Whatever happened to "Open Doc"?
Little more than decade ago I was signed up as an apple developer. I got these cds in the mail with "Open Doc". I installed it on my 604e and I thought it was extremely cool. The concept was to have a document and apply applications to portions of it i.e. 3D design, word processing and photo shop and never have to close the document, import it to other apps or import graphics or such. Pretty much the opposite of how we work with documents right now.
Has anybody else played around with this?
Is there still traces of the idea in some apple vault?
Has anybody else played around with this?
Is there still traces of the idea in some apple vault?
Comments
This is one of the projects Steve canned when he took over. It was an extremely cool idea, but with a long way still to go before it would become practical. My pet conspiracy theory is that Apple agreed to discontinue OpenDoc as part of the deal they made with Microsoft in 1997. If I was Microsoft, I'd have seen it as an existential threat. Of course I have no evidence for this, other than the timing.
There was no conspiracy with Microsoft to kill OpenDoc. Neither was there anything impractical about the technology. It did, however, require a change in the user paradigm for working with computers. OpenDoc was composed of documents and editors. Each document could be composed of many different types of objects. Double-clicking on an object launched a compatible editor. The most famous OpenDoc editor was CyberDog, a webrowser that enabled the creation of documents with live web-based content.
To be sure, OpenDoc faced challenges. Changing user paradigms was challenge. Microsoft's competing OLE was a challenge. Not all challenges came from enemies and inertia. The technology ported to OS/2 where development languished. What killed OpenDoc, however, was Apple's switch to an OpenSTEP-based OS.
In fact, I think it needs to be done. Maybe not exactly like it was envisioned in the past, but something similar. We need to move from an app-centric paradigm to a doc-centric paradigm. Think about it. Core Audio, Core Image, Core Video, Core everything. Apple is also writing apps for most of the main functions. How hard would it be to then incorporate all this code into the Open Doc paradigm?
With all the memory and CPU cores today, I say put them to work loading editors in the background for the datatype one is looking at. Split the custom FInder for the datatype and the editor for that datatype into two parts. The finders for each datatype are always active just like the current Finder. So when you want to see pictures, click iPhoto and you have it immediately open. No waiting around. In the background the editor is loaded immediately. When you want to edit, there is no waiting around. It looked ahead to what you might want to do and got ready.
In addition, make all files part of a database using metadata and keywords. So Spotlight gets keywords and fast response. These software improvements would make the hardware seem a hundred times faster. I wish I had time to mock all this up because I think most people would then get what I am saying. Apple continues to inch their way there but most people do not see the big target at the end that they are shooting for. That target is Open Doc.
At least it should be. I have no insider knowledge of what Apple is really doing but I see how all the pieces are fitting together. OS 11 could be quite a leap forward in how we use computers. Wish I had more time to explain all this in detail.
As has been mentioned, Microsoft's OLE technology (which seems trivial today) was probably a better mouse trap. Why? Well, for starters it was built around existing robust applications. It's one thing to embed a 'spreadsheet', it's quite another and better idea to embed an 'Excel spreadsheet'.
In today's world where complex content is largely delivered via the internet, these types of documents are constructed with a whole host of tools that didn't exist 10 to 15 years ago. And documents is probably the wrong term now anyway. It's more like just 'displayed information' or something like that.
Apple and Microsoft were doing a lot of horse trading at that time. I can easily hear Bill Gates saying to Steve, "and we want you to cancel OpenDoc."
I am very surprised about the many responses to my topic! I thought I was the only one remembering the menus changing when you clicked on a part of your doc.
It would save me a lot of time. Instead of all thes app icons you only need to see your documents. Using a full featured sound editor together with iMovie, electric image, photoshop and dreamweaver features available at once could be fun.
Apple's next OS needs to be document centered rather than application centered. Yes, edit movies, audio, images, text right in a website authoring program. No more bouncing assets between programs. The OS also needs to keep a database of all assets and their instances. That way you don't delete a photo that is being referenced in another document.
The idea sounded cool but it felt slow and buggy.
And it was very complex to code for. In a way, every opendoc "document" was it ´s own file system, and coding the mechanisms for saving such a document was incredibly hard.
On top of it you had ole 2, which was Microsoft´s version of OpenDoc. I bought one book for to learn ole 2 , and was big and ugly and so much code had to be written just to do file operations.
I am glad they took it way. It was a very expensive project, and when IBM and Novell left it, it could easily have consumed all of Apple´s resources.
I miss Wave though, the prettiest word-processor I´ve ever known.
Zon