Features

The app color codes all the differences between the versions of the document. Hovering over one of the boxes with a different version of a part of the text gives you the option to accept or reject a change. You can also add new text to a document within the app and make minor formatting changes to the text (bulleted lists, italics, bold, etc.). At the end of this process, you can save the newly compiled document for further editing in your word processor. 

CompareMyDocs does have quite a few limitations. It can't handle images and tables, for example, and footnotes simply become part of the text. Because of this, the service works best for relatively straightforward documents as you will have to add all of these assets back into the text after you finish your comparison.

API

TextFlow also launched its new API today. This API, which will be available free of charge, allows developers to integrate TextFlow's document comparison service into their own applications. This would be a great addition to other online office suites and online storage services like DropBox and Box.net, as Josh Lowensohn points out on CNet.

• TextFlow is still an AIR application. If you were a TextFlow user before, nothing critical has changed in this regard. Most of TextFlow's competitors are online-only.
• Although you can invite people to edit a document online, they basically get their own view of the document. Once they are finished editing, they would click share to push those changes back to the master document. In other words, this isn't live collaboration.
• Collaborators that you send an email invite to will be able to work on a web-based version of TextFlow that just supports editing the current document.

Going back through the TextFlow blog, it appears that they have addressed our initial complaint of only being able to successfully edit limited document length files, as well as a number of Microsoft Word document compatibility fixes among other changes.

Overall, we think TextFlow is moving in the right direction, and sticking with a workflow idea that works really well with certain people's method of collaborating on documents. TextFlow comes in a business edition at $99 per user/year and a free personal edition.

The best way to understand TextFlow's feature set and interface is to try out one of the Flash demos on the company's website.

Elegant, but With Severe Limitations

Sadly, TextFlow's usefulness is restricted by a number of severe limitations. It can, for example, only handle files of less than 10 pages. TextFlow also can't handle images or charts and tables, which, depending on the type of documents you need to edit, might be a show-stopper. Up to seven editors can submit documents, which should be enough in most circumstances, but might be too restrictive for some.

According to TextFlow, a lot of its alpha users were in big corporations and law firms, and it is easy to see why these users would like TextFlow. We can also see how this would be a useful tool for students who want to work on a group project. TextFlow's current limitations, however, will leave a lot of users wanting for more.

In the future, TextFlow might switch from being an Adobe AIR application to a pure online model that will have fewer restriction, but if you often need to collaboratively edit relatively short and simple text documents, TextFlow is definitely a product that is worth a try.

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

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!

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.