“NoteShare comes from AquaMinds, the company that produces a popular Macintosh organizer, NoteTaker. The program is designed specifically for the social aspects of computing, and its significance is how easy it makes what has been a very complicated and challenging undertaking,” James Fallows reports for The New York Times. “The purpose of NoteShare is to let people work together – on projects, reports, Web pages, musical compositions or practically anything else they might do individually at their own computers. Programs that seem similar are already available from countless vendors, since the race to create the best ‘collaboration software’ has been under way for many years. But most existing programs have one of two limitations. If they are easy to use, they are not very powerful. And if they are powerful, they can be difficult to use and especially complicated to create and maintain.”
Fallows writes, “Based on what I have seen over the last month, NoteShare genuinely does make it possible for ordinary users to create collaborative systems, with little muss or fuss. Here’s the procedure, which for now is strictly for the Apple Macintosh:
One person, using a PowerBook, Mac mini or other Macintosh computer, creates a NoteShare “notebook,” the basis of the shared effort. On the screen, it looks like a spiral-bound pad with pages that can contain text, drawings, video or audio clips, Web pages, live Java plug-ins or other digital matter. That person then presses a “Share Notebook” key. The Macintosh’s built-in “Bonjour” technology detects others running NoteShare on the local home or workplace network, and lets those users read, edit and add to that notebook. Via the Internet, Mac users elsewhere can share the notebook in real time. At any given moment, only one user can make changes, while the others watch. But the editing “pen” can be passed from user to user almost instantly.
Fallows reports, “NoteShare has been tested with up to 36 people using the same notebook at once. (This version, which will cost $149.95, will be available later this month. A version that will let [Windows] PC users read notebooks and do limited editing is planned for later this year.) The result is that, with very easy setup procedures, people in the same room or in different countries can watch one another edit the same document or drawing. You add a paragraph, and I see it on my screen. I add a new title, and you see how it looks… Whether this program will work commercially, I have no idea. Its Mac-only nature obviously limits its market. But its design expresses two impulses that are both the history and the future of the computing business: letting people connect more thoroughly, broadly and richly; and making it steadily easier for them to do so.”
Full article here.
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MDN —
Great looking touch with the with the Apple bullets on the adverts! Hope their lawyers like it too!
Have a Happy New Year!
qka:
option shift K
You can use ’em too! (just not on these posts) 🙁
I was just curious what kind of “collaborative software” would be worth $145, and even a mention on MDN.
But not curious enough to google it…
Nice attempt, look at subethaedit for this, it is an awesome tool that has been around for years. Ohh and 36 users is weak, had over one hundred on a single doc at a conference.
http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/
35 bucks beats $150
http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/
It has been out for over two years, is free for personal/non-commercial use, and only costs $35 for a commercial use license.
Best of all, it is not beta!
To be completely fair:
I posted my comments directly to the author, and here is his reply:
“thanks for your note. Yes, I do know about S.E.E. — and I’m replying instantly because I was just writing to somebody else on the same theme. You’ll notice that I didn’t name ANY existing collaboration program, varieties of which have their own particular strengths and weaknesses. What looked different about NoteShare to me is that its COMBINATION of ease and power was a step forward. Subethedit has ease of use, but it looked to me as if NoteShare offered more things (richer range of data and apps) that you could also use easily. The reason I didn’t name that program (or a lot of others) was to avoid the very detailed compare-and-contrast.”
To be completely fair:
I posted my comments directly to the author, and here is his reply:
“thanks for your note. Yes, I do know about S.E.E. — and I’m replying instantly because I was just writing to somebody else on the same theme. You’ll notice that I didn’t name ANY existing collaboration program, varieties of which have their own particular strengths and weaknesses. What looked different about NoteShare to me is that its COMBINATION of ease and power was a step forward. Subethedit has ease of use, but it looked to me as if NoteShare offered more things (richer range of data and apps) that you could also use easily. The reason I didn’t name that program (or a lot of others) was to avoid the very detailed compare-and-contrast.”
To be completely fair:
I posted my comments directly to the author, and here is his reply:
“thanks for your note. Yes, I do know about S.E.E. — and I’m replying instantly because I was just writing to somebody else on the same theme. You’ll notice that I didn’t name ANY existing collaboration program, varieties of which have their own particular strengths and weaknesses. What looked different about NoteShare to me is that its COMBINATION of ease and power was a step forward. Subethedit has ease of use, but it looked to me as if NoteShare offered more things (richer range of data and apps) that you could also use easily. The reason I didn’t name that program (or a lot of others) was to avoid the very detailed compare-and-contrast.”
To be completely fair:
I posted my comments directly to the author, and here is his reply:
“thanks for your note. Yes, I do know about S.E.E. — and I’m replying instantly because I was just writing to somebody else on the same theme. You’ll notice that I didn’t name ANY existing collaboration program, varieties of which have their own particular strengths and weaknesses. What looked different about NoteShare to me is that its COMBINATION of ease and power was a step forward. Subethedit has ease of use, but it looked to me as if NoteShare offered more things (richer range of data and apps) that you could also use easily. The reason I didn’t name that program (or a lot of others) was to avoid the very detailed compare-and-contrast.”
Does anyone familiar with SEE know if:
–Sharing works fully over the internet (rather than a WAN or LAN).
–You don’t need to install it on a server.
–It is easy (one-button, or close to it) to activate sharing.
This will be hacked in a microsecond.