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| Author | "Live objects" in Cyberdog terms? (Read 9906 times) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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wove
1024 MB  Posts: 1363 
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on: May 23, 2023, 22:18
OpenDoc and Cyberdog are long dead and saddly remembered as an abberation at best and an Apple brain fart at worst. Spinning way forward though "Live Objects" most closely resemble Office 365 or Google Docs. It was intended to provide real time collaboration on productive tasks. CyberDog in OpenDoc terms is a container application. Meainting it could contrain other OpenDoc parts and even other OpenDoc containers. In a classroom, one group could create a schedule in a spreadsheet part, another group could work on a diagram in a draw part, while others could create text in a word processor part. The times saved on a local network could all be pulled together to display a daily classroom newletter, that would refresh when ever any of the parts were modified. I find it still useful. One of its great strenghts was that it was designed to only work with what it could handle, so it easily ignores whatever it can not handle without crashing. Since it is designed to use whatever resources it can locate on your computer, Cyberdog's capabilities are enchanced anytime more capabilities are added to the system. Just the other day Ovalking linked to UK/BBC radio. I clicked the links in Cybeerdog and iTunes opened in the background to play the stations and add them to my playlist. (I am using OS 9.) I thought it was a shame that Opendoc went nowhere, but many of the concepts live on are in regualar use. |
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68040
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512 MB Posts: 950 68k - thy kingdom come, thy will be done !
Reply #1 on: May 24, 2023, 20:06
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I tried my luck at OpenDoc and found it a complete nightmare to operate. If you click on an object you should be able to manipulate it in a completely intuitive way. But I could't even figure out how to change a simple graphic after hours of trying.
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wove
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1024 MB Posts: 1363
Reply #2 on: May 25, 2023, 03:16
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I have used OpenDoc and Cyberdog since they were first released. The work flow made sense to me and fit nicely with how I thought/wanted things to work. Although I speak highly of the technology, I would not suggest that anyone jump into using them today. When GUIs first appeared there were a couple different approaches, one being very document centric, while the other was application centric. The Lisa was document centric, you either opened a document, or you opened Stationary to create a fresh document. Motif an early GUI was very similar. It was cloned and used as the UI for PC GEOS, which worked the same. The problem with that approach is that it is not very commercial, which I am sure Jobs saw right away as he pushed toward the Mac UI. In life though we tend to think more of projects/documents than about the tools that create them. I like cookies; I do not care if they how they get made. Maybe I or my wife made them in the kitchen, or perhaps Kibbler has elves make them in trees. When I meet up with fellow cabinet makers, we talk of the things we build, the tools are just the trivial bits and bobs we work with. We all have saws and chisels and planes. We all know how to use them. We can use each others tools easily. Our cabinet making is not defined by the tools we use, it is defined by the projects we build. So much computer talk, new or retro, just revolves around applications, when it feels like it would be much more useful if it revolved around the projects and documents we create. In any event I like OpenDoc because it is document/project centric and also because I have been using it for decades. So for me the tech is 60% nostalgia, 25% just use to using it, and 15% because it tickles my fancy.
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Bolkonskij
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Administrator 1024 MB  Posts: 2023
Reply #3 on: May 28, 2023, 08:43
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Thank you for the explanation. I do remember the basic OpenDoc concept and the "focus on the document, not the application that created it". It's an interesting concept but it always seemed to me to solve a problem that didn't exist - for ME! I understand, back then we had a low computer literacy (well, we still have, but that's another topic) and a lot of people were overburdened by the idea to change a file / creator code on a document. So I assume this is where the idea stems from. As I mentioned on other topics before, I'm a fan of the small-but-nifty type of application. Give me a single application that does a single thing, but does it really well. I don't like the One-size-fits-all feature-creep type of software suite that CyberDog was intended (?) to become. I wasn't thrilled about the concept back then and I am not now. I do give it credits for a lovely mascot though :-) The reason this failed might be because us nerds always felt we don't need that concept. And the people that might have put it to good use ... well, it was still beyond comprehension for them.
Last Edit: May 28, 2023, 08:47 by Bolkonskij
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68040
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512 MB Posts: 950 68k - thy kingdom come, thy will be done !
Reply #4 on: May 28, 2023, 15:26
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Sorry, but I got an engineer's mindset on this: Any document can only be as good as the applications available to work with it. And so yes, applications do matter - a lot! If I click on a graphic object and all I get to see are some tiny mini-items and the I am supposed to play guessing games which does what - nah, that won't cut it for me. Microsoft's OLE on the other hand offers you a fully intuitive menu to work with - even in Windoze 3.1.
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MTT
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256 MB Posts: 394 SSW7 Oldtimer
Reply #5 on: June 01, 2023, 01:32
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NOT OpenDoc, but "Publish and Subscribe". Any users of this tech here? Publish and Subscribe predated "Apple Open Collaboration Environment" (AOCE) and its successor,) OpenDoc. Introduced with System 7.0, P&S behaved in a simpler way to OpenDoc in that a program could publish a portion or portions of a document, and another program or programs could subscribe to the published element (called an Edition), or to any number of published editions in a single document, from a number of different sources. For example, Word 5 could publish a block of text, and ClarisWorks and FreeHand could both subscribe to that published Edition and embed it into their own documents. This could be done on the same computer, or over a network. The publishing program had control over the published Edition, meaning it was able to edit the Edition. Subscribed documents would automatically receive updated versions of the Edition when they ran. Users of subscribed to documents could also launch the publishing program from the subscribed Edition and edit the Edition (if permitted to). Unlike OpenDoc, P&S was built into the Mac OS and didn't require the optional install or learning curve that OpenDoc presented. It did however require programs to natively support P&S. Most of the better known Mac software of the day developed for System 7.0 and on, did support P&S, such as Microsoft Word/Excel, ClarisWorks, Macromedia's FreeHand, etc. Publish & Subscribe survived in the Mac OS from System 7.0 to 9.2.2
Last Edit: June 01, 2023, 02:10 by MTT
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wove
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1024 MB Posts: 1363
Reply #6 on: June 01, 2023, 02:35
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I used Publish and Subscribe. I thought it a bit clunky to use, but it has been a long time since I used it. I seem to recall you needed to configure it before you wanted to use it. Meaning as far as I recall you needed to set the separate documents up, one to be a publisher and one to be a subscriber before you could use it. The whole setup felt more like MS tech than good Apple tech, but when it did appear it was indeed handy. Publish and subscribe did not feel all that useful if you were sticking in ClarisWorks, but it did have a use with MS documents. I seem to recall using it with Corel Draw which I used as a page layout application and was able to have it subscribe to a Word Perfect document to pull in text. For me OpenDoc really just killed off any need for it. It was just so much easier to drag in an editor container and work on multiple data typed in the same document at the same time. Just seemed like no fuss no bother. On the downside of course OpenDoc did not gain traction so it was soon apparent there was going to be a real lack of capable editors. (I do not think Publish and Subscribe gained much of a following either either.) I do not have anything against applications, the problem I see with the focus on applications over documents/projects is that many folks conflate being good at using an application with being good at being a creator. Witness the number of people who mastered PageMill only to fill MySpace with some of the most confounding material ever published. 
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