The really funny part about {NeXTstep,NextStep,NEXTSTEP,Nextstep,OpenStep) being around for 16 years (1989 was the release of 0.8, I recall), is the apps that Steve (that's JOBS) is recycling from the old days.
Keynote is VERY close to a wonderful 1995 NEXTSTEP presentation app from Lighthouse Design called "Concurrence". How close is it? Well, why not ask Roger Rosner, who now works at Apple, on Keynote, and was one of the founders of Lighthouse.
Another Lighthouse founder, Kevin Steele, wrote Diagram! for NEXTSTEP in 1992, WELL before Visio was even a company (and well before Visio bought ten copies of Diagram!, worked for a year, and came out with a similar program for Windows, making millions of dollars). He rewrote it a couple years ago and gave his new version to me (and Omni) -- we renamed it OmniGraffle.
And (finally for now) there was a company that started working on an amazing word processor / page layout hybrid program for NEXTSTEP in 1996-7ish, that just barely got published before the company folded.
The product was called... Pages. cf. Pages. Note that both Apple's new iWork apps are actually NEXTSTEP apps from the mid-1990s.
The last great product from the 1990s NEXTSTEP days was Lotus Improv -- later rewritten by Lighthouse as "Quantrix". It was a truly amazing infinite-dimension spreadsheet. Do a google on Quantrix -- there's a new Java spreadsheet of the same name. And, in fact, by one of the old Lighthouse alumni. And it runs on Mac OS X, but, frankly, I'd really rather have a native Cocoa port. (Sorry, guys, but it doesn't feel the same yet.)
[BTW, it really pays to have worked at Lighthouse. Their president, for example, is now the president of Sun.]
I feel like you're still missing part of my point, and thus misunderestimating the grander plan.
First off, let me explain that I feel that progress is made in tiny little increments. Do I expect Delicious Library to instantly bring peace to the whole planet? No. Do I think it's a step in a positive direction? Yes. That still makes it worthwhile.
It seems like what you're saying is that everyone shouldn't want to read the same thing, and I'm not disagreeing with you. What I'm saying is, imagine being able to instantly find people who have the same _taste_ as you, and then getting recommendations from just them, instead of from the entire world.
And yes, the world has real problems. But a lot of real problems go away when people treat each other with dignity and respect.
The way Delicious Library could bring the world together is we will create new meta-communities based on common tastes instead of based on racial, monetary, or geographical boundaries. Imagine you rate a bunch of books you like and discover someone else who has almost the exact same taste as you through Delicious Library -- maybe at first you sample some of the selections from other person's 'loved-it' list that you haven't tried yet, but then as you build up confidence you start talking to the person, and exchanging ideas about the stuff you both love.
What if you then discover this person lives in a country that your country currently calls its enemy? How is this going to change your view of the "enemy"? I know that "you", in this particular case, probably aren't impressed with this scenario, because you're already enlightened vis-a-vis your country's enemies. But I'm also sure you can imagine a "you" where getting to know the enemy as a person would have a profound effect.
--
Of course, the e-book club is useful for a lot more than stopping wars. I see it as a way for us to create new societies. I don't claim to have invented this idea, what I do claim is DL will make it VERY EASY. Once you have all your stuff in your computer, it should be REALLY easy to rate it and compare it with others.
My point isn't that we should avoid human contact, in fact, it's quite the opposite. We are basically shy creatures, and we need commonalities in order to bond and form societies. For instance, I barely know my neighbors, but I know everyone at my local Apple Store.
What we want to give people is some known set of common interests for them to form real friendships around. We want Delicious Library to say, in effect, "Hey, there are 35 people in Seattle who have very similar tastes in horror novels as you do... maybe you should form a book club?" or "Hey, there's a woman down the street who has the next book in this series you love -- why not ask her if you can borrow it?"
It's ironic to argue with someone on slash-dot, which is a very clear example of what I'm talking about (a new society that ignores traditional boundaries), about whether this kind of idea is valid.
I am a tad starry-eyed. I'm proud of it. Twenty years ago everyone said I was a dreamer for fighting Microsoft and supporting UNIX (and then Nextstep, then Mac OS X). "There's no way Microsoft's reign could ever end! Who could imagine such a day!"
Dreamers fail a lot, except when they don't, and then, THEN they change the world. And if I die having not changed the world, well, at least I tried.
Let's leave movies aside for a second. I have a collection of about 1,200 books in my library. Mostly sci-fi (everything Larry Niven wrote before 1985, Steven Brust), some graphic novels (yes, that's snotty talk for comic books), some fiction by Somerset Maugham.
What I discovered back when I was at Omni was there was an engineer there who had a lot of the same taste as me in books. He started introducing me to authors he liked, that I'd either never heard of or never thought I'd like. Alec Effinger (rip, friend), for instance.
And, what was amazing was EVERY book he recommended, I treasured. (Thanks, Wiml!)
How incredible, I thought, to have the ability to KNOW, before I ever buy a book, before I even go to the store, that I'm going to like it!
So, one of my thoughts for Library was, what if we could do this on a larger scale? What if, instead of querying your friends and hoping one has similar tastes, you could query the whole world? What new worlds would you be introduced to if _everyone_ who had similar interests to you were making suggestions?
We're not talking about comparing your library of crap to everyone else's crap and recommending crap. We're talking about looking at the books that _you_ treasure, and finding someone who treasures the same titles, and then asking, well, what do they like that you haven't seen yet? What do you like that they haven't seen?
Besides the new books you'd get to read, imagine the conversations you'd get to have with this group of people.
The reason that everyone has "the same crappy Hollywood movies" is because they don't have anyone they trust to recommend movies to them, so they let the shelf-space at the video store do the recommending.
So set your cynicism aside for a second. We're trying to provide an alternative to the exact system you hate, which only rewards mainstream tastes. Maybe we succeed, maybe we fail, but at least we're trying to do something neat.
I'm not sure what you mean by "inaccessible to robots"? Like, are you calling marketing people "robots," or are you talking about, like, SkyNet?
Delicious Library just queries Amazon with a barcode and they send back a product description. Nothing identifying the user is sent to Amazon. It's all in our FAQ.
In version 2.0, you'll (hopefully) have the option of sharing your collection with other users if you'd like. Possibly the robot stalkers you speak of will attempt to get this data from the users who have volunteered to share it, but that's the risk you run in building a community.
We could also all board up our windows, because someone could drive by and see what kind of furniture we like. I choose not to.
We use my house as a base of operations -- extra scanners are stored there, along with our MacWorld booth, and, if I have my way, that giant TV we had at MacWorld.
All these assets are guarded by two fierce attack-cats, so don't try looking up our address of incorporation and breaking into my house! You will emerge fuzzy, my friend. FUZZY!
I can't speak for Omni, since I don't have anything to do with their day-to-day business any more. I think it's a fair guess that development will continue on OmniWeb and OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner and OmniDiskSweeper without me, as it has for the last nine months.
Little Kimberly Anne survived her disease and took off on her own six years ago. She's happy and living in Seattle, and writes book reviews for MSNBC.
You don't have to switch shelves by hand to switch between entering movies and books by hand -- just add all items to the "Incoming" shelf and they'll morph into the correct item type when they are looked up.
But, if you add an item specifically to the "Books" shelf it is MUCH faster for us to only check the books database, and we get much better results as well.
Being an espresso snob is very expensive. The machine back at Omni cost us $1500 on close-out, and I think it kind of sucks, now.
The two La Marzoccos at Zoka cost, no kidding, something over $20,000 each. (They are re-tuned by hand once they come in the United States to be even more frou-frou.) Their entire water supply is run through an enormous Cuno water filter. They roast their own beans (which they sell as far away as Japan) and train baristas from all over the country. Their baristas consistently place tops in the national tournaments.
Seriously, you have to try an extra-foamy mocha here. Imagine drinking coffee-meringue-pie!
We will absolutely have sharing your collection be "opt-in," on several levels. We aren't Safeway.
Amazon already has 1,000,000x the data on people's buying habits and their relations to each other than we'll ever collect, so I suspect that if marketers were going to have a field day, they'd be calling Amazon long before us.
It's true that it'd be _possible_ for us to do less-than-good things with the data we collect, but we're not going to. We're going to use the data to create new virtual communities of people with common interests, and bring our fragmented society closer together. If you don't want to join in those communities, don't check the preference box.
Mike has always been against us making the "buy similar items" aspect of our product too prominent, because he didn't want us to seem like a front-end to Amazon. And when we were looking for a way to help the world with our money, It was his idea to give all of our Amazon associates' money to charity, so it's clear to our customers we are NOT trying to encourage them to BUY BUY BUY.
Any new technology can be used for good or evil. I would expect people on this forum would recognize this truism isn't an argument against progress; it's a caution against recklessness.
Our whole company is predicated on doing things differently, so when we're meeting with clients it's sort of our badge of courage to tell them to meet us at the Zoka.
I don't think it's ruffled anyone's feathers. We've done press interviews and met insurance guys and interviewed employees. Everyone seems to feel very at home. I guess it's not much different from meeting a client when you're on the road.
[The hilarious part is that our Zoka happens to be RIGHT next door to The Omni Group. I mean, literally the next building over. So, for people I've done business with before, it's like, "Uh, remember where I used to be? Well..."]
Eight hours at the coffee shop, on average. I'm usually there every day. I also work from home, and from restaurants; my laptop goes with me everywhere. I'm the life of the party, yes sir.
Mike and I pretty much are always working on our company -- even when we're watching movies, we'll be thinking of ways to solve the problems we're hitting.
Part of the idea here is that you don't have to lock your company in a building and turn a key and say goodnight to it every night. We've incorporated it into almost all of our normal lives. That, for me, is the core point of the 'coffee shop as office' meme.
It's funny, because most people's reaction to our software when they first see it is, "Wow, how useful! Here's my credit card," but for some it is, "Wow, how useless... here's my credit card."
I don't actually want to argue with your point, although it's worth mentioning, as other people have, that you can print out your list of stuff and tuck it in a safety deposit box, so if you lose your collection to fire or theft it'll all be replaced exactly. Or you can print your collection and take the list to the video/book store and make sure you don't duplicate items. Or you can track your loans and make sure you don't lose items.
Or you can use the smart recommendations and find items you never knew you'd like, and buy with more confidence that you aren't wasting money. Or you can sell items you're no longer using in just a couple clicks, and make some extra money AND tidy up your life.
All of these things potentially make and/or save you money.
But, you may not want to do any of that. What I'd like to point out is, our real goal in writing software is to make you smile.
Did we succeed at that? Because, for instance, "The Incredibles" probably didn't make you better, stronger, faster (etc), but I'm betting you don't regret the $9 you spent on it. And if every company's goal was to make products that made people smile, I don't think the world would be a bad place at all.
I'm assuming this was meant to be a jab, but Mike's actually very seriously considering getting a Segway. He lives only about ten blocks from the cafe, and we're both very concerned about the environment and stuff.
It's kind of mean to assume we're stupid just because we managed to get some publicity for our tiny company. We still worked really hard on our product.
Slashdot Mirror
Geez JCR... you can't think of ANY example of ANY of us exerting influence on developers?
Rude.
The really funny part about {NeXTstep,NextStep,NEXTSTEP,Nextstep,OpenStep) being around for 16 years (1989 was the release of 0.8, I recall), is the apps that Steve (that's JOBS) is recycling from the old days.
Keynote is VERY close to a wonderful 1995 NEXTSTEP presentation app from Lighthouse Design called "Concurrence". How close is it? Well, why not ask Roger Rosner, who now works at Apple, on Keynote, and was one of the founders of Lighthouse.
Another Lighthouse founder, Kevin Steele, wrote Diagram! for NEXTSTEP in 1992, WELL before Visio was even a company (and well before Visio bought ten copies of Diagram!, worked for a year, and came out with a similar program for Windows, making millions of dollars). He rewrote it a couple years ago and gave his new version to me (and Omni) -- we renamed it OmniGraffle.
And (finally for now) there was a company that started working on an amazing word processor / page layout hybrid program for NEXTSTEP in 1996-7ish, that just barely got published before the company folded.
The product was called... Pages. cf. Pages. Note that both Apple's new iWork apps are actually NEXTSTEP apps from the mid-1990s.
The last great product from the 1990s NEXTSTEP days was Lotus Improv -- later rewritten by Lighthouse as "Quantrix". It was a truly amazing infinite-dimension spreadsheet. Do a google on Quantrix -- there's a new Java spreadsheet of the same name. And, in fact, by one of the old Lighthouse alumni. And it runs on Mac OS X, but, frankly, I'd really rather have a native Cocoa port. (Sorry, guys, but it doesn't feel the same yet.)
[BTW, it really pays to have worked at Lighthouse. Their president, for example, is now the president of Sun.]
I feel like you're still missing part of my point, and thus misunderestimating the grander plan.
First off, let me explain that I feel that progress is made in tiny little increments. Do I expect Delicious Library to instantly bring peace to the whole planet? No. Do I think it's a step in a positive direction? Yes. That still makes it worthwhile.
It seems like what you're saying is that everyone shouldn't want to read the same thing, and I'm not disagreeing with you. What I'm saying is, imagine being able to instantly find people who have the same _taste_ as you, and then getting recommendations from just them, instead of from the entire world.
And yes, the world has real problems. But a lot of real problems go away when people treat each other with dignity and respect.
The way Delicious Library could bring the world together is we will create new meta-communities based on common tastes instead of based on racial, monetary, or geographical boundaries. Imagine you rate a bunch of books you like and discover someone else who has almost the exact same taste as you through Delicious Library -- maybe at first you sample some of the selections from other person's 'loved-it' list that you haven't tried yet, but then as you build up confidence you start talking to the person, and exchanging ideas about the stuff you both love.
What if you then discover this person lives in a country that your country currently calls its enemy? How is this going to change your view of the "enemy"? I know that "you", in this particular case, probably aren't impressed with this scenario, because you're already enlightened vis-a-vis your country's enemies. But I'm also sure you can imagine a "you" where getting to know the enemy as a person would have a profound effect.
--
Of course, the e-book club is useful for a lot more than stopping wars. I see it as a way for us to create new societies. I don't claim to have invented this idea, what I do claim is DL will make it VERY EASY. Once you have all your stuff in your computer, it should be REALLY easy to rate it and compare it with others.
My point isn't that we should avoid human contact, in fact, it's quite the opposite. We are basically shy creatures, and we need commonalities in order to bond and form societies. For instance, I barely know my neighbors, but I know everyone at my local Apple Store.
What we want to give people is some known set of common interests for them to form real friendships around. We want Delicious Library to say, in effect, "Hey, there are 35 people in Seattle who have very similar tastes in horror novels as you do... maybe you should form a book club?" or "Hey, there's a woman down the street who has the next book in this series you love -- why not ask her if you can borrow it?"
It's ironic to argue with someone on slash-dot, which is a very clear example of what I'm talking about (a new society that ignores traditional boundaries), about whether this kind of idea is valid.
I am a tad starry-eyed. I'm proud of it. Twenty years ago everyone said I was a dreamer for fighting Microsoft and supporting UNIX (and then Nextstep, then Mac OS X). "There's no way Microsoft's reign could ever end! Who could imagine such a day!"
Dreamers fail a lot, except when they don't, and then, THEN they change the world. And if I die having not changed the world, well, at least I tried.
Heh.
Select all the shelves, hit command-A to select all items, and then press the delete key.
Wow, you're a tad on the cynical side.
Let's leave movies aside for a second. I have a collection of about 1,200 books in my library. Mostly sci-fi (everything Larry Niven wrote before 1985, Steven Brust), some graphic novels (yes, that's snotty talk for comic books), some fiction by Somerset Maugham.
What I discovered back when I was at Omni was there was an engineer there who had a lot of the same taste as me in books. He started introducing me to authors he liked, that I'd either never heard of or never thought I'd like. Alec Effinger (rip, friend), for instance.
And, what was amazing was EVERY book he recommended, I treasured. (Thanks, Wiml!)
How incredible, I thought, to have the ability to KNOW, before I ever buy a book, before I even go to the store, that I'm going to like it!
So, one of my thoughts for Library was, what if we could do this on a larger scale? What if, instead of querying your friends and hoping one has similar tastes, you could query the whole world? What new worlds would you be introduced to if _everyone_ who had similar interests to you were making suggestions?
We're not talking about comparing your library of crap to everyone else's crap and recommending crap. We're talking about looking at the books that _you_ treasure, and finding someone who treasures the same titles, and then asking, well, what do they like that you haven't seen yet? What do you like that they haven't seen?
Besides the new books you'd get to read, imagine the conversations you'd get to have with this group of people.
The reason that everyone has "the same crappy Hollywood movies" is because they don't have anyone they trust to recommend movies to them, so they let the shelf-space at the video store do the recommending.
So set your cynicism aside for a second. We're trying to provide an alternative to the exact system you hate, which only rewards mainstream tastes. Maybe we succeed, maybe we fail, but at least we're trying to do something neat.
I'll take my halo back now, thank you.
You can't order them arbitrarily, but you can order them by any criteria in the database, and purchase date is one of the criteria.
We automatically sort by artist and then title after any sort you select, so if there are two items you buy on the same date the sub-sort will be OK.
I'm not sure what you mean by "inaccessible to robots"? Like, are you calling marketing people "robots," or are you talking about, like, SkyNet?
Delicious Library just queries Amazon with a barcode and they send back a product description. Nothing identifying the user is sent to Amazon. It's all in our FAQ.
In version 2.0, you'll (hopefully) have the option of sharing your collection with other users if you'd like. Possibly the robot stalkers you speak of will attempt to get this data from the users who have volunteered to share it, but that's the risk you run in building a community.
We could also all board up our windows, because someone could drive by and see what kind of furniture we like. I choose not to.
Booxter implemented iSight scanning after ThinkSecret ran an article previewing Delicious Library's iSight scanning.
I've been told theirs is, uh, quirky, but I admit I have not used it, and they've said they've improved it in recent versions.
We use my house as a base of operations -- extra scanners are stored there, along with our MacWorld booth, and, if I have my way, that giant TV we had at MacWorld.
All these assets are guarded by two fierce attack-cats, so don't try looking up our address of incorporation and breaking into my house! You will emerge fuzzy, my friend. FUZZY!
I can't speak for Omni, since I don't have anything to do with their day-to-day business any more. I think it's a fair guess that development will continue on OmniWeb and OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner and OmniDiskSweeper without me, as it has for the last nine months.
Little Kimberly Anne survived her disease and took off on her own six years ago. She's happy and living in Seattle, and writes book reviews for MSNBC.
You don't have to switch shelves by hand to switch between entering movies and books by hand -- just add all items to the "Incoming" shelf and they'll morph into the correct item type when they are looked up.
But, if you add an item specifically to the "Books" shelf it is MUCH faster for us to only check the books database, and we get much better results as well.
The two La Marzoccos at Zoka cost, no kidding, something over $20,000 each. (They are re-tuned by hand once they come in the United States to be even more frou-frou.) Their entire water supply is run through an enormous Cuno water filter. They roast their own beans (which they sell as far away as Japan) and train baristas from all over the country. Their baristas consistently place tops in the national tournaments.
Seriously, you have to try an extra-foamy mocha here. Imagine drinking coffee-meringue-pie!
We will absolutely have sharing your collection be "opt-in," on several levels. We aren't Safeway.
Amazon already has 1,000,000x the data on people's buying habits and their relations to each other than we'll ever collect, so I suspect that if marketers were going to have a field day, they'd be calling Amazon long before us.
It's true that it'd be _possible_ for us to do less-than-good things with the data we collect, but we're not going to. We're going to use the data to create new virtual communities of people with common interests, and bring our fragmented society closer together. If you don't want to join in those communities, don't check the preference box.
Mike has always been against us making the "buy similar items" aspect of our product too prominent, because he didn't want us to seem like a front-end to Amazon. And when we were looking for a way to help the world with our money, It was his idea to give all of our Amazon associates' money to charity, so it's clear to our customers we are NOT trying to encourage them to BUY BUY BUY.
Any new technology can be used for good or evil. I would expect people on this forum would recognize this truism isn't an argument against progress; it's a caution against recklessness.
Our whole company is predicated on doing things differently, so when we're meeting with clients it's sort of our badge of courage to tell them to meet us at the Zoka.
I don't think it's ruffled anyone's feathers. We've done press interviews and met insurance guys and interviewed employees. Everyone seems to feel very at home. I guess it's not much different from meeting a client when you're on the road.
[The hilarious part is that our Zoka happens to be RIGHT next door to The Omni Group. I mean, literally the next building over. So, for people I've done business with before, it's like, "Uh, remember where I used to be? Well..."]
Eight hours at the coffee shop, on average. I'm usually there every day. I also work from home, and from restaurants; my laptop goes with me everywhere. I'm the life of the party, yes sir. Mike and I pretty much are always working on our company -- even when we're watching movies, we'll be thinking of ways to solve the problems we're hitting. Part of the idea here is that you don't have to lock your company in a building and turn a key and say goodnight to it every night. We've incorporated it into almost all of our normal lives. That, for me, is the core point of the 'coffee shop as office' meme.
Our web server and store machines are both off-site. We don't do shipping out of the coffee-house either. We do take phone calls and meetings there.
Because we're trendy?
We have a fulfillment center in Olympia for the scanners and we have a FedEx Kinko's a block away for other shipments.
It's funny, because most people's reaction to our software when they first see it is, "Wow, how useful! Here's my credit card," but for some it is, "Wow, how useless... here's my credit card."
I don't actually want to argue with your point, although it's worth mentioning, as other people have, that you can print out your list of stuff and tuck it in a safety deposit box, so if you lose your collection to fire or theft it'll all be replaced exactly. Or you can print your collection and take the list to the video/book store and make sure you don't duplicate items. Or you can track your loans and make sure you don't lose items.
Or you can use the smart recommendations and find items you never knew you'd like, and buy with more confidence that you aren't wasting money. Or you can sell items you're no longer using in just a couple clicks, and make some extra money AND tidy up your life.
All of these things potentially make and/or save you money.
But, you may not want to do any of that. What I'd like to point out is, our real goal in writing software is to make you smile.
Did we succeed at that? Because, for instance, "The Incredibles" probably didn't make you better, stronger, faster (etc), but I'm betting you don't regret the $9 you spent on it. And if every company's goal was to make products that made people smile, I don't think the world would be a bad place at all.
I'm assuming this was meant to be a jab, but Mike's actually very seriously considering getting a Segway. He lives only about ten blocks from the cafe, and we're both very concerned about the environment and stuff.
It's kind of mean to assume we're stupid just because we managed to get some publicity for our tiny company. We still worked really hard on our product.
> They left a smaller company where they didn't have control to form a smaller company where they would.
I was the president of Omni Group for about 10 years, and I founded it, and I still am the largest shareholder.
> When they enter middle age they'll not want their 'window office' to be a seat at a coffee bar.
I'm 35. I had a real window office most of my adult life, and I'm much happier now.