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.

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.

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?

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 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

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…