TidBITS#730/17-May-04
=====================
Our last Mac OS X Trojan horse coverage was only a few weeks ago;
now, Adam reports on a malicious new Trojan that's been spotted
in the wild. Adam also compiles his wishlist for WriteRight, a
hypothetical word processor designed for professional writers.
Also in this issue, we note St. Clair Software's new HistoryHound,
which helps you revisit Web pages, email support for .Mac, and
the releases of disclabel 2.0 and the Japanese translation of
"Take Control of Customizing Panther."
Topics:
MailBITS/17-May-04
A Real Mac OS X Trojan Horse Appears
WriteRight: The Writer's Word Processor
Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/17-May-04
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MailBITS/17-May-04
------------------
**Apple Offers One-on-One Email Support for .Mac Services** -- On
03-May-04 Apple started offering direct email support for .Mac
service questions, a switch from providing support only via
discussion forum responses. Previously, if you experienced any
problems with .Mac email, using iSync with .Mac, or other issues,
your only method of receiving an answer or advice was to post
your question on Apple's .Mac discussion board. Now, Apple offers
direct support for .Mac email, iDisk, HomePage, Backup, and Virex,
as well as using various applications like iPhoto or iSync with
.Mac. Apple also offers a link for account questions.
<http://www.apple.com/support/dotmac/>
The top of each section lists FAQs and links to demonstration
movies of using the service. Scroll to the bottom, and you'll find
a form that promises a response as soon as within 24 hours. Direct
email support finally fulfills one of our ongoing complaints about
.Mac: for $100 a year, Apple should meet the standards of an
inexpensive ISP. [GF]
**HistoryHound Fetches the Past** -- Talk about a delayed
reaction! I've been moaning for years about how useless most Web
browsers are at helping you return to places you've been in the
past. Back in 1996, there was a MacUser utility called Web Ninja
that captured the URL of every page you visited, making it easy
to find and revisit those pages. And until this January, when
the Omni Group showed off the pre-release OmniWeb 5, nothing
even approached Web Ninja's power. With OmniWeb 5, the Omni Group
raised the bar, indexing not only the URL of each page you visit,
but also the full text. I've been beta testing OmniWeb 5, and
although I don't search my history every day, that feature has
proved invaluable on more than one occasion.
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=00892>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07511>
<http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb/5/>
But what about other browsers, like Safari and Internet Explorer?
Jon Gotow of St. Clair Software has come to the rescue with
HistoryHound, a $20 utility that reads the existing history
and bookmarks from Safari and Internet Explorer, visits those
sites on the Web, indexes their contents, and lets you search the
index. To search, you press a keyboard shortcut (no matter what
application you're in), type your search terms, and pick a page
from a ranked results list; it opens immediately in your default
browser. It's a brilliant, elegant interface, and although I
haven't used it long on the Macs where I still rely on Safari,
I think it will become one of those indispensable tools (and it
has a great icon done by Tony Bush of Cartoon Dogs). If you've
ever found yourself unable to find that site you visited a few
weeks or months ago, ask HistoryHound to find it for you. A 30-day
free demo of HistoryHound 1.0.2 is available as a 1.6 MB download
and requires Mac OS X 10.3 or later. [ACE]
<http://www.stclairsoft.com/HistoryHound/>
<http://www.cartoon-dogs.com/>
**GarageBand 1.1 Released** -- Apple tidied up the garage a bit
today with the release of GarageBand 1.1. The new version
addresses a number of issues, adding per-track Echo settings and
support for unprotected AAC audio files. The update also supports
loop libraries located outside GarageBand's default disk location,
and provides fixes related to moving GarageBand songs between
different computers, the timing of individual notes and regions,
and support for Propellerhead Software's ReWire (which provides a
mechanism for transferring audio data between applications - like
GarageBand and third-party software instruments - in real time).
GarageBand 1.1 also now has the capability to rearrange tracks
by dragging them. The update is a 37.5 MB download via Software
Update or Apple's Web site. [JLC]
<http://www.apple.com/ilife/garageband/>
<http://www.propellerheads.se/>
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/garageband.html>
**disclabel 2.0 Released** -- SmileOnMyMac has updated disclabel,
their slick application for creating CD and DVD labels, along
with inserts for jewel cases. New in disclabel 2.0 are improved
graphics capabilities such as foreground and background layers,
object arranging and distributing, masking and soft focus effects,
and combining multiple images into a montage. Images can be
imported on a per-track basis, and you can now print inserts,
covers, and booklets on plain paper as well as export to PDF,
TIFF, or JPEG. disclabel 2.0 costs $30, and is a free upgrade
for anyone who purchased the previous version after 01-Jan-04;
otherwise upgrades cost $10. It's a 6 MB download. [ACE]
<http://www.smileonmymac.com/disclabel/>
**"Take Control of Customizing Panther" in Japanese** -- Our
industrious Japanese translators have done it again! We're pleased
to announce the release of the Japanese translation of Matt
Neuburg's "Take Control of Customizing Panther," which is now
available for $7.50. We're once again offering this version
free to Japanese speakers who have already purchased the English
version of Matt's ebook. To download your copy, click the Check
for Updates button on the first page of "Take Control of
Customizing Panther" and click the download link in the Web page
that appears. The free download link will work through 01-Jun-04.
If you don't have the current 1.2 version of "Take Control of
Customizing Panther," your copy won't have the Check for Updates
button, so you'll need to upgrade to 1.2 with the instructions
we sent on 10-Apr-04. If you have trouble, send email to Tonya
at <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. [ACE]
<http://www.tidbits.com/TakeControl/jp/panther/customizing.html>
A Real Mac OS X Trojan Horse Appears
------------------------------------
by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
A few weeks after the hullabaloo surrounding Intego's press
release about a technique that could be used to create a Trojan
horse that looked like an MP3 file (see "Mac OS X Trojan
Technique: Beware Geeks Bearing Gifts" in TidBITS-726_), a real
Mac OS X Trojan horse has been reported to Macworld UK. The Trojan
horse, which purports to be a Web installer for Microsoft Word
2004, does _not_ use the technique previously revealed, but it's
decidedly malicious. If you are foolish enough to run it, it
deletes your entire Home folder.
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07636>
<http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/top_news_item.cfm?NewsID=8664>
In the somewhat confused article, Macworld UK says that the reader
who reported it to them downloaded it "from LimeWire." (LimeWire
is actually client software for the Gnutella file sharing
network.) This reader, proving that common sense isn't as
common as would be ideal, somehow thought that the file must
have been a public beta of the next version of Microsoft Word,
so he downloaded it, noticed that the icon "looked genuine and
trustworthy" and double-clicked it, only to discover that it had
instead deleted his Home folder.
Our searches of the Gnutella network using Acquisition (a truly
elegant Macintosh program, particularly in contrast to the brutish
LimeWire, which we also used to search), came up empty. Since the
IP numbers of those sharing files on the Gnutella network are
readily available, it's highly likely that whoever initially
seeded the Gnutella network removed the Trojan horse to avoid
further detection, and since detection is easy, it's relatively
unlikely that even bozos would knowingly share such a malicious
program.
<http://www.acquisitionx.com/>
<http://www.limewire.com/>
Macworld UK initially chose not to reveal the technique used,
but Intego, showing a continued extreme lack of judgment, promptly
issued a press release linking to further information that
explained almost exactly how to create a similar Trojan horse.
Macworld UK then republished Intego's information, and many other
sites jumped on it as well. As best I can tell, the argument for
publishing the technique is that if people know how it's done,
they can better identify and avoid such Trojan horses in the
future. That's specious at best, since a Trojan horse merely
must deceive a user long enough for that person to double-click;
knowing what language it's written in is irrelevant. All that
publicizing the technique does is increase the number of people
(large though it may have already been in this case) who have the
capability to create such a Trojan horse. The cynical are already
wondering if Intego's publicity of the previous Trojan technique
may have played a role in the creation of this one. If Trojan
horse reports continue to roll in, the fault will lie with Intego
and everyone else who published the instructions.
Suffice to say that the technique is extremely simple; this Trojan
horse merely preys on gullibility and cupidity to sucker people
into launching (arguably, it's a bit of digital Darwinism at
work). It's worth noting that this Trojan also doesn't exploit any
weaknesses in Mac OS X; it's just a deceptively named program that
deletes files, and there's no foolproof way to prevent deceptively
named malicious software on any platform. No anti-virus software
is necessary to detect this Trojan, and it does not replicate
itself. As long as you don't download applications from
untrustworthy sources, you have nothing to worry about,
particularly if you maintain regular backups.
WriteRight: The Writer's Word Processor
---------------------------------------
by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Please accept my sincere apologies if the title of this
article has raised your pulse along with your hopes. There
is no WriteRight, and, speaking as a professional writer, with
thousands of articles and numerous books under my belt, I'm
comfortable saying that the Macintosh world doesn't have a word
processor that's designed for writers. Although I'm not familiar
with the full complement of word processors for other platforms,
I'd be surprised if they were any better. I'm not talking about
students, who may knock off a few papers per semester, or managers
who need to write up occasional status reports. I'm talking about
real writers, the kind of people who spend their days in their
word processors, creating text, tweaking it into shape, and
preparing it for the next stage in its life, be that a Web page,
a press release, a magazine article, a book, or some other form
of published work. It continues to amaze me that no word processor
has attempted to appeal more directly to its most professional and
accomplished users; it would be like telling a Hollywood director
to use iMovie instead of Final Cut Pro.
**Then and Now** -- First, a bit of history. In the beginning
there was MacWrite, which introduced the entire concept of
WYSIWYG - what you see is what you get. There were a few other
good word processors back in the early days of the Macintosh,
including the sprightly WriteNow, FullWrite (whose 2 MB memory
requirement was shocking back in the day), and two more familiar
names that have survived to this day: Microsoft Word and Nisus
Writer. Other word processors were built into now-defunct
integrated programs like BeagleWorks and GreatWorks; also, both
ClarisWorks (now AppleWorks) and the perennial underdog RagTime
are still kicking.
<http://www.apple.com/appleworks/>
<http://www.comgrafix.com/ragtime_5.html>
Along with the surviving programs, we've seen a revival of
interest in small word processors: Nisus Writer Express (actually
a completely new program that bears only a passing resemblance to
the powerful and quirky Nisus Writer Classic), Mariner Write from
Mariner Software, and the intriguing Mellel from the Israeli
company RedleX. It's also worth considering TextWrangler from Bare
Bones Software, a text editor descended from the venerable BBEdit.
Alas, when I call these word processors "small," I mean it. They
have occasional flashes of brilliance, and all show some promise,
but for a serious writer who collaborates with other authors,
works with a variety of editors, and produces text for
professional publication, they simply don't cut it.
<http://www.nisus.com/express/>
<http://www.marinersoftware.com/>
<http://www.redlers.com/>
<http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/>
Microsoft Word remains the juggernaut of the industry, and to be
blunt, aside from a few years when it seemed Nisus Writer Classic
might have been able to make a run at the bloated and buggy Word
6.0, Word has been the most powerful and capable word processor
on the Macintosh. At the same time, Word elicits more cursing
from writers than any other. Its features are piled high and deep,
and while they often claim to do something particularly useful,
they're often confusing to use while falling short of what's
actually necessary. For instance, Word's Compare Documents feature
has never produced sufficiently useful results for me. Perhaps
others have had better luck, and I always remain hopeful that a
new version will make drastic improvements, but I've come to terms
with the fact that I'm unlikely ever to have more than an arm's
length relationship with Word.
<http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/wordx/wordx.aspx>
<http://www.nisus.com/NisusWriter/>
So come with me on a fantasy trip into the set of features that
in my opinion (bolstered by that of many other writers and editors
with whom I work regularly), would exist in the ideal writer's
word processor, call it WriteRight. Do note that such a program
would of course need solid implementation of all the basic word
processing features; I focus here on the features that are either
essential to the writer or for which I've heard many a writer
express a fervent desire. "If only Word could..." is how those
conversations always start, and then we go into the feature
wishlist.
**Keyboard and Mouse Navigation** -- It always surprises me when
I use a word processor that doesn't offer full keyboard navigation
and a full complement of text selection features. Writers spend
so much time in their word processors that keyboard and mouse
shortcuts become not just niceties but essentials. This isn't
the place for a full list, but you should be able to navigate
a document using the keyboard by character, word, sentence,
paragraph, and document, with or without the Shift key held down
to enable selection. Similarly, double-clicks should select words,
triple clicks should select sentences, and quadruple clicks should
select paragraphs.
Also useful in this regard is the capability of customizing
keyboard shortcuts. For whatever reason, I (and many programs)
believe Option-Delete should delete a word, but for some reason,
other programs assign this function to Command-Delete. It's
maddening, so I always take the time to regularize a program
that disagrees with me, even if I have to use a macro utility
like iKey or QuicKeys to override its default behavior. Keyboard
customization within the program is better.
**Auto-Save** -- Also surprisingly lacking in many word processors
is a good auto-save capability. At its most simple, auto-save
merely needs to write the file to disk every few minutes. If
something goes wrong, you never lose more than the last few
minutes of work. Nisus Writer Classic offered the best combination
of controls, enabling you to specify both an elapsed time and
a number of keystrokes between saves. For instance, I might want
to auto-save every 5 minutes, but I can type rather quickly,
so I might also want to auto-save every 500 keystrokes. As far
as I know, no other word processor yet matches that level of
configurability, but WriteRight should.
Nisus Writer Express offers a new feature I was initially
dismissive of, but which I've subsequently grown to appreciate:
Document Manager. Basically, Nisus Writer Express can
automatically save new documents to the Document Manager rather
than forcing you to save each file separately. Sometimes I just
want to start writing; I don't want to name my file and put it
somewhere specific (and there's little worse than an auto-save
feature that doesn't work until the document has been saved for
the first time).
It might seem clever to record all actions in between saves to a
separate roll-forward log that could be replayed after the user
restarted, and I'd be all in favor of that if it were implemented
well. For instance, Word automatically opens a copy of your
document after a crash. But it's a copy, so you must manually
figure out if it has useful data that doesn't exist in your
original, and if so, you must decide whether it makes more sense
to copy the recovered text back into the original or to save the
copy and replace the original file in the Finder. Psychologically,
it's the worst time to ask users to make decisions that could
result in data loss. In contrast, Adobe InDesign has a pretty good
roll-forward log; most of the times I've crashed with unsaved work
in an InDesign document, InDesign has merely reopened my document
with the unsaved changes. Of course, there were two times while
I was writing my iPhoto Visual QuickStart Guide that InDesign
blithely reported that my document was corrupted and couldn't be
opened after a crash. I would have appreciated an opportunity to
revert to my last saved version (which should have been fine)
without all the interim changes. Both times, my Retrospect backups
saved my bacon.
**Search Harder** -- Find/Replace features are another area where
most word processors don't make the grade. Nisus Writer Classic
remains the gold standard here again, with its capability of
searching on any attribute of text in the document using either
plain or pattern-based searches within a selection, throughout an
entire document, or even across multiple documents. It's powerful,
flexible, and elegant, and I remain flabbergasted that other
programs haven't just copied it wholesale. Even Nisus Software's
own Nisus Writer Express doesn't match up.
If you doubt that writers need these kind of features, just
imagine the on-deadline call from your editor saying that figure
references need to be in the form "Figure 1.2 - Caption text." and
every figure reference in the 12 files that make up your 350-page
book uses the previous requirement of "Fig. 1-2: Caption text.".
With Nisus Writer Classic, I could make that change throughout the
entire book in a few minutes; with any other program, it might
be hours of error-prone manual labor. (And if I have to tell a
program to continue searching from the beginning of the document
again, I'm going to scream. Simple searches shouldn't require user
prompting.)
**Character and Paragraph Styles** -- One of the most important
features of a word processor is styles. I'm not talking about text
formatting styles - bold, underline, and so on - but user-defined
character and paragraph styles. With such styles you can change
the style definition, and all the text in that style immediately
changes to match. Character styles apply to any run of one or
more characters, whereas paragraph styles apply to the text of
a paragraph (as indicated by a trailing return character).
Word's support for styles is quite complete, despite a complex
interface and a few quirks in how multiple styles applied to the
same text interact. Mellel and AppleWorks both offer some level
of style support as well, Nisus Writer Express 2.0 (due in a few
months) promises it, but the current versions of Nisus Writer
Express and Mariner Write both lack styles entirely, as do more
text-oriented programs like Bare Bones Software's text editors.
WriteRight would refocus its style support somewhat. Styles are
useful for the control they give over both the look of certain
bits of text and other attributes (such as identifying a style
that shouldn't be spell checked, or that should be considered to
be a URL). But what's most important, though, is that styles be
easy to define, apply, and modify, and that they be available to
other programs. For instance, if InDesign and QuarkXPress can't
read a word processor's character and paragraph styles, it simply
won't be acceptable for producing documents for layout. WriteRight
should also have HTML and XML export features that work from
character and paragraph style definitions, since the easier it
is to repurpose text, the better.
**Reference Tools** -- When it comes to working with text, too few
word processors provide tools to help writers write. There are a
few such tools, of course, like inline spell checking, and it's
not unheard of for a word processor to have a thesaurus, a
dictionary, or even a grammar checker. Even when present, though,
the implementation of these features leaves much to be desired
from the writer's standpoint.
Inline spell checking is wonderful, of course, and my main
irritation with it at this point is that not everything shares
the same dictionary, even though Apple now offers system-wide
dictionaries. So, I end up with separate user dictionaries for
Eudora, Word, and Cocoa applications. (Here's an idea for a
shareware utility: a program that synchronizes user dictionaries
between programs and between Macs. If only iSync were open to
developers!) And a few programs I use for text, such as BBEdit
and InDesign, still don't offer inline spell checking, so not
only do they have their own user dictionaries, but they force
users to work through clumsy dialog-based interfaces.
(For the record, Adobe should be ashamed of the spell checker in
InDesign; it's possibly the worst one I've ever seen, requiring
three clicks in two dialogs to add a word to the user dictionary
and offering no style-based way of marking text like URLs that
should never be spell-checked. At least InDesign CS added an
option to avoid complaining about sentences that don't start with
capital letters, as every other sentence in my iPhoto Visual
QuickStart Guide does, thanks to Apple's capitalization.)
After inline spell checking, though, writing features become far
less coherent. Word offers a grammar checker that could be useful
to people who aren't writers (since professional writers who use
"poor" grammar generally do so intentionally). A useful mode for
a grammar checker would be as a proofing tool that could catch
typographical and other subtle errors, such as the wrong "its" or
a typo that results in an incorrect, but properly spelled, word.
Word does provide a dictionary that's handy for looking up
definitions, but it's not nearly as usable as a truly clever
feature in Nisus Writer Express. When combined with the free Nisus
Thesaurus, Nisus Writer Express can show you, in a portion of a
drawer, thesaurus entries for the word next to or containing the
insertion point. I often now begin TidBITS articles in Nisus
Writer Express because the real-time thesaurus helps me break
out of the rut of using roughly the same words in article after
article. I'd love to see a similar feature in WriteRight that
also performed real-time dictionary lookups.
<http://www.nisus.com/Thesaurus/>
It's tempting to build Internet search capabilities into a word
processor, such that you could select a word and look it up in
Google, for instance. However, that kind of a feature (which
appeared in the most recent release of Eudora, in fact) misses
the point, since a writer is unlikely to want to run a Google
search for a single word because the results probably won't be
relevant. However, I could imagine a feature in WriteRight that
would take advantage of Apple's text summarization feature to
summarize a selection and then feed that summary to Google. The
additional context from having multiple search terms would
likely produce useful hits.
**Word Count & Document Statistics** -- For years, Microsoft's
Word product managers complained that every review of Word took
the program to task for not making it sufficiently easy to do a
word count. Microsoft finally added a constantly updated word
count to the status bar at the bottom of the document window, and
in my next meeting, the Microsoft folks pointed out that feature,
joking that it was only there so they could get better reviews.
I laughed along with them, while sighing internally: word count
is utterly necessary for almost everyone who makes a living
writing, and bringing the feature out into the open wasn't
a sop to reviewers, it was a long-overdue decision.
For TidBITS articles, we care about character count instead of
word count, since, in our case, character count is a more true
representation of an article's size than word count. Although most
word processors can perform these counts, Nisus Writer Express and
Mellel deserve credit for making document statistics particularly
visible. My theoretical WriteRight would definitely work along
similar lines.
**Outlining** -- For many writers, everything starts as an
outline, just like our seventh grade English teachers taught
us. Outlines help you organize your thoughts ahead of time,
and particularly with longer works, ensure that you don't
realize two-thirds through that your organization is all wrong.
There are of course numerous stand-alone outliners, such as
OmniOutliner, NoteTaker, Hog Bay Notebook, and so on. But
outlining is the first part of the writing process, and it's
clumsy to be forced to create your outline in another program
and then refer back to it constantly as you write. Of the current
crop of word processors, only AppleWorks and Word offer outlining
capabilities, and the outlining tools in AppleWorks seem crude.
As with so many other features, Word's outlining tools have the
right idea, but suffer significantly in the implementation.
<http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnioutliner/>
<http://www.aquaminds.com/>
<http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/hog_bay_notebook.php>
I won't expand on Matt Neuburg's long-standing criticism that
Word's outlining tools lack the functionality of More, which
remains the gold standard to serious outline users like Matt.
I'm not as picky as Matt about how I interact with my outlines,
but I still find that outlines I create in Word never go beyond
being outlines; I always start a new file to write my document.
By doing so I lose the capability to flesh out my outline with
the final text of my article, book chapter, or paper. And more
to the point, when I'm in the middle of a long document and wish
to shrink everything down so I can move sections around wholesale,
it never seems to work out. In part, that's because Word's
outlining mode relies entirely on Word's built-in styles, which
many publishers don't use because they conflict with the styles
necessary to work with their particular page layout template.
But even with our Take Control ebooks, which do rely on Word's
built-in styles for reasons like this, Word's outline view isn't
clean; there are often bits of text that don't want to slot into
the appropriate hierarchy for some reason.
In short, though Word has the right idea, I'd like to see
WriteRight offer not only outlining that Matt Neuburg will love,
but also outlining that allows the author to expand or contract
the full text of the piece at any point in time.
**Collaboration Features** -- Most serious writers, other than
those working on their first novels in unheated garrets, work
with other writers and editors, but this fact seems to be lost on
companies that create word processors. In fact, in the Macintosh
world, only two word processors offer any collaboration features
at all: Microsoft Word and (stretching the definition of a word
processor) SubEthaEdit. So what's necessary? WriteRight should
provide revision tracking, extra-textual commenting, and
collaborative editing, and it should write files in a format
that can be read without loss of information in Word, InDesign,
QuarkXPress, and other common word processing and layout programs.
<http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/>
Word does offer revision tracking to help you identify, via
color coding of text, who made what change in a document, and
the feature is essential to any serious writing project. Essential
though it may be, it's also horribly implemented, difficult
to use, and buggy in ways that can cause significant troubles.
(Most notably, sometimes Word just forgets who you are, and
starts marking all your changes as being made by Unknown.)
Revision tracking needs to be based on both person (as Word
does it) and time because the same person may often edit a
document more than once, and it's important to see which changes
were made in which edit pass. When Glenn Fleishman and I were
writing The Wireless Networking Starter Kit, we sometimes changed
our names in Word for our second or third passes just to
differentiate between initial changes and subsequent revisions.
Revision tracking doesn't help much with identifying and working
with the various versions of a document through time. If a
document goes through several editing passes by different people,
it may be difficult or impossible to see the state of the document
at any point in time. Also, keeping copies of interim versions
of documents is prudent because Word documents occasionally
become corrupt. If you're exchanging documents via email, multiple
versions of a file are a fact of life, since you send one version
of a document and get another back, but if you and your
collaborators use a shared folder, you must come up with a manual
versioning and checkout system; the approach I see most often
involves editing the filename with a version number and your
initials. I'd like to see WriteRight integrate a distributed
version control system where you could write a document, check
it out (which would allow you to send it to someone else), and
when you receive their changes back, check it back into the
system. Even if WriteRight were just maintaining the files on
disk in a coherent way, that would eliminate the need to fiddle
with filenames and special In/Out folders.
Revisions happen to the actual text of a document, but equally
important is the capability for different people to make comments
on aspects of the document outside of the text. Again, Word offers
a commenting feature that, though slated to improve in Word 2004,
is so amazingly annoying in Word X that you wonder if anyone at
Microsoft could have actually used it before shipping. Just the
way it scrolls the text of the document when you click in a
comment, placing the commented text at the very bottom of the
screen (so you can't see most of it), makes my stomach hurt. But
commenting, like revision tracking, is essential when working with
another author or editor, so WriteRight must include a complete
commenting system.
**Document Management Server** -- In an even wilder fantasy world,
WriteRight would also have an Internet-accessible document
management server that would make it possible for multiple people
to see and comment on the same document simultaneously, with each
person being able to see the comments of others. That's great for
avoiding redundancy and enabling people to refine or disagree with
each other's comments. Right now, the best way of doing this is
with a free Web service called QuickTopic Document Review; I'd
love to see a similar multi-user document commenting interface
that also integrated the comments into the actual document.
<http://www.quicktopic.com/docreview>
A document management server could also enable real-time
collaborative editing, a feature that exists, as far as I know,
only in the SubEthaEdit text editor. Real-time collaborative
editing means you can have multiple people on a network (including
over the Internet) writing and editing in the same document at the
same time. Although the act of sharing a document space requires
some getting used to, it proves to be incredibly helpful at times,
particularly in the early stages of developing an outline or
taking notes.
Unfortunately, SubEthaEdit truly is a text editor, not a word
processor. It offers only the barest minimum of editing and
writing features, and even its signature feature lacks obvious
refinements such as being able to save the color marking that
indicates who wrote what after the document is closed. I'd like
to see SubEthaEdit's developers document the sharing protocols
and make them available - either as open source or on a licensed
basis, whichever they feel is most appropriate - to companies
developing full-fledged word processors. The capability of
allowing multiple real-time editors in a document is too useful
to restrict it to an application as limited as SubEthaEdit.
**And One File Format to Rule Them All** -- Microsoft Word
controls the word processing market for two reasons. First, as
we've seen, it offers more useful features for serious writers
than any other word processor, and even badly implemented or
buggy features are often better than nothing. Second, and more
important, the Word file format has become the lingua franca of
word processing documents. It's a network effect: lots of people
have Word, so exchanging documents happens most easily in Word
format. The page layout programs support Word because it's what
most people use, which then makes it a requirement for anyone who
writes text for later layout. Put bluntly, then, WriteRight must
not only read and write Word documents, it must use the Word file
format in as close to a native fashion as possible. Realistically,
that probably means RTF, though it will need to at least convert
Word files from .doc to .rtf format without losing anything.
As much as I'd like to think otherwise, file conversion currently
isn't good enough. I wrote my first few books in Nisus Writer
Classic, then converted them to Word to send to the publisher for
layout in PageMaker. I performed the conversion successfully, but
I spent a lot of time preparing the files for conversion, making
sure styles were all named perfectly and consistently applied.
After conversion, there was even more cleanup work to bring the
file to the level necessary for prepress work. Worse, going back
and forth between programs ensured that collaborating with my
editor was a nightmare, since he didn't use Nisus Writer Classic,
and I had to give him quickly translated Word files then address
his comments back in the original Nisus Writer documents. After
the final conversion, I was also faced with the problem of how
to start the next edition. I gave up, and now I write my books
in Word (or directly in InDesign).
I'm sure converters have improved, but just for giggles, I dropped
a moderately complex Word document with styles and tables and
comments on Nisus Writer Express, and while the file opened with
all the text intact, it didn't look much like the original.
Returning the file to Word after a change didn't help; the file
had lost the essential metadata that marked paragraph styles,
tables, and comments, among other features.
**Is WriteRight Pure Fantasy?** Honestly, I hold out little hope
that any of the companies building word processors today have it
in them to bring their products up to the level of my hypothetical
WriteRight. RedleX seems to be moving fairly quickly with Mellel,
and although Nisus Software clearly doesn't have the development
resources to bring Nisus Writer Express up to the level of Nisus
Writer Classic right away, at least they have it as a goal (not to
mention a model).
The real kicker is my last requirement - that WriteRight be able
to read and write Word documents without losing any information
at all. I believe the RTF format can encode essentially everything
in a Word document, including comments and revision tracking, but
that's helpful only if WriteRight also supports all those
features. In short, WriteRight must essentially clone almost every
feature of Word that matters (and I haven't even mentioned things
like tables and hyperlinks) to be able to read a Word file without
losing data, and more to the point, to be able to write the file
back out with all data equally intact. It's a tall order, and one
that may not be feasible.
But aside from the fact that it never hurts to dream of a tool
that would actually make my everyday work faster, easier, and
better, I think it's also important to make sure these ideas are
in circulation so that those who are developing word processors
can know that just ensuring we can make our text use different
fonts in bold and italic won't warrant even a yawn.
Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/17-May-04
------------------------------------
by TidBITS Staff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The second URL below each thread description points to the
discussion on our Web Crossing server, which will be much
faster, though it doesn't yet use our preferred design.
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/>
**Playing iPod through iTunes** -- Solutions to the problem of not
being able to play songs stored on an iPod directly using iTunes.
(2 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2232>
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/97>
**Westernmost Wi-Fi** -- Is the hotspot Adam found on Kauai,
Hawaii really the westernmost Wi-Fi location? Readers debate the
location, and how to define "westernmost". (4 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2229>
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/95>
$$
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