Slashdot Mirror
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."
Rendezvous, however, is unicasted, therefor noone on the lan needs to know anything about ips or networking in order to get it to work. That's really the only thing thats neet about it, the fact that two people turn on the program, and have it automagicly find the other programs running on the lan.
Yes, indeed. Unfortunately, emacs shares the minibuffer between each frame, so if one user tries to start a search-and-replace, for instance, everything goes to hell. Even in this crippled state, though, I found this pretty useful. (I'm willing to bet that Hydra doesn't have the fancy features that Emacs has, anyway, so maybe they're on equal ground after all!)
You can also join via an IP address, for those times that you are not on the same subnet.
What, me worry?
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?
Rendezvous is a standards-based implementation of multicast DNS. It uses multicast transport of those packets to cover a campus network. Unicast would refer to a single IP address source and destination.
You're right and you're wrong.
The application uses multicast DNS to FIND the service, but then reverts to unicast for actual USE of the service. It'd be quite silly to send all of that information all over the network.
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
Hydra works over the internet also. You don't have to be "sitting at a meeting", but you do need a Mac. Of course nothing stops you from buying a Mac if you want to.
Not sure what using LaTeX has to do with any of this. Hydra does support LaTeX color syntaxing and will eventually work with typesetting your documents too from what it says in the FAQ. Of course TeXShop already does that nicely on OS X. Getting edits from many users for a shared LaTeX file seems to work great with Hydra. I just had a friend share a paper I wrote on a machine across campus and I was able to find it instantly with Hydra (and Rendevous), add my LaTeX modifications and was done. A quick run of latex at the command line on his end and we were set!
I may not be understanding why Jabber "may" be so great for this type of work...someday in the future, but seems that Hydra is doing it today, and will only get better in future.
Cool tools like this that I can setup in seconds and teach ANYONE to use in a minute are why I'll never mess with Linux for desktop work again. My time is money!
Wilersh
Well, the twist with Rendezvous and iChat is that you can sit down, open your laptop, have your Mac automatically connect to the nearest wireless network and automatically discover ever other iChat client on the network. No IP addresses, no entry of nicknames; it automatically discovers everybody else on the local network. Not only that, but it's rediculously easy to do the same thing yourself, or anything you like using it; Apple's libraries are supposed to be top notch from what I hear. I'm rather surprised nobody's written an iChat client for Windows/*NIX yet, as it should be trivial to use Apple's code and write a small program that would handle this.
:) /rant
None of this is incredibly new or even groundbreaking in itself. The main feature is that it's so simple and easy to use that you can put it together in combinations that nobody would have even thought of putting them together, or that they wouldn't have put in the effort to get it to work. I have a Epson inkjet that I share from one computer to my main one. I was impressed to click the checkbox on the sharing computer in the other room, sit down in front of my main computer and begin printing without ever touching a configuration setting anywhere in the OS. Like I said, nothing groundbreaking, but it makes everything that much easier to use, and gives me one less thing to worry about. Which I appreciate.
My English teacher once told me that two positives don't make a negative. Two words for her: Yeah, right.
.@.
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