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."

Comments

Re:Been there, done that

[krisp]

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.

I don't mean to be a cheerleader. But,

[veldmon]

this is what an operating system is supposed to enable. That is why I recently made the 'switch' to a PowerBook running OS X Jaguar.

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.

Typo

[Repugnant_Shit]

Future improvements will include support for RTF

Someone left off the "M" at the end.

Remote pair programming?

[matiasp]

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".

Re:Remote pair programming?

[SuperBanana]

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.

Think of it more like...'live' CVS. Think of it also not in terms of just programming, but other text editing- like, say, a book. According to the Jabber guys, this sort of stuff is incredibly handy for legal documents, which are heavily co-authored.

If you've got six guys in a meeting room, six laptops, and one doc, you can quickly say "okay, bob, edit section 6. Jane, section 3" etc..nobody needs to worry about re-syncing copies of the doc, or CVS servers, or any of that...and people can even watch as the guy edits his particular section. Maybe they notice something amiss, and mention it- "okay, can you rewrite that phrase?" While Bob continues writing, Jane corrects the one phrase...etc. Each team member can work with any number of other people(including zero, ie, on their own.)

While it's fun to joke about people trading insults and deleteing other's writing, that's moot- if you don't have good team dynamics and people are hostile/uncooperative/ego-tripping, that's a people problem, not a technology problem. You can't solve people problems with technology. Well, you can, but it's often far more time-consuming. What takes a sysadmin an hour or two(configure proxy to block porno sites) can often be solved by a 1 minute phone call to HR("Bob is swamping the line browsing porno" HR to Bob: "Surf porn sites again, and you're fired.")

Re:Been there, done that

[Tom7]

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!)

Fast, clean, badass...

[agent oranje]

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.

We just started using this at my school

[gozar]

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.

Re:Been there, done that

[rifter]

More to the point, what other editor *needs* a psychiatrist feature? Ok, maybe Word, but not if you can disable the "damned paperclip."

Re:Been there, done that

[b0r1s]

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.

Heheh

[fredrikj]

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 :)

Innovation

[nullard]

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.

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.