This Rendezvous editor looks great for "a bunch of macheads sitting at a meeting"...but Until Rendezvous is extended to more platforms and actively used, this is useless for most people- I serve as 'editor' of a large manual, and nobody else in the group of about 12 has a Mac(I use Lyx/Latex for the manual...and that makes getting edits in from people is a total PITA.)
something Jabber based would be much cooler, since there are clients for everything...and it'll work over a WAN, the internet, etc...not just a local LAN...which means we could have a collaborative worksession, despite Everyone in the club being spread out across New england and lower canada.
That said, I can't find any info about any editors that actually use Jabber yet, though...
Please help metamoderate.
That's great, but useless for me since my code is perfect the first time around :)
Sorry, that was my first thought...
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
To use an analogy, just about everything done via USB can be done via legacy ports. However, USB makes it easier. That's what rendezvous brings to this process.
Notice how all the *nix people (who are so used to looking down on other OS users) are now upset whenever Apple has a new bell or whistle.
They've found that they can have OS-envy also...
I saw that it works with PB, that means it will be even easier for people to help me when I trying too program :). Im trying to learn obj-C fyi
I fought the corporate America, and the corporate America bought the law.
I like the free Developer tools Os X gives with each copy of OSX and have been impressed by the IDE, but man the author is right - would it not be cool to see Apple taking some initiative and incorprating XP programming style tools into the existing ones? I mean hell if they could spend so much time on the dang "i" apps maybe they could every once in a while take a break and develop some great XP tools.
-- (Score:i, Imaginary)
You didn't mention what OS you were running, which might indeed make a difference. Experimentally, I just copied a 68MB file from one folder on a hard disk to a folder on an encrypted volume on that same disk, and it took 10 seconds (800Mhz G4, MacOS 10.2.4, 200$ of memory). That's fast enough for me.
In terms of why choose a Mac over Linux or Windows:
- it definitely has a better UI than Linux.
- it definitely has better applications than Linux.
- it is definitely easier to manage and deal with security updates than Linux.
- it is definitely easier to manage and deal with security updates than Windows.
- I don't trust Microsoft to get security right, and I trust them less (as a corporation) than Apple. This is based on their track record.
- As an OS for nerd work, I like Unix more than Windows. I want emacs, it's got emacs. I want TeX, it's got TeX (yes, I know Cygwin and use it, and it's amazing, but it still fails the live-or-memorex test).
- iTunes, iPhoto, Disk Copy (where did I get that encrypted disk from?), iPod.
- adding hardware to a Mac (well, a G4 box) is easy; adding hardware to a PC is generally not as easy. (I've done both).
I agree, a Pentium box is cheaper, on a dollars-per-cycles basis. However, the Mac makes better use of the cycles, and makes better use of my time. I have never wanted to own a PC; I do like Macs, and have bought them in the past, and will probably buy them in the future.
...IEEE 1394...
Careful: FireWire at a Glance
Er...
802.11b: No.
802.11g: No.
IEEE-1394: Yes, in a consortium.
ZeroConf: No.
Actually, Apple created IEEE-1394 - it was FireWire before it was an IEEE standard.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
To be truly useful for multi-user editing, wouldn't it be helpful to have some sort of version control built in?
What kind of undo facility does it have? Does it keep a history journal of which user makes edits so that edits can be rolled back?
How about a way to lock parts of the document?
We have a project that has somewhat similar ambitions but with Java. Basically, we have integrated threaded messaging, revision control, group document editing, instant messaging, contact management, mailing lists, file management, and workflow into a single interface.
Currently, it does not have "live" group document editing because of lack of perceived demand. Quite frankly, my programming style is too unstructured for it to make sense for me. However, this is a fairly simple thing to add if enough people want it. We do have asynchronous group document editing.
The beta installer is available at http://www.suprasphere.com/sbeta. You will need java >1.4 to run it. It will download one update, and you will need to login again. We are working on using the OSGI component architecture so that modular updates can be achieved without needing to "reboot" the whole thing with every update.
We will do an open source release as soon as we finish the revision control engine. We want to be able to use SupraSphere to accept changes and manage its collaborative development as soon as we hit 1.0. The revision control will work somewhat like CVS, but you can set update "thresholds" for certain files that will require the voting approval and/or rating of certain group members. For example, you can require that an update to a common library must receive the approval of at least 60% of the project members, with an average rating of > 4.0/5.0.
You can also create builds with different versions of the source files, which will show up inside the interface immediately for others to test. Then, the specific files of those versions can be tagged as a cohesive update set for voting approval.
One strength with this project is the security. Everything is encrypted and secured with triple DES sockets and zero knowledge authentication. This makes it easy to pull from many different sources into one view. This way, if you're involved with many projects at once, you can query different source databases for only the files and discussions that are pertinent to you.
We would greatly appreciate your feedback on the beta before we go gold. There's a discussion engine with contextual highlighting (you'll see what I mean when you get in there). If there are some ideas of things you want, please let us know asap, as we're planning 1.0 source release at the end of April.
Thank you for your consideration.
David Thomson
SupraSphere Founder
Apple. IEEE-1394.
Apple. ColorSync.
Apple. QuickTime.
There's three off the top of my head. Inventions are rare in the computer industry, yes, but Apple is the exception. And, they've gotten rid of their aversion to "not invented here", allowing them to use good technology (USB, IDE, PCI, etc.) from other sources.
Do I like Apple? Yep. Sure do. Can't wait to be able to afford one of their machines. : )
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
This guy is just trying to bait somebody so that he can scream... "nuh uhh... Apple the OS from Xerox" Meanwhile, he doesn't realize that Xerox was compensated for the code Apple used, and that Apple totally re-invented the technology that Xerox had in the labs. He makes it sound like Apple had an instant GUI once the transaction was made. (For those that don't know, the IP that was purchased from Xerox amounted to little more than a window with a few icons in it. The windows didn't scale (at least not on the fly, they didn't overlap, there was no desktop, there was no trash can, there wasn't even drop down menus! Apple invented all that! Regardless, this guy is implying that Apple hasn't invented anything, which simply isn't true.
...I'd love to see this brought into other applications, like word processors, spreadsheets, etc. Maybe someone from OpenOffice.org is listening? It would definitely give you an advantage over Microsoft Office.
IEEE-1394 -- In a consortium.
ColorSync -- no. Color compensation has been done, many times. Apple just built it into a personal computer.
QuickTime -- No. Apple licensed the codec from Sorenson.
There's three off the top of my head. Inventions are rare in the computer industry, yes, but Apple is the exception.
That's three out of your ass. Care to try again? Apple likes to portray themselves as "oh-so-innovative", but they haven't invented anything. They *might* be able to take credit for some GUI elements. Of course, that was over 20 years ago, and they haven't done jack since.
I have already been working on a distributed text editor called Panopticon, I know I didn't release any files yet, but it has been around a while. Panopticon on Sourceforge Like others have said this has been done like in emacs to some extent. My view is to build programming practices into the editor and cvs support (which I am almost done with). This was meant to be a tool for developers/admins to help each other without having to see each other in person. However the editor had to have intelligence to support the correct context of the development environment and data (binary,xml,text,etc). Also had to have locking so people can edit together in real time and diffing (all the reason for rccs and cvs support in the editing process). It is really hard to make money in open source for lone developers sometimes. Oh well good luck.
Can you imagine the endless possibilities of fun in this? Just imagine two developers disagreeing about a piece of text, then fighting for minutes, one guy typing frenetically to outperform the other guy's continuous backspacing :)
You used 'ass clown' and 'asshat' in the same post. I salute you, good sir. (-__-)/)
Ah am not a crook! (\(-__-)/)
RTF... was that the evil bit I read about the other day ?
This is just what Computing needs. While this may not be the best way to do programming it does lend itself to brainstorming. As a way to solve problems and such it sounds very nice.
More strange ideas and crazy apps will by statistics bring out those killer apps that has been absent for a while.
HTTP/1.1 400
Is it really YOUR code? I'm willing to bet that since you're in a collaborative environment, it's not YOUR code. Developers who are that possessive of code they write are a bloody pain in the ass to work with. Get off your high horse.
I'm trying this with a friend and it looks like there might eventually be a possibility of maybe using this over IPv6. When I connect to his address, it says "Searching for Documents" and finds none. Is anyone experiencing this with other protocols?
I think the best way to use this is in a single office, where people can talk to eachother and work on the same code without having to share a keyboard/screen in an akward way. Pair programming is great when you can quickly exchange ideas with your pair.
On a sidenote, I am not happy at all with their hostname, hydra.globalse.com. Am I the only one who thinks this should be globalse.cx? ;p
Trollem mirabilem hanc subnotationis exigiutas non caperet
At first glance this sounds good, but hasn't this been done before with the video conference software ? I remember reading about how the "shared whiteboard" would allow for internet meetings to be far more productive since we could be working on the same data at the same time.
Those fizzled, and I suspect that this will as well. Most people just funamentally can't accept their documents/work magically changing as they go along.
Hmm, on further thought, maybe this might develop into something that you could bundle in software development packages to the suckers^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmanagers that believe that eXtreme Programming is the silver bullet that will solve all programming problems.
*sigh*
Stratus Technologies has invented all kinds of super fault tolernate technologies that it puts in it servers.
Nobody else that I know of even comes close.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
A couple of things not yet mentioned here...
First of all, for pair-programming or whatnot, I would imagine that this would of course work best with the two programmers sitting next to each other. However, this would allow both programmers to select/enter/point out stuff to the other person without having to shuffle keyboards and mice around, which I think would be very convenient.
Secondly, the changes that occur to the documents can be color-coded in order to show who has made what changes. I assume this is lost when the document is saved, closed, and reopened, but it does provide good feedback on who has done what to the document. I would imagine that, like pair-programming, this could be a decent learning tool, if you have mistakes that you made pointed out right away in this manner.
Third, until the syntax coloring can be modified via preferences, this isn't as useful to me as it could be. I like to have the same syntax coloring at work, school, and home in order to make my life a lot easier - and each area has different editors for me to use. Once that can be done, I imagine this could become quite useful to me, at least.
Rendezvous uses link-local multicast, not broadcast.v ous/
"Multicast DNS Responder (mDNSResponder), the component that listens for and responds to DNS-format query packets, sent via IP Multicast to UDP port 5353" From: http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/rendez
I don't see why Rendezvous could not be enabled to use global multicast. Apple could use a GLOP address (http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2770.html) for each application that wants to have a global presence.
Anyway, Rendezvous != Broadcast.
Link-Local Multicast != Broadcast
I want it... hey, I've got an iBook, I guess I'll go get it! :-) ...now the big problem is: finding someone who I can use it with!
-C
"This above all, to thine own self be true"
Hear, Hear!
Work on Hydra begins.
(Looking back it's amazing what you can do with Cocoa in just 8 weeks.)
Next time...
Work on BlaBla begins.
(Looking back it's amazing what you can do with Cocoa and Hydra in just 4 weeks.)
>> Had I been going to bed earlier every night? Have I been sleeping later? Has Tyler been in charge longer and l
Here's an old paper on a way to handle rollback and undo: A Framework for Undoing Actions in Collaborative Systems
It's been tried with a group-modified version of Emacs (DistEdit).
i think it goes without saying, okay well maybe it does, is that with the exception of rendezvous, which is cool, this can all be implemented in java. rather easily with sockets and rmi. plus by making the data protected and synchronized, and separating things in separate threads, you can make it rather safe. the only thing i guess java lacks is rendezvous, but since this is on os x, and java is a core component, rendezvous is accessible on pure java.
/.
i'm not criticizing, and havign used rendezvous only in my school's network to print from my ibook, i am impressed with rendezvous so far. but this is not a a WOW thing. but hey, it's about os x, and this is
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
You know, from a guy who runs a website (OSCast) that claims to be unbiased, you're quite the Apple fanboy/troll.
I wonder if this could be expanded to use as a tech-support mechanism - something like PC Anywhere - where instead of playing the "OK, and now what do you see? No, the other backslash..." games, to connect directly into a terminal window session.
While programming is one use of it, I could see this kind of thing being expanded to support, maybe some interactive gaming, who knows.
Apple is one of the few that has some reasonable improvements.
Microsoft, impressively, has put forth not a single serious jump forward that I can think of.
I think most real improvements, though, come from individual programmers or grad students.
May we never see th
Exactly, two people editting the same document at the same time is a recipe for disaster. I don't mind collaborating, but you can bet that I want some tools that will allow me to keep a revision history of any editting done. The last thing I would want is some hoser editting out the last 4 hours of my work.
I can imagine an application for this hack that might be really useful with version control systems. Consider this hypothetical scenario....
You're called in on a weekend to make a hot fix to some code you own, only to discover that someone else has checked your code out of a library to do some tinkering, and happened to leave the file open in an editor in his development environment. This person is on vacation and unreachable, as are any administrators that could unlock the file. I know CVS allows concurrant versioning (simultaneous edits that are resolved when checked back into the library), but with Rendezvous, you could check out the file make your changes, and not have to worry about merging them later.
I can see some significant benefits to an integrated development environment (like Eclipse perhaps) which has code editing, version control, and concurrent development management built in.
With all this new networking technology, could you not have a group of trolls posting 'all your base are belong to us' jokes and goatse.cx links to /. COLLABORATIVELY?
catch (HumourFailureException e) { e.user.send("You, sir, are a humourless idiot."); }
How the heck is Quicktime an invention of Apple? It's just a media player with a codec Apple didn't even come up with, and they chose one of the worst one out there, Sorenson is such a flaming pile of junk I don't even know where to begin, except that RealMedia is better than it.
"Imagine doing some extreme programming with this, with one person writing code and another following the first and correcting their mistakes & making optimizations simultaneously?"
:)
Sounds like you really should just hire that second programmer.
I know exactly what Rendezvous is, it's nice but this program isn't anything new, it's like saying an IPv6 version of an IRC client is a *new* paradigm in programming, it isn't, it just uses a new protocol.
There is more to QuickTime than Sorensen. And Apple was the first company to include video playback that's as easy to use as editing a text doc.
/LOT/ of development effort went into QuickTime (and QuickTime VR etc.)
A
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
That's just a syntax highlighted chat room, AOL has a zillion chat rooms, so that part's not new. It's great to see a good use of a chat room-style GUI to do something else besides talk to each other. Good borrowed & modified use of an existing technology!
stuff |
If you happen to be working along and get stuck it'd be nice to be able to email/IM/irc/phone/etc someone elsewhere in the office and get them to look at your code with a system like this. Not having to go over to their desk and they pull it up or come back to your desk. But, that's just a thought from my end. of course then you've broken the other persons flow and wasted company time :)
Dude, you're wrong all over the place.
p
FireWire: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,848866,00.as
ColorSync: Implementation is half the battle, but they didn't invent color matching. They made it work transparently.
QuickTime: QuickTime is more than just a codec. It's a time-based media framework that is unlike anything that came before it. Sorenson is just a piece of the puzzle, like M-JPEG and Cinepac.
How about network autodiscovery and physical networks that anyone could use? (AppleTalk and LocalTalk).
Or simple and obvious multiple monitors? Plug another video card in and get a bigger desktop. In 1987!
Perhaps you're blinded by the hatred you have for something that is pretty trivial in the scheme of things.
These days, however, I use a Mac. And I have had very few problems with USB systems. Generally, I plug it in and it works, rarely do I even need to download a driver.
But as with so many things - YMMV.
It's just a media player with a codec
Was that the most ill-informed comment on Slashdot evah? You certainly don't know much about QuickTime - come back once you've done some reading. I guess you think the Mercedes S-Class is a hunk of steel with an engine?
--
Reverse outsourcing: it's the future
You can do this with emacs by exporting your screen and sending a copy of a frame over to the other X screen. Only issues is that only one person can use the mouse at the same time. Not a new idea but a reasonable implemintation.
Screw realty just hook me up another monitor!
Why would the parent get moderated upward?
/. less and less useful.
That does not work with screen. screen does not support two terminals with the same display, and it intentionally does not allow you to do that. When two terminals try to show the same screen, you'll get this error message (as an example):
Window 0 (bash) is on another display (joe@/dev/pts/26).
as an example. If you look at the screen source code, you can find the line where this is disallowed. Line #2873 in process.c:
if (p->w_display)
{
Msg(0, "Window %d (%s) is on another display (%s@%s).", n, p->w_title,
p->w_display->d_user->u_name, p->w_display->d_usertty);
return;
}
SetForeWindow(p);
Activate(fore->w_norefresh);
Please moderators start reading content before giving away moderator points. Some of you idiots are making
Apple invented Firewire. They may have invited industry input, but it was their initiative.
Apple invented ColorSync. Similar things may have been done before but that is irrelevant. Did Honda not invent the Insight? I mean the Model-T came first and they are both cars.
Finally, repeat after me: "QuickTime is not a codec." QuickTime is a system for dealing with time-based data. It can store text, images, video, etc. It can even store objects with motion information. It can contain hyperlinks and even SWF content. Sorrenson is one of many codecs available for use in storing movie data in the QuickTime format.
Besides these three there are things like HyperCard, QuickDraw, etc. Both of those were many years ahead of their time. Clipping wasn't done until QuickDraw. Look at HyperCard then look at Director and Flash. Look at Revolution. Look at the web itself.
Lets have another. Looc at MacTV. Now look at all these "media PCs" being merketted as innovative. The MacTV is many years older than any of these. Give gredit where credit is due. There is nothing substantially different (given the technology of the time) between these media PCs and the MacTV.
Also, don't forget the innovations in the Newton and the Pippen. Apple has innovated more than most modern hardware or software manufacturers with a fraction of the income.
t'nera semordnilap
The problem with this is that you need to be able to compile it synchronously as well. Also, when I program I have many files open at once, and I flip back and forth between them rapidly. I make changes quickly, sometimes a line or two, a quick pasting of text, and then start the compile. If another person has changed some text right before I do this, it would screw up my changes. This makes a tool like this impractical. It might be helpful to watch what another person is doing to a file, but you can't really watch someone else while you are programming. This is why modularity in design is so important, so that people can work somewhat independently without needing such inefficient interaction as this enables. It's an interesting accomplishment, but I don't think it would be that useful in practice.
My USB 802.11b client bluescreens my Windows xp Pro box. I have updated the drivers and all sorts of stuff, but nothing helps. At least Windows hasn't called that part of the driver in 11 days.
Okay, granted. It's good to have choice, isn't it? Hydra looks easier to use for many people.
At microsoft it appears NetMeeting is frozen back at Win98 / NT4, which is less good. I code for web in a Windows shop (Mac at home); I'll look into NetMeeting more.
It's already cool as a 1.0 product, it's FREE, and it may help inspire a more collaborative workflow. (For some kinds of work, for some people, some of the time.)
Not into it? Scroll down instead of taking the time to complain. Jeez.
je ne suis pas un fou
The thought of someone modifying the same file I am at the same time as I am sends shutters down my spine.
Therefore, it is you who sounds like the troll.
Well, what about Kim Jong Il?
"North Korea actually has large amounts of usable chemical, biological, AND nuclear weapons, AND long range missiles that can reach the west coast AND it has expelled nuclear weapons inspectors, AND threatened to turn America into a sea of fire."
How is he any less of a threat than Saddam? Saddam seems downright agreeable compared to him!
Multiple people working on one text document is old hat.
For example, CVS: edit locally at will, ``cvs up'' to integrate changes others have committed, resolve any conflicts, continue.
Even Visual SourceSafe supports this to a degree.
In other words, it's amazing what amazes some people.
>>> "you're quite the Apple fanboy/troll."
I don't run oscast, although I do work for the company.
I don't even own a Mac, but I do get upset when people troll messageboards with incorrect information.
A really mature reply, LOL
Their motto is "Seven brains are smarter than one." On the other hand, Despair.com tells us that "None of us is dumber than all of us."
Who do I believe?
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Are you suggesting that it would be OK to roll into North Korea and kick ass? Your lesser of 2 evils argument is stupid. I believe we can leave China to take care of that one. I also think it's funny that the only response is, "What about this!!" Just sidestep the issue like any good coward.
...we used to do the same thing when they had the IBM PCjr demo machines at K-Mart. We'd grab an extra wireless keyboard and stand behind the people using the machine and "correct" their typing, much to their consternation.
Who cares about N Korea? Not the US. There's no oil there. Why should the energy strapped US bother with something that gets them nothing in return?
I liked the story about the guy who made a RAID array outof 5 USB floppies, a lot better.
This guy is whack.
I believe it could be very well used for other things, such as writers writing with other writers... for a movies scene... I am writing the scene and my co-writer is adding more glitz and glamour to the dialouge so I don't make it come out all corny and terrible...
--Chris
I had a flame... but she had a fire.
Shutters down your spine? Talk about opening a window into your soul!
Clear, Dark Skies
I want Hydra/Rendezvous for Windows...
...in real time doesn't mean the rest of us are also incapable.
I personally have never had a problem with pair programming. A lot of the time it's like having a second pair of eyes and two extra brain hemespheres, depending who you are working with...
Pair-Programming obviously isn't for you.
I've even found pair programming to be beneficial when sitting with someone who's either learning, or lacks experience as it forces me to explain coherantly what I'm doing and why I'm doing it, which I find helps give me perspective.
Like I said, Pair-Programming obviously isn't for you.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
I'm curious what other people have found...
So far, the one I've been most impressed with push or pull clipboards with Rendezvous across Mac OS X systems. It's a bit of a security issue if you don't have it reasonably configured, of course.
So what have y'all seen that impressed you?
Just imagine the micromanaging possibilities. It's a dilbertian managerial utopia!
v
testing out my trending skills
Most people just funamentally can't accept their documents/work magically changing as they go along.
"Accept" it? If I were marooned on a desert island, I could learn to "accept" the lack of cold beer. I've "accepted" that I will, truly, never bone Natalie Portman. Why in the name of Jesus Christ would I want to "accept" someone diddling my work in real time? Where's the value-add?
If it's code, they're screwing up my state. If it's a blog entry or a love letter, well, blood will flow. Period.
This is the A-Number-One, pluperfect example of a solution in search of a problem.
Suddenly, my iChat windows are full of "Message from Llama69: Hi! I'm from Hong Kong! What are you wearing?"
The whole point of Rendezvous is to support creating small short-lived networks. Why would you want a global presence for such a thing?
Clear, Dark Skies
I remember this was a cool demo in Oberon, the very neat operating system written by the guy who invented Pascal, Nicolas Wirth. You could collaborately write complex text inside a normal text window that you opened. That was about 15 years ago...
Oberon actually still exists, and can be run on top of Linux these days. Not that anyone care. It was a nice experiment, though.
Was that them? Well, I guess MS isn't COMPLETELY useless, then... ;-)
"Common Sense Ain't" -Unknown
I'm much more comfortable with the idea of having someone help me (or helping someone else) debug a really tough problem that I'm stuck on.
So on that note, give me an extreme debugger as nice as this Hydra thing is for editing.
// foo.c
#include "foo_1.c"
#include "foo_2.c"
#include "foo_3.c"
#include "foo_4.c"
----
Just split the file into pieces and #include them in the original. Now multiple developers can edit different parts of the same "file" at the same time, without the annoyance of somebody fux0ring with what you just typed.
Damn right! I'll see these turd burgling moderators in Meta moderation.
I have a tibook. I use a lot of USB devices (mouse, keyboard, digital camera, m-audio IO box, bluetooth adapter is my usual set) and i've never installed any drivers for any of them. I just plug them in and they work. Oh, I think for the audio thinger I did. It grabbed it off the network. But USB (at least on mac) is a dream compared to COMX/COMX+1 on IRQY hell. Seriously, I had no idea it caused any one problems. I switch the devices around all the time (don't have enough ports, and I don't need the camera and audio and bluetooth at the same time) and *still* nothing breaks or gets confused. iTunes switches back to internal speaker and won't go back to the audio machine until I restart iTunes, but that's it.
You can get Rendezvous for Java from StrangeBerry. I'd like to see this built into Eclipse.
.Sig-nify,
Imagine doing some extreme programming with this, with one person writing code and another following the first and correcting their mistakes & making optimizations simultaneously?
Then imagine one programmer pounding another into the ground screaming, "my code! MY CODE!!!"
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
Finally, I've been waiting for this! My productivity at work will double!
I have dual screens on my workstation. Now if I get another USB keyboard and use hydra, I can type with my right hand looking at the screen on the right and correct my mistakes with my left hand on the other screen/combo. I can code and correct simultaneously, now all I need is coffee intravenously.
Who needs two programmers when one programmer can do all the work?
Having just studied the Cocoa text system I'd be willing to bet they simply hooked up another field editor class to project builder's text system.
Cocoa's text system is, shall we say, different when compared with other toolkits. It exposes this amazing API that lays the fondation for text editors, word processors, desktop publishing, web browsers (Berners-Lee used cocoa's predecessors), and anything else which does any kind of text management or layout.
The only drawback I can see to it is that a programmer who expects to do one-off writing of text to a drawing surface is really in for a surprise. However, I'm in the process of porting wxWindows to run atop of Cocoa and have found that even one-off text drawing hardly takes much effort once you realize how the classes (NSTextStorage, NSLayoutManager, and NSTextContainer) interact with each other.
Well, that's perhaps nice in some situations, but the guy probably checked it out for some reason, for instance, to make changes? And he didn't check it back in for some reason, for instance, he wasn't done making changes? And his half-done changes might not be the best thing to put in the code because they might cause more problems than you are ready to deal with anyway.
Actually, Randezvous doesn't, but Hydra does. You can type in an IP address as well, if Randezvous multicast doesn't do the job for you. The connection, as was mentioned, is plain IP unicast.
I just tested this with my colegue last night, me being connected through a 56K modem. All went well, updates were fast. We didn't really need to get anything done, so we replaced ICQ with this - and the 1-hour conversation went just fine.
I must say I was very impressed. Clean, lean and simply working - just as the Mac programs once used to be. It won't replace BBEdit, but it does have it's use.
No, there were multiple wheel mouse vendors that predated them. MS was the first one to popularize the wheel mouse, and to get it working well with lots of apps.
May we never see th
Yeah, tons.
- Sun: NFS
- Sun: NIS/NIS+
- Sun: NSS/PAM
- Intel and others: USB
- AMD and others: Hypertransport
- Sun: Java
Yeah, there's a lot of Sun in there, because I know their stuff better, but come off it. Companies invent stuff all the time, it just doesn't always turn into a viable product, and it doesn't often show up as a unique, identifiable thing.Hell, everything in linux was invented by someone; the free software people sure as hell didn't think of it. ;)
Because few people have an ISP that allows them to use global multi-cast, so what's the point?
If you have USB, just plug in an extra keyboard and mouse. This will turn any old application into one where two people can work at the same time, if they just politely hand control over the cursor to each other.
I've seen alot of negative comments here about Hydra being Mac only. There is talk of making Hydra open source, perhaps you should contact the Hydra team and express intrest in porting Hydra to your favorite OS? If they do make it open source it's surely going to be because of intrest in the project and, as stated on their page, it surely will be a large undertaking due to the fact that it's written entirely in Objective C and Cocca. Unfortunately this means a complete re-write will be needed, but you didn't have anything to do this weekend, did you?
Also, if you want to get active about making Rendezvous a reality on more that just the Mac (which is what Apple and Zeroconf are hoping for), Zeroconf.org is a good place to start, and there is a SourceForge project devoted to Zeroconf on Unix and Linux as well.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Because few people have an ISP that allows them to use global multi-cast, so what's the point?
So, a good tool exists, but because your ISP is backwards and doesn't support something that's been around since the mid-80s, we should just give up? How do you feel about a end-user ISP that doesn't news servers, or mail servers? To me, that seems like a crappy ISP who doesn't really deserve my business. I expect certain services to be provided when I get Internet service, and I frown on any ISP that rightly deserves to only be called a Web Service Provider.
Now, from the business side of things, you need to shop around for someone who actually provides multicast service. Trust me, there's quite a few of them out there. Off the top of my head, I'll mention Sprint, Verio, Qwest, Cable & Wireless, Global Crossing, and Level 3.
On the residential side of things, I know that multicast works on dial-up. You just need to get your provider to actually enable it. Multicast is also a part of the DOCSIS 1.1 standard, so your cable modem ISP shouldn't have a problem providing service. I know of a few DSL providers that offer multicast service, so it should be possible there as well.
Finally, just because you offer multicast doesn't meant that you can't fall back to unicast if multicast doesn't work. That's exactly what Windows Media Player does, and Quicktime, and Real Player. They all try to multicast first, and fall back to unicast if they can't join the multicast group.
You know, I just started reading slashdot this week and this is the fourth time I've seen repeated troll posts like this one (2nd time seeing this one, twice on another one as well). I like slashdot and all (I guess I should say /.) but I think its just ridiculous that these obvious flames aren't removed. They add nothing to the /. experience. I know this isn't related to the original thread so go ahead and 'mod me down' (I don't even know what that means :\ )
I suppose you also believe Hitler had nothing to do with the holocaust as well,
No
you ignorant fool
you gave a good description of yourself.
What about the 100,000 Kurds that Saddam killed?
So if S.H. killed 100.000 Iraqis this gives the USA the right to kill other thousands of Iraqis?
Explain to me how the world will be a better place with Saddam in power?
The world would be a better place if Iraq had been disarmed and S.H. removed from power without wasting thousands of lives and billions of dollars,
This is Rumsfeld logics: Iraq was a threat to the USA because they had no useable weapons of mass destruction that could be of any danger to the invading forces. In other circumstances you would call him a coward.
But Xerox Parc has something like this (and has had for a while now) for webpages.
:)
I came across it after I had the exact same idea, only to find that XerocParc had already implemented it
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
anyone has been able to do this for at least .. gimme
10 years using screen kibitz mode
a freakin break
'intelligent reasons' - you just hit the nail
on the head. hardcore mac users tend to be
ignorant and seemingly proud of it. apparently
macs run at the speed of productivity for these
people. fine for them. let them pay extra
money for the privilege.
did you read that link?
it says explicetly that:
"in the mid-80's Apple invented...firewire"
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Can anyone name ONE thing that "Anonymous Coward" invented?
I haven't read *every* comment to see if this was already mentioned. But I saw some people disappointed that it 'only supported rendezvous' .. Please note that this application allows you to just join a session by specifying a host/ip as well, so it's not JUST rendezvous enabled.
Cheers,
-JD-
You are a complete friggin idiot. This war is about a whole bunch of former oil executives (bush, cheney, rice etc.) turned powerful politicians completely exploiting the military strength of US to benefit a few oil, defense, reconstruction corps.
Look in the mirror... yea, that's what fools look like
"melt" attack!
I'd say if I'm able to access your X display you should be more worried about what I can do! I might have run Emacs as a sandboxed user...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
At one time Quicktime wasn't a framework if I remember correctly... Quicktime 1.0 was a single proprietary codec developed in house at apple with the .qt extension...
Right. That was my point. See, I responded to his assertion that Apple had never invented anything with that link, which suggested that Apple had invented firewire. To get there, I read the link and saw what it menat. Then I thought about what he said and saw that the link countered his assertion. So I presented the link as evidence that Apple _had_, in fact invented something. So I posted it here. And to it you responded, but yoe seem to have missed one or two of the steps in that progression.
Nope. GNUstep.
Ummm, "First Post"?
Today, my supervisor asked me and several of my coworkers to create a document for leaving pass-down notes for the next shift. Since each of us work in a different area it would be nice to be able to collaborate a document while being on different sides of the plant. Five people, one document, simple. However, since I work for Dell I doubt this will be coming to my owkrplace anytime soon.
What would be the use of it if it were just a codec by itself? If you mean it only supported one type of format, that might be true. But it had a bunch of other things besides just a codec with .qt extension. It had APIs other apps could use to view and capture videos. Here's some info on QuickTime 1.0:
i o/ bfp_quicktime1.htm
http://www.billfernandez.com/bf_info/bf_portfol
It's great to see the niftiest, coolest, and most useful (eMacs notwithstanding) stuff is still coming out first on the Mac (or NeXT, as in the first web browser), and spreading from there. Cross-platform would be nice. Just a matter of time...
("regular user" != Anonymous Coward)
The version of screen in Debian stable is 3.9.11-5, and it has no problems displaying the same window to multiple screen clients simultaneously. You're trolling, or you're doing something horribly wrong.
If you think this is wrong, please file a bug and I'll walk you through a simple example of how to do this in my reply to the bug report.
perhaps I lost my way in the thread but I swear you responded to some one who had said Apple invented fire wire.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Are you sure? I've always heard that MS invented it. It was the single point of light in an otherwise borrowed/stolen legacy.
Actually, I should add that I sat at a Tektronix terminal with 'X' and 'Y' scroll wheels in 1987, so incorporating it into a mouse (one MS had an OS that could actually use a mouse, that is) probably wasn't too huge of a leap.
That was me who said Apple had invented firewire. I think we might be agreeing.
hmm :-)
I guess I got lost in the thread then becasue we do agree
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Are you sure?
Yup, MS did not invent the scroll wheel. Here's a quote from the X scroll wheel mouse page.
The first mouse I saw having a wheel was a Genius mouse (Easyscroll), with pratically no support (CoreyFromailed me that the first scroll mouse was actually a mouse systems "3d mouse"). One year afterwards, Microsoft popularised the concept with its Intellimouse, trying as usual to use if for unfair competition (it only worked with MS apps), but other manufacturers soon followed, with products working with all windows apps, such as the logitech ones.
May we never see th
If you have a chance, try it out. I had it set as my "External Editor" for a while in Code Warrior, but since it doesn't support setting breakpoints and can't open header files via good old command-D, I turned that off after the session was over. (If you do have it set as the editor, you can swithc back to Code Warrior and command-D there and it will open the file in Hydra.)
I eagerly await new versions!
[ReidNews]
you remember incorrectly
why the fuck would Apple have a file extension?
have you EVER used a pre-OSX Mac?
That was classic intercourse!
Three of us used Hydra extensively this weekend, preparing editorial material for the next issue of our fanzine, Plokta. It's certainly much more than a demo, as some have suggested. We found it very straightforward and effective to use, and much simpler than any collaborative editing tool I've previously encountered. We were working in a single room on a wireless LAN. Hydra is a relatively simple text editor, with syntax colouring for a range of languages (as it has HTML, it satisfies my limited requirements in a text editor, too). Document owners can choose to share them (and whether to control user access to shares), and LAN users can see a list of all shared documents and ask to join those they're interested in working on. Once shared, text created by each participant is separately coloured. Participants are handily identified with iChat icons and the position of their cursor is noted. It works as advertised; it's possible to work fully interactively and edit simultaneously, which takes some getting used to. When editing editorial text, we would have found it helpful for deleted text to be indicated with strikethrough rather than just deleted. Otherwise Hydra was extremely handy. It both sped up and simplified the process of writing and re-writing material, and version control risks were eliminated. When material was ready to be imported to the laid out document, it could be cut-and-pasted from Hydra, rather than the usual process of saving a copy to the server and then opening on the machine on which the layout was being done. Only other drawback; those of the team not using Mac OS X were disenfranchised (it's taking advantage of Cocoa), and we just can't afford to buy those PowerBooks fast enough. We've also done a test session over the Internet; sharing documents (through our various firewalls) is slightly more fiddly. Once participants and documents are identified, the program remains as easy and straightforward as on Rendezvous. Our wishlist item; that this collaboration system is fully incorporated in Apple's rumoured forthcoming OS X native word processor. Bottom line; it's very useful indeed, and it's free.