
Show HN: A multi-touch document manipulation system - stevewilhelm
http://liquidtext.net/demos/
======
mgunes
It's a kind of belated consolation that people are finally waking up to the
potential of transclusion, structured notetaking and active reading in
assisting and boosting human intelligence, decades after the onset of the
still unfulfilled visions of forefathers such as Ted Nelson and Douglas
Engelbart; and it's definitely great to see skillful people working on the
vastly unpopular field of general-purpose _production_ software of the
literary kind. But this is _just the thing_ that ideally shouldn't be
productized and shut into the walled garden of an iPad application, unable to
flexibly integrate into a user's broader systems of knowledge and memory.
Hopefully the technology will have much more extensive implementations beyond
the application.

We should have had this kind of thing as a standard part of our common user-
facing software by now; in all software related to reading and writing. All
implemented in free software, open protocols and standards, in a distributed
manner, not tied to one company or organization. In 2012, I should have been
able to practically link a paragraph of my comment here to a line on a local
PDF file, another paragraph on that file to a particular portion of a web
video, and string a group of such links and transclusions together, comment
further on them, keep them under version control, and share them with others,
without being tied to a single service or application. This stuff should be
_infrastructure_.

And this is what personal computers were supposed to be all about, before the
original naive and optimistic vision of enhancing human intelligence and
distributed production and sharing gave way to the current situation where
personal computers are used mainly to mindlessly consume centrally produced
crap. I'm still looking forward to and willing to work towards an updated
variant of that vision, but it's going to be an uphill battle.

~~~
acous
Assuming you keep track of this area, are there any other interesting projects
out there?

~~~
mgunes
I assume you mean _recent and active_ projects; there's nothing recent I can
remember that attempts to do the kind of thing I tried to describe in the
second paragraph of my comment. (Which is why I intend to start working on my
own modest, desperate attempt at it in the following months.)

However, there are various projects, some of them historical, that have
attempted to tackle it in limited contexts, or implemented _parts of it_ , or
have envisioned it in holistic systems that are now outdated. Almost all of
the somewhat interesting ones I've come across can unfortunately be classified
as one of the following: 1) Productized, narrowly focused yet-another-app 2)
Academic or overly specialized in-house or personal project with no real
effort at widespread usability 3) Unmaintained and outdated 4) Essentially
vaporware

With that said, here are a few links of interest, with the forefathers noted
first:

* Xanadu: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu>

* NLS: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NLS_%28computer_system%29>

* Relations: <http://relations-rcp.sourceforge.net/>

* Zettelkasten: <http://zettelkasten.danielluedecke.de/en/index.php>

* semantic-notes: <https://github.com/jsomers/semantic-notes>

* Synapsen: <http://www.verzetteln.de/synapsen/shots_e.html>

* flashbake: <https://github.com/commandline/flashbake>

* ConnectedText: <http://www.connectedtext.com/>

* The Literary Machine: <http://sommestad.com/lm.htm>

* Leo: <http://webpages.charter.net/edreamleo/front.html>

* Smart Notebooks (currently seeking funding on Kickstarter): [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1947703258/smart-noteboo...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1947703258/smart-notebooks-keeping-on-the-same-page-across-th)

* Bibkosh: <http://www.bibkosh.com>

* gitmarks: <https://github.com/hmason/gitmarks>

* Lifestreams: <http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/lifestreams.html> , <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.02/fflifestreams.html>

* Locker: <https://github.com/quartzjer/Locker>

* Telehash: <http://telehash.org/>

* Singly: <https://www.singly.com/>

* pan.do/ra: <https://pan.do/ra#about>

* Papers: <http://www.mekentosj.com/papers/>

Some related reading:

* <http://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/1.html>

* <http://takingnotenow.blogspot.co.uk/>

* <http://www.visi.com/~snowfall/notebook.html>

* [http://web.archive.org/web/20100422130439/http://gilest.org/...](http://web.archive.org/web/20100422130439/http://gilest.org/luvly/20040322-lion.html)

* [http://web.archive.org/web/20100108034547/http://software-li...](http://web.archive.org/web/20100108034547/http://software-libre.rudd-o.com/Streams_vs._documents)

* <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book>

* <http://www.xanadu.com.au/ted/XUsurvey/xuDation.html>

* [http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/reading-with-the-stars...](http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/reading-with-the-stars-teaching-with-the-highbrow-annotation-browser/37591)

* <http://www.openannotation.org/>

* <http://www.katsommers.com/2010/11/02/web-narrative/>

* <http://www.paleofuture.com/blog/tag/dymaxion-chronofile>

* <http://www.jagshouse.com/swyft.html>

* <http://al3x.net/2009/01/31/against-everything-buckets.html>

~~~
drothlis
* Smallest federated wiki: <http://wardcunningham.github.com>

~~~
mgunes
Thanks; I forgot about it somehow. Previous HN discussion:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4199260>

------
tjoff
I like it, but in all honesty - I don't see how multi-touch brings any
advantage compared to a keyboard+mouse for this application.

The workflow is a bit different yes, but there is barely anything in there
that really takes advantage of multi-touch gestures more than zoom, and there
are many great zoom implementations available when using a mouse.

Regardless this could be quite useful, my biggest gripe is exporting your
work, you should be able to export it to a PDF or something so that anyone can
read or print it while still retaining comments, links etc. in a good,
intuitive, way. That will make or break it in my eyes (granted I've only
glanced at it so far) and I didn't see anything about that on the site/videos.

Not saying that it is badly suitable for multi-touch but I just have a hard
time seeing myself working with my hands like that for a long session. Mouse +
keyboard is vastly superior in terms of ergonomics and if I will be writing
long comments a real keyboard is a must.

On a tablet? Sure, but feels like the UI requires a larger screen than a
tablet.

~~~
troels
My thoughts exactly. In fact, watching the presentation gave me the
impressions that the touch ui was actually slightly awkward to work with,
compared to using a mouse.

That's not a problem, as the application it self is quite interesting. So I
think they should focus on that and then let the ui be secondary. When using
it on a tablet, touch-ui is used, when on a laptop/desktop machine, the
mouse/keyboard ui is used.

------
dzuc
Calls to mind aspects of Xanadu, which is nice to see:
<http://www.xanadu.com.au/ted/XUsurvey/PTF2CLO8.JPG>
<http://www.xanadu.com.au/ted/XUsurvey/xuDation.html>

------
dbcooper
This is great. When reviewing/editing/revising technical manuscripts (journal
articles, technical reports, dissertations etc) this would be extremely handy,
and cut out the constant scrolling to check and recheck definitions and parts
of the document with others. Referring back to the materials and methods
section is an obvious use-case.

Would be nice to see the layout of comments/notes etc on the RHS be more
structured (snapped to a grid?) though. Shouldn't have to zoom in and out on
these.

Now if this was combined with one of those Wacom 24 or 27" touch screen
displays ... :)

------
mdkess
This looks really awesome. For a long time, I've thought that multi-touch has
been very under used, it's nice to see people thinking outside of the desktop
OS paradigm. I would imagine this would be quite useful with a Wacom tablet as
well - any thoughts on that?

I've never reviewed articles before, but one thought from looking at your
video is that it might be nice to be able to group things in a more concrete
way, for example, if you are picking out different themes from the article. I
was immediately reminded of BumpTop. I think that a part that is not
necessarily focused on in the video is more rigorous organization of the
snippets that you take out of the article.

------
cpr
Nifty!

But how do you avoid the "gorilla arm" problem with large touch-screen
monitors?

~~~
DasIch
A touch screen table would solve that problem. In a perfect world we would
have desks whose entire surface is a multi-touch screen, not as a replacement
but additionally to "regular" monitors to allow exactly these kinds of
interfaces.

~~~
cpr
Not really--you'd still be using large-arm motions on a large surface, holding
up your arms so you wouldn't generate false touches. Even palm detection won't
help, as you'd still need the large-scope motions to tie things together.

~~~
Gigablah
The "false touch" problem is solvable:

"Swept Frequency Capacitive Sensing"
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4tYpXVTjxA>

Basically the idea is to make devices aware of the physical context of user
interactions.

------
pknight
This looks amazing. It's nice to see a different take on a UI for working with
bigger documents. I must say I'm not a huge fan of touch interfaces but
something like this could port well to a kinect type interface. Project the
screen onto a wall and add some voice recognition and kinect and you could
have fun working on big texts while standing and moving around the room. You
could write a book in a room without a chair or desk.

------
mjcohenw
How well does this work with LaTeX and other document formatting systems?

------
Jarred
This looks awesome.

------
goggles99
Seems really cool but I can't ever see using a giant touchscreen all day like
that. Imaging the fatigue that would ensue and the Repetitive Use Injuries
(RSI) that would occur.

I really like the concept though. I would really like to see something that
used similar features in a coding IDE.

