Since Leo is enjoying a spring of sorts, with fresh ideas growing and renewed life on old ones, I thought I'd share something which has long bugged me but I've never seen anyone talk about, at least clearly and eloquently, until today.
QQQ A Modern Undo - Making undo usable beyond the last few changes http://e-texteditor.com/blog/2006/making-undo-usable Undo is one of the most fundamental features of modern software applications, yet it has hardly evolved since it was invented. And this is even though it widely acknowledged to be mostly useless when going beyond a few changes. This article presents a set of solutions to make undo far more useful. They not just blue sky ideas but actual features implemented and functional in e - the Collaborative Text Editor for Windows. “By [undoing] repeatedly, you can gradually work your way back to a point before your mistake. This is convenient if you’ve made a mistake four or five commands back. It is marginally useful if you’ve made a mistake twenty or thirty characters back. And it is completely useless if your mistake is ancient history.” - Learning GNU Emacs (page 42) Most modern software has an unlimited undo history, tracing the changes all the way back to the document creation. Yet, as the above quote attest, it is mostly useless beyond a few edits. QQQ I've never used the e-editor but after reading some of the blog posts and watching the screencast I'm very intrigued. If nothing else it is refreshing to see someone tackling an old and well established niche with some truly new thinking about how to meld what are usually disparate methods of interacting with one's data. I've haven't been this curious about an application since I encountered Leo. The same fellow (haven't run across his name yet), is also "open sourcing" his company (http://e-texteditor.com/blog/2009/opencompany). I haven't seen this done before, not like this. The ideal is that *anybody* can become an employee, there is no hiring, and no firing. Payment for one's involvement is through a community trust metric, perhaps like Advogato or Stack Overflow. He started this grand experiment in 2009, with a fair bit of push-back about the open-but-not-quite-open code license, and a lot of support as well. It looks like the trust metric is not progressing so well, or at least not swiftly. All in all, a very interesting project to watch. cheers, -- -matt -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "leo-editor" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/leo-editor?hl=en.
