Live Ink
Wow. John just sent me a link to Live Ink, a company that has cool text-formatting software. It’s analogous to code formatting, but for written language syntax.
It looked gimmicky, at first, but then I started trying out the samples on the site. After a few pages, it started to click. I would read phrases of each sentence as a unit. Because the text is formatted somewhat like the outline of the parts of a single sentence, I’m able to quickly scan and jump to relevant clauses. The indentation also serves to bring several clauses into the eye’s fovea in parallel. In this way, it seems to gain some of the advantages of serial reading interfaces (i.e. eye movement over a small area), while still allowing for page scanning and variable-rate reading.
Too bad it’s a proprietary product, and too bad it’s Windows/IE-only. Because of this, I’m pretty sure it will never see mainstream development or use, unless the company somehow does extremely well with its software boxen business model (unlikely) or it goes under and opens the source.
The product itself seems to work as a hosted service. You download a thin client that sends clipboard text to a server to be parsed and formatted, and then the client displays the result. If they were smart, they would make this a web service. There’s an adoption curve that Live Ink has to overcome, and letting lots of uses proliferate (Greasemonkey scripts! Wordpress plugins! A new version of Wikipedia!) would build a user base that would actually buy the product, or demand it from content providers.
(via John, who got this from Slashdot)
May 20th, 2007 at 3:52 pm
hey i love firefox as much as the next guy, the one sipping his latte and browsing design blogs on a macbook in this san francisco coffeeshop but let’s face it, Windows/IE is what the world runs on. so to say that it won’t see development because it is tied to that (for now) is kind of, uh, wishful thinking. hippie.
May 21st, 2007 at 9:20 am
Hi, Aaron. Didn’t see you sitting next to me. My macbook screen was in the way
Let me clarify, though. I’m not dinging the product for releasing first (or even exclusively) on Windows/IE instead of OS X. Rather, I’m dinging it for being a desktop app at all. It’s a networked app with a lightweight user interface. It begs to be a web service, not a shrink-wrapped turd.
Don’t get me wrong; I know that plenty of software makers do fine selling software in huge, fenced-off binaries. But those apps are usually things that people a) really need and b) know that they really need. It seems to me that Live Ink’s biggest barrier to entry is educating the consumer about their product. If the product isn’t easy to try out or ubiquitous, I think they’ll be restricted to the small K-12 education sales that they seem to be going after.