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CompareMyDocs: Comparing and Merging Documents Made Easy
CompareMyDocs makes it easy to compare multiple revisions of a document and to compile a final version based on these revisions. The site, which launched today, can handle Word documents and rich-text files. You simply select up to seven documents and the service will display all the differences between these in a very well-designed interface. CompareMyDocs is available free of charge.
TextFlow Gets Online Collaboration Tools
TextFlow, the visually stunning collaborative document editor we reviewed last November, just announced a major update today: online editing and back-end file storage offerings to augment its unique and easy to use Adobe AIR application. Prior to this announcement, TextFlow was limited to only being able to work with local files.
Textflow: Collaborative Editing Made Easy
Even though there are already a myriad of tools that try to make collaborative editing easier, few of them are as elegant and easy to use as TextFlow, which just launched its public beta this morning. TextFlow is an Adobe AIR application that allows a master editor to merge documents from up to seven other editors. Unlike Etherpad, which we reviewed last week, TextFlow is not a real-time collaboration platform, but works with a more traditional editing model.
Douglas Coupland - Hey Nostradamus!
Douglas Coupland returns to form big-time with
this sensitive and soulful book, Hey
Nostradamus!. Before I get to the review, I'll go over my
background as a long-time Coupland fan - because it's especially relevant to my
thoughts on Hey Nostradamus!. I discovered him during the 90's and he was one of
the quintessential writers of that milieu, mostly due to his first novel
Generation X (1991). That book set the scene for the popular (but clichéd)
slacker culture
that developed in the 90's. My favourite Coupland book is Microserfs (1995).
I felt I had a connection to
the Microserfs characters that wasn't possible with the slackers in Generation
X. Perhaps that's because I'm a nerd, like the Microserfs characters. His
next book,
Girlfriend in a Coma (1997), is another favourite of mine. Microserfs
and Girlfriend in a Coma both have an undercurrent of melancholy, but the
essential likeability of the
characters make the books deeply affecting.
I haven't read all of Coupland's work, but I had a go at both of the novels that preceded Hey Nostradamus! - All Families Are Psychotic (2001) and Miss Wyoming (1999). I have to say that both were very disappointing and I finished neither. I don't think I even got past the first few chapters. I just couldn't connect with those books. The characters were not very likeable and there seemed to be a lack of soul in the worlds presented - although I recognize this was deliberate on Coupland's part. Don't get me wrong - the writing itself is top drawer, as you'd expect. But the characters and settings of those two books were deliberately superficial. Unfortunately that made the books hard to connect with and so I wasn't compelled to finish them.
Finally I get to the review of Nostradamus!
So we come to 2003's Hey Nostradamus!. Let me say right here and now that this book ranks up with Microserfs and Girlfriend in a Coma, possibly surpassing them. The book is in 4 parts and each part is narrated, in the first person, by a different character. Not only that, but the 4 parts span 15 years, from 1988 to 2003. Coupland successfully gets inside the skin of each of the 4 narrators. Each narrator is very different from the others, but they also have shared experiences on a personal and humanistic sense that helps to bring the book together into a unified whole.
The story starts with a Columbine-like school massacre, where 3 disaffected youths go on a shooting rampage in a school cafeteria. One of the victims is a 17-year old girl named Cheryl, who is the narrator of part 1 (from the after-life!). Cheryl was a sweet-tempered but otherwise ordinary girl who secretly got married to her school sweetheart Jason just weeks before the shooting. In fact, that was the most exciting aspect of her life to date - a life fatefully cut short. Just before she was shot, Cheryl had scribbled into her binder: "GOD IS NOWHERE/GOD IS NOW HERE". Those words would later immortalise her memory, along with her cherubic yearbook photo. But at the time she wrote them: "...all I was doing was trying to clear out my head and think of nothing, to generate enough silence to make time stand still".
The next section is narrated by Jason, Cheryl's high school sweetheart. Jason wasn't present in the cafeteria at the time of the tragedy, however he arrived just as it was nearing its conclusion and he managed to kill one of the gunmen - but too late to save Cheryl. It's 11 years later when he writes his narrative. Incidentally Coupland is at pains to make sure each character physically writes down their narrative - in Jason's case on pink bank note slips. At first I found this to be a rather hokey novelistic device. But on reflection, I believe it did add to the authenticity of each narrative - each character was in a sense purging themself of their story and making it immortal, by writing it down.
But back to Jason's narrative - it's 11 years after Cheryl's tragic murder and Jason has struggled to accept it and get on with his life. He is a bachelor who lives a rather squalid life filled with part-time jobs, booze, and some hazy dealings with seedy gangsters. The most significant part of Jason's narrative is his description of his relationship with his father, a very strict religious man with a seemingly heartless lack of tact. I thought there were some plot twists in Jason's narrative that struggled to keep my disbelief suspended, but it was how those plot devices provided depth of meaning to the characters that held it all together.
The third part is narrated by Heather, who meets Jason and becomes his partner. They share an imaginary world together, filled with make-believe creatures and childlike stories. Heather is a courtroom transcriber and much of her narrative is written while she is at work - instead of transcribing a boring courtroom trial, she writes about her experiences with Jason! I better not ruin the plot, but I will say that Heather ends up being just as sympathetic a character as Jason and for similar reasons.
The fourth and final narrative is from Reg, Jason's father. Reg was portrayed as a narrow-minded and heartless man by Jason and this is well supported by anecdotes of the things Reg did in the name of orthodox religion - for example, immediately after the school shootings in 1988 he didn't support Jason but instead morally condemned him for killing one of the gunmen in the cafeteria. In his narrative, written in 2003, Reg has softened his strict religious stance by this stage and is somewhat contrite for the way he treated people in the past. His section is short, but concludes the book with a note of redemption.
Summary
It's hard to adequately convey the depth of feeling present in this book - you have to read it yourself to experience it. All I can say is that the book held me spellbound during the time I read it. For example when I was reading it on the train, I sometimes got a bit misty-eyed and occasionally I paused to stare out of the train window with a soulful expression on my face. I probably looked like a right berk.
This is a superb effort by Douglas Coupland and ranks with his very best work.
My rating: 9/10
Mobile Web - Watch This Space!
I've mentioned that September is Month of Mobility at Read/Write Web, but I haven't posted about it as much as I wanted to. Why? It's because the mobile world is mostly new to me, which means I've had to batch process a whole bunch of information about it over the past few weeks.
Frankly I've been so absorbed in the PC Web over the years, that I haven't taken much notice of the Mobile Web. But it's sneaking up on everyone! The point when the Mobile Web came up behind me, tapped me on the shoulder and cleared its throat, was just after I got a new WAP-enabled phone. That was at the end of August and I've been playing with my new phone since then. At the same time I started to explore the world of the Mobile Internet. Also during this time I've been writing content for my eBook Culture blog - and it won't surprise you that in my last 3 posts over there, I've been exploring the connections between eBooks and the Web. There is some crossover - for me anyway - in the worlds of Web, mobile phones, PDA's, and eBooks.
So, I haven't yet got to the synthesis stage of my information processing on the Mobile Internet - let alone the analysis. But I thought it'd be useful to do a brain dump now.
Mobile Web
Sir Tim Berners-Lee did an interview with internetnews.com last week. While most of it covered the usual ground (Semantic Web, Web Services), at the end he spoke about what he calls the "Mobile Web". He was asked what emerging technology excited him and he replied:
"...one area to watch is the mobile Web. I'm seeing a lot of initiatives and energy in this space. The same energy you see here at this [SpeechTek] conference with the voice sector, you'll see that energy replicated in the mobile space. This will be a big area. Over the next six months, you should watch this space for some exciting things."
My ears really pricked up when he said that "a strong mobile Web is about device independence". This is a theme that the eBook industry is struggling with right now. I won't bore you with the details, but basically eBooks come in many many formats - and most of them only work on specific devices and/or are crippled with DRM "functionality". If there was a scale measuring device independence, then eBooks would be near the bottom of that scale.
What Sir Tim wants is a Web that can be extended into the mobile space, not one that breaks off into it's own unique version of the Web. The Mobile Web must be interoperable with the PC Web as we know it today (HTML pages principally), which in practical terms means it has to use the same standards and formats. Sir Tim wants a "unified Web", one that enables users to "browse the Web from any phone and from any device without limitations."
I'll follow up with a post later about the W3C efforts to obtain device independence.
Ubiquity
When you're talking mobile phones and the Internet, one blogger stands out from the crowd - Russell Beattie, who wrote recently:
"It's not just about the ability of the phones, but about their ubiquity. Remember back in the mid 90s when everyone was going nutso about the economies of scale provided by the Web? Well, they haven't seen nothing. Right now the industry is on track to sell 650 million new phones in 2004."
There's no doubt that statistically, mobile phones are the big untamed market of the Internet. I recently wrote about the ITU (International Telecommunication Union) and their report entitled The Portable Internet [btw all these different terms are pretty much interchangeable: Mobile Internet, Mobile Web, Portable Internet]. The ITU said that in October 2003 the Asia Pacific region passed 1 billion telecommunications users. They predict that before 2010, there will be an extra billion users there and "the majority of them will be connected using radiocommunications".
Russell Beattie and Sir Tim seem to be on the same wavelength in terms of timeframes. Russell gives it 6 months to a year for the mobile internet scene to explode. He says:
"...there's going to be a time, very soon, when more people are accessing the internet via their mobile devices rather than PCs. I think what's going to surprise a lot of people is how quickly that's going to happen."
Russell is one to watch in this space and it looks like he's already working on a new mobile internet business. He encourages others to join the fray:
"What interests me is the other data services - the communication, collaboration, coordination and information services that have yet to be taken advantage of. There are lots of opportunity out there for mobile apps that tap into these markets."
Nearly Mobile Internet
One of the key factors in uptake of the Mobile Internet is data speed. And although subscriber and developer-wise we're getting closer to Mobile Internet Nirvana, the fact is a lot of us are still on pre-3G mobile networks. Roland Tanglao recently called it "the GPRS version of the mobile internet" and we in New Zealand are in the same boat. NZ has GPRS and CDMA mobile networks, but we've been promised 3G for years. Our neighbour Australia is a bit ahead of us in the mobile world, as Hutchison already has a 3G network - using the brandname 3.
Apart from speed, the user-friendliness of the mobile internet and its applications is another hurdle. As of this date, it's still a pain for people to use a pokey little keypad and screen for mobile internet. The mobile jigsaw (fitting all the pieces together) I wrote about earlier is also an issue.
On the positive side, the handsets available these days are much easier to use and have more functionality than even a couple of years ago - and they will get even better before the year is out. Plus with people like Russell developing new services and apps, there's a lot of developer enthusiasm around (don't forget it wasn't that long ago that WAP in particular was ridiculed by developers). So mobile apps and services are getting increasingly user-friendly.
As Russell expanded upon, it's a new form of media. Just as eBooks shouldn't just duplicate paper books, the Mobile Web shouldn't be about replicating PC Websites and apps onto a mobile platform. And as Sir Tim says, it's all about extending the Web so the Mobile Web complements and interoperates with the PC Web.
It's going to be an interesting ride over the next 6 months!
Bit of a Re-design
I've been mucking around with my CSS over the past few days. Gone are the vertical grey lines and greeny colour scheme. I've kept the pacific green colour in the site title though, as a keepsake of the old style. Plus that colour is sort of identified with me now and my favicon uses it.
It's all about the whitespace and I've tried to make that more prominent. The homepage has been modified along those lines - I now use excerpts so people can easily scan the content. That's allowed me to include more links to previous posts on the homepage. I've cut back on the content in the menu too - the blogroll and references now have their own pages.
I've reverted to traditional link colours in the body text, as a nod to the oldstyle Web. The only exception is the linkblog content on the right-hand side of the homepage, which needed to blend in more so I used underlined black text.
Regarding the vertical lines, I think I originally had those mainly to show off my table-less CSS design ;-) Well, that and there were (and still are) 3 distinct columns in my design. But now I've gotten rid of the vertical lines, I think because I wanted to free myself from the box-like constrictions they conveyed. A subtle and psychological change, and my reason for it is a bit artsy-fartsy, but hey it works for me.
There are some other minor mods and I will probably do some more tinkering, but then that's the beauty of style sheets. All it takes to change the design of a whole website is some spanner work on the CSS.
Update: I've gone to a centered layout (boooring!). This new design is All About The Whitespace, so it works better if it's centered. I think I'm done now... maybe a bit more tinkering with the header.
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