Just a random couple of notes on two tools that I’ve looked at recently.
1) Mary Murrell points out that the Institute for the Future of the Book has released Sophie 1.0 and has announced a competition for a workshop at the institute for multimedia literacy at USC. Sophie is a multi-media authoring tool– a bit like Macromedia Director, for those who can remember that far back into the last millenium, but much much better. It’s open source, it has a very nice interface that allows for rapid construction of multi-page documents which can incorporate sound, video and images. It has a timeline for creating time-based presentations and it handles most of the main formats without trouble. It does take a bit of energy to learn, but it could be used to create really rich presentations or documents. It’s kind of the perfect in-between-film-and-text tool. The only shortcoming is that it produces its own file format which requires the sophie reader (also free, and available on mac-windows-linux) to read a book produced in sophie. This means that docs can’t be easily displayed on the web, but requires the viewer to download and install a piece of software. Better for presentations than stand-alone docs, I guess. However, it looks like one could export the time -based stuff to a movie format, and the text-based stuff to a pdf, so it’s not that bad.
2) On the extremely cool, but maddening side is Apture. Apture is an amazingly clever add-on to a web-site that allows beautifully clever links that pop-up and move the window around and allow you to quickly add photos and video to any site. It’s hard to explain (go play with the the demo). The down side is that this is 1) so NOT free and open source software, and as far as I can tell a direct route into allowing apture to basically display whatever it wants on your site, in order to get this functionality (it uses a remote application server that essentially serves content on top of your site, so it’s a bit like an annotation service); and 2) it ruins the “view source” aspect of the web by overlaying content that cannot be easily investigated, as one can with normal content displayed in a browser. Apture is hardly the main culprit here, but they are part of a trend towards the obfuscation of web technologies, towards a re-closing of the source so that it becomes harder and harder for individuals to teach themselves such new tools. Indeed, Apture is not intended to be learned and re-used by anyone except at the interface level, unlike the wealth of tools (HTML, PHP, perl, python, ruby) that we have come to expect as part of our information environment. This makes me sad and mad. I wish they could see the light 🙂
I think this is the first time I’ve been first to comment on my own post
3) Another new site I just discovered is Diigo which is a “social annotation” tool. Sort of like social bookmarking, except that it allows users to add annotations and share them in a manner similar to del.icio.us… It seems to be a service very similar to apture in that it is not exactly free/open but at the very least it specifies that user generated content in annotations is in the public domain, for what that’s worth. I have to admit, I’m finding this new generation of tools a bit bewildering… I hate the demands of social networking, but I don’t imagine I will be able to resist for long…
One amazing tool I think everyone here will find useful is Doodle which is just about the best way I’ve seen for finding a suitable time to schedule a meeting or get together. You pick some dates and times and everyone can check when they are free. I’ve tried a few similar services, and I find this one to be the easiest to use.
Hi there,
Tristan here from Apture. I wanted to welcome you to the Apture community and thank you so much for your feedback. I hear everything you are saying about overlaying content and not building it into the page source, and I wanted to clarify that a bit.
We didn’t build something outside the HTML source on purpose, we simply stepped back from the web today and said that we could build something far richer and more compelling, but it would take more than the authoring tools we have today. The tools of today allow us to build the same thing we’ve been building for the last ten years: flat web pages connected by links to more flat web pages, when we thought we could be building multimedia-rich, interactive experiences that drew empathy and engagement from readers, something that really took advantage of this unique medium.
To do that we needed more sophisticated authoring tools, and it turned out that none of the current languages support what we wanted to do, nor were user-friendly. HTML didn’t let you discover and link multimedia with one click. So we invented a new way for anyone, any lay person to connect all these rich webs of multimedia together on their pages with just a few clicks.
I hope you find Apture useful, and please drop me a line if you have any more feedback.
Tristan
Your review doesn’t do justice to the power lying dormant within Sophie.
As an offspring of the Squeak project, Sophie inherits the full power of the Smalltalk language. In essence Sophie is a specialized programming language for developing multimedia documents, as such it is an order of magnitude more powerful than tools like Director. You don’t write, or compose, Sophie documents so much as you program Sophie documents.
For a look at the form a repository of Sophie documents might take look at website for the Scratch programming language. Scratch is also a Squeak based project.
Tristan, thanks for the note. Let me put a finer point on this: I think you’ve done something amazing. You may only be the first past the post, but perhaps people will remember Apture for first demonstrating how to do this. Let’s reflect a bit, however, on what Tim Berners-Lee did when he first demonstrated something equally amazing: he immediately dedicated it to the public domain. Now, Tim Berners-Lee didn’t make a gazillion dollars, and Apture might, but he did enable an absolutely stunning array of innovative possibilities by doing so. What does Apture enable? A stunning array of advertising possibilities. Forgive me for putting this in stark terms, but do we really need that in order to have a rich multimedia experience? And is Apture arrogant enough to think that they are the only people who can do this?
My sense is that the people who create the first stand-alone, free software based system that enables what Apture enables, but also enables people to build on top of it, mod it and make it better— they are the one who will be remembered. Perhaps it should be Apture?
Jason, thanks for the note. I had heard that before about Sophie, and I’m sure it’s true (and wonderful)… but I’m not sure how to describe that flexibility in terms of creating a document… “programming a document” sounds like some mumbo jumbo to me… what does that mean in concrete terms for people who are not programmerish?
Jason and CKelty,
I’ve actually been following Sophie for over a year now, and have still not figured out why I would possibly want to use it. Jason’s comment got my attention however. Does this mean that Sophie could be a replacement for the late, great, hypercard? It is amazing how much people still talk about Hypercard.
I think the line between “programmer” and “non-programmer” is going to blur dramatically over the coming years due to tools like Sophie. To use Sophie is to learn some programming concepts even if the learning occurs by accident.
As the project moves ahead I think you will see an API develop that will allow interaction with Sophie documents in the way a web site might interact with a Google or Amazon data feed. And just as mashups have grown up around the Google and Amazon APIs in unpredictable ways so I think we will see mashups involving Sophie documents that will surprise, amaze, and irritate.
But, most importantly Sophie lacks the constraints associated with high powered multimedia software. It isn’t hamstrung by proprietary formats, high cost, or the need for specialized hardware. It runs everywhere, on everything, and is available to everyone.
Sophie is exactly like Hypercard in that the floor is very low and the ceiling very high.