pretty impressive but...

for collaborative editor, my gold standard is buzzword by Adobe. Yes it's
closed doors, yes it's another data roach motel but, it works so well, I don't care.

How does it work well? Well, I can blow things up full-screen and I have a dark
writer like environment. Minimal UI, graphics, graphics leading your focus to
the text and nothing but text, marginal comments that, when selected, highlight
what the user is commenting on (selected region). Other than the fact it still
sucks for speech recognition, only manages files slightly better than most other
word processors, and it is sometimes cranky about flash and doesn't work on a
Macintosh, it's pretty darn good.

I tried to make the collaborative editor thing work with a friend of mine but,
she couldn't get the linux version to work right in part because it kept asking
for a jabber ID. There were some other things wrong that escape me at this
point but it was not fun. If someone is willing to suffer the, working with a
new user learning, let me know and I'll give you access to my document.

Now I know my needs are not worth as much as a pisshole in the snow but in case
you're interested, here's what I could use.

1) Compatibility with speech recognition:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&ved=0CBsQFjAG&url=http%3A%2F%2Fct.scansoft.com%2Fcustomerfiles%2Fkbasefiles%2F5176%2Fwp_WinAppsCompatibleWithDNS.pdf&ei=jf32StCMKouo8AbKoIDzCQ&usg=AFQjCNHTGijNCA6Lof19N7jvyE-6MclgPw&sig2=aAAnMyC93KUiU8U2fztoog

or

http://tinyurl.com/nscompat

Lower right-hand corner of page 2 "dictation and correction"

It would be lovely to have full select and say compatibility so I can edit
without touching the damn keyboard of my broken hands. I'm even willing to
commit to building the grammar for driving all of the other features (font
changing, etc.) using the dragonfly extension to NaturallySpeaking.

I know this is a fairly narrow market but, disabled users are sweating it out
with open office and Microsoft Word which are just way too fat and clumsy to
work with speech recognition properly.

2) dark writer like functionality.

When I write, I only want to pay attention to what's on the screen. I don't
need to see all the other text controls or other things that that nature because
I'm just writing text. 12 point, Courier, double spaced text. Black
background, white text. Thank you very much. :-)

3) dual document presentation.
When I write, I often create a "slave" document where I put notes, little bits
of exposition exploring an idea, back story. Things are not going to end up in
the final document but I don't want to lose because they were research worth
spending time on. So far, nobody does a dual page side-by-side slave document
feature well except maybe Emacs (C-x3).

4) marginal notes.

I really really like buzzword marginal notes. It's so nice to be of the
comments from people about what needs to be fixed the document without them
screwing around with my text. It's hard enough catching all my own grammar and
speech recognition derived errors. I don't need to learn how somebody else
writes and try to integrate that style into my own.

Can you tell I'm a seriously cranky author? There are two people in this world
I trust to edit my text. And one of them is suspect. it's not unlike having
someone change your code as you still exploring the problem space.

This would mean you would have three types of access. Read-only, reviewer, and
coeditor (terms taken from buzzword). It means you can read-only or you can
leave comments or you can change the document. My experience shows that this is
very powerful.

5) platform for publishing

Done right, this can become a platform for also to publishing. The trick is to
allow the end user to control authentication on a document. Why? Let's take a
simple example of a blog. If you have a wrapper program which would fetch pages
from the collaborative repository, you could turn at the Word documents into
blog entries. Readers of the blog could then comment in-line rather than
stacking up their comments on the bottom where they are disassociated from the
content. It wouldn't make sense for everyone to get an Abbey word collaborative
user ID for a whole bunch of reasons. A cool side effect of this would be that
if the blog creator found mistakes, they could then modify the document in Abbey
word, publish a new version (with the old version available as a tab or
something) and then preserve appropriate comments but delete the ones pointing
out the error. I'm probably not expressing it clearly enough but, that's the
rough idea.

think be true for online book publishing. You have a framework which grabs
pages from the collaborative framework and the book becomes visible in the book
framework complete with payment systems etc. again, just another idea.

Anyway, I keep watching because it's really interesting what you're doing and
I'm hoping someone can help me by being a guide to lead me through the clueless
new user woods of this feature.

--- eric
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Received on Sun Nov 8 18:50:21 2009