Big Fractal Tangle: tidepool preview is now available

After yet another 4am grudge match with both Tidepool and Storymill.net, we're (mostly) ready for the world to see what we've done so far. You can download the Tidepool preview by visiting:

http://storymill.net

Details on Tidepool and Storymill can also be found at the site. There's also a Flash demo if you don't have time to install the actual program. We had hoped to get Tidepool uploading its w3photo goodness to Storymill, but we're still inches away, so it will have to wait until the next release. You can still output the RDF locally and upload to w3photo. Storymill currently has just a fraction of its future functionality. The parts you can see now are just the bare minimum needed to support the w3photo stuff, which we decided to add at the last minute.

Anyway, I'm very very tired. The last week has been like three weeks rolled into one. As today is my wedding anniversary, I'm starting a much-needed week long vacation. I'll be unavailable until June 1st.

Send questions, comments, encouragement to us here. I'll see you in June!

I couldn't get through on the automated comment form or through email to immuexa.com, so I'm afraid I'll have to leave a comment here!

Nice work - it's an interesting interface. Things I noticed (iBook 800 G3, OS X 10.3.3, Java 1.4.x):

- there was no menu bar; I didn't know if there was supposed to be one.
- tooltips didn't hover over the button, but the middle of the window.
- my first thought, ignoring how the underlying system works, was to simply rename people rather than figure out how to delete them and re-add (which I did, though a button would be easier than having to right-click with only one button...). Of course, I now have RDF entries for, say, myself, that point to the 'preloaded' people:

<j.0:person rdf:about="http://www.storymill.net/waverly/person/8c9f6">
<foaf:name>Richard</foaf:name>
</j.0:person>

I don't know what alternative there would be, other than making the interface explicitly say that you're renaming a person, not doing file manipulation (i.e. there's a hidden identifier that stays the same).

Still, great work!

posted by Rich at May 26, 2004 07:00 PM

Rich,

Thanks for your comments. I just now took a break from my vacation to see what people were saying, only to find that our contact email address is not working for some sendmail reason, though I tried it just minutes before release :)

To respond:

1. we deliberately left out the menu bar, as we feel most non-technical users are daunted by them. There are also no drop-down lists or complex context menus. Our goal is a transparent UI that maps as directly to the real world as possible.

2. the tooltips thing we'll look into. It's not a known issue.

3. Deletion and renaming of tags is a tricky issue, given that we're aiming at worldwide perpetual persistence. If a tag is in use by 30 users and 20 storymills, and I rename it, what then? And what if many other systems (movable type, etc) are using the same information? We're aiming at a "never forget" approach. When you rename, you're really creating a new tag and hiding the old one. When you delete, you're really removing. We're still exploring the implications of this.

posted by Timothy Falconer at May 28, 2004 03:16 AM