Cool Software

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I have spent the day in the company of a gaggle of Mac users (is ‘gaggle’ the correct collective term ?). They made me quite jealous with Hydra a collaborative editing tool in which users not only share documents but can work on them simultaneously. It makes things like collective to-do lists or meeting minutes really easy.
So far I haven’t been able to find anything similar for my collection of Windows/Linux boxes.
At last! An excuse to by a Mac !

  • John T Furry

    But whats the point of collaborative software that works on < 5% of the worlds computers ?

  • Kal

    Well, on that occasion PCs were in the minority. Its a shame that there doesn’t seem to be any PC software that can do the same thing…it would be even more cool if it used the same protocol and could read Hydra-shared documents.

  • http://www.jezuk.co.uk/cgi-bin/view/jez Jez

    It’s always struck me as amusing that while I don’t know any programmers who think Woz is anything less than a big, beardy, genius, none of them ever gave any thought to actually buying a Mac.
    Until OSX anyway, when suddenly Macs not only looked really, really pretty, but that you could actually do real (for some definition of real) work on them. There’s a big pile of really cool stuff you can get for them, a lot of it based on the magic of Rendezvous. When we were doing Java/XML/XSLT work all day, every day, I gave serious thought to getting one.
    Still, getting a Mac would be an indulgence. Compared with generic PC, they’re really pretty expensive. For jobbing programmer types, there’s a fairly massive class of jobs you can’t do with them. Chances are a lot of your bits and bobs won’t work with it (like your Zaurus, maybe)?
    Buying a machine so you can use a fancy-pants text editor? That really would be super-indulgent. Pretty, though. :)