Cafe Bucky

[note: this is on my personal blog, instead of ORN, because
I have been posting there all week (and still have another to
do in the next day or so). It's also more of a personal wondering
out loud thing than the reporting/musing I've been doing over there.]

What happened to Hydra at OSCON?

I found it interesting that Hydra, the Mac collaborative editor, didn’t get a lot of use during OSCON. It was
in some sessions here and there, with perhaps 4 users. The
Emerging Tech Conference had half as many people, perhaps
the same percentage of Macs, and a lot more use (just
see the archived sessions at trevor.smith.name).

So what happened? I’m not sure. I suppose it just
wasn’t on the radar for most Mac attendees (which is
a little strange, since it is a few months after Etech. You would
think it would have had even more use). Perhaps the people
that attend the two events are more different than I thought?

Oh well. I’ll tell you a selfish interest in collaborative editing:
lazyness! It’s actually not so much lazyness, but a desire to get a
more complete set of notes than I could possibly type on my own.
Think of the solo note taker. You have 100 people in the room, all
typing the same thing within their own space, missing a good chunk of
a fast moving talk.

When it comes to capturing a session, there are at least two tangents
to take: one deals with the idea of something like Hydra on any
platform, and the other is capturing a talk via iChat AV
(with permission, of course)

Think of Jabber, and how it can do so much more than just
simple IM. We know it can do group chats. The next step
would be to feed it into an editor, keeping track of cursor
position and other per-user info. Something like collaborative
editing should not be limited to one platform. We should
pay proper respect to the folks at The Coding Monkeys, because they
did a super cool implementation, but we should also realize
that the functionality is too important to wait for a Windows
and Linux port. We want it now!

The other capturing idea also happens to involve Jabber …
well maybe. iChat does use Jabber (as mentioned in the
“JabberJazz” talk at OSCON.) I imagine iChat AV might
make some use of it as well.

Get an iSight, fire up iChat AV, and stream the audio/video
to something that can capture it. After the talk is over,
make a compressed version of the talk available via BitTorrent.
Should be pretty straightforward. What’s the video equivalent
of Audio Hijack? To be clear, I am putting this out
there in the context of archiving talks where the speaker
has given permission. Some wag will probably think
of a name for it (”laptop broadcasting” doesn’t sound
right to me!)

Date: Friday, July 11th, 2003 at 6:34 pm | Category: Tech | RSS Feed: RSS 2.0 feed.

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