Lotus Notes is also a product of the (late!) 80s. I’m too young to have used it, but it strikes me as a collaborative tool in the groupware space that fibery occupies now?
I don’t know about Fibery (I just submitted this article b/c of hypertext and the fact the promo was minimal), but I’ve used Notes and I wouldn’t really call it hypertext. It kinda smashes two things together:
A distributed document database, with an easy to use UI (building/reporting/forms) on top of it, which it excelled at
A PIM/groupware thing on top of that, with a notoriously clumsy UI
Since I kinda forgot to say it and it’s important to the point I was trying to make here, and it’s too late to edit it in: Domino/Notes is multiplayer FileMaker/Access more than anything.
I haven’t used Fibery, but I do use TiddlyWiki and Notion quite a bit and I find this space super interesting. I know TBL is working on Solid these days but I wonder if there’s any interest on bringing these richer hypertext ideas to the current WWW or whether the failure of Xanadu and the greater emphasis on the app web has made this a non-starter these days.
There is one thing that I think all these tools got right, and the web – with all the inherent clumsiness of early tools – got right until a point, and now it doesn’t get it right anymore: no difference between reading & authoring.
Lots of materials, especially personal notes, are rarely the kind of things you write once and then only look at, forever. And yet in most contemporary systems, if you want to make a change, you have to click Edit, scroll halfway through the page until you get to the thing you wanted to change, and then make the change in Markdown which you hopefully get right otherwise it screws up the whole page if you click Save without doing a Preview first and so on. It also mostly works only for minimally-formatted, cursive text. If you have to write math you might as well go back to LaTeX and PDFs because as soon as one of the umpteen things in the dependency chain of LaTeX-in-Markdown to formula rendered in your browser breaks (and it will break) you’ll wish you would’ve never bothered with computers in the first place.
Lotus Notes is also a product of the (late!) 80s. I’m too young to have used it, but it strikes me as a collaborative tool in the groupware space that fibery occupies now?
I don’t know about Fibery (I just submitted this article b/c of hypertext and the fact the promo was minimal), but I’ve used Notes and I wouldn’t really call it hypertext. It kinda smashes two things together:
Since I kinda forgot to say it and it’s important to the point I was trying to make here, and it’s too late to edit it in: Domino/Notes is multiplayer FileMaker/Access more than anything.
I haven’t used Fibery, but I do use TiddlyWiki and Notion quite a bit and I find this space super interesting. I know TBL is working on Solid these days but I wonder if there’s any interest on bringing these richer hypertext ideas to the current WWW or whether the failure of Xanadu and the greater emphasis on the app web has made this a non-starter these days.
There is one thing that I think all these tools got right, and the web – with all the inherent clumsiness of early tools – got right until a point, and now it doesn’t get it right anymore: no difference between reading & authoring.
Lots of materials, especially personal notes, are rarely the kind of things you write once and then only look at, forever. And yet in most contemporary systems, if you want to make a change, you have to click Edit, scroll halfway through the page until you get to the thing you wanted to change, and then make the change in Markdown which you hopefully get right otherwise it screws up the whole page if you click Save without doing a Preview first and so on. It also mostly works only for minimally-formatted, cursive text. If you have to write math you might as well go back to LaTeX and PDFs because as soon as one of the umpteen things in the dependency chain of LaTeX-in-Markdown to formula rendered in your browser breaks (and it will break) you’ll wish you would’ve never bothered with computers in the first place.