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34 Comments
- oboreruhito, on 10/12/2007, -3/+26I'm happy for your experiences with OS X. But if you RTFA, it's about cross-platform, OS-independent, browser-based applications.
That means having awesome copy/paste/clip doodads that work regardless of your operating system, without needing to download software locally to do it.
Apple, meet orange. You two can get along well if you try. - durandal2005, on 10/12/2007, -3/+8Your comment got negative diggs because you're a jerk. It's just a bit immature to flame all over somebody for sharing their opinion. Grow up.
- FunkyChicken, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Um, I love Kevin like everyone else, but uhhhh, what was the point of this post?
I mean Anil never really comes to a fundamental conclusion and seems to just ramble on about being disappointed with the current state of Copy & Paste.
An example of the inconclusive rambling below:
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"But the battle for office app supremacy on the desktop may have actually been a fight instead of a rout if all the also-rans had added up to something more than the sum of their parts."
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What in the hell???
Copy and Paste continues to function as it ever has and continues to be a heavily used aspect of daily computing. This post may have called for the 'Reinventing of Copy & Paste' in its title but falls way short by failing to present any new ideas, fresh thinking, or even some concrete clues as to why it was written.
I feel cheapened for having spent time reading this.
Sorry Kev, maybe I completely missed the point, but I can't digg it. - digger_twit, on 10/12/2007, -6/+10Algorithms - the faster people digg it the faster it gets to the front page
- isoprophlex, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Digg Digg Digg. What ***** lemmings you all are...
- chime, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6This blog entry is about copy/pasting in web apps - not OSX or Windows.
- rmassie, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Isn't this the same sort of thing that XML was supposed to provide. Data independance? We can do better.
Ideally we need to come up with a few standard XML formats to store data and a few standard viewer widgets that all browsers (or maybe sites?) should have some type of renderer for.
Who comes up with the standards though? The W3C? Too slow. If anything i think the like minds of the blogging / web 2.0 world should try and implement some standard widgets based on a standard xml data type (similar to rss) so we can copy and paste between webapps.
Someone really should be able to paste a leightweight chart in their digg comments.
(I mentioned the term web2.0, it's mod-down time right?) - Urusai, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Browser-based applications...that's great, but don't we really need IM-based applications instead? I mean, browsers are so 1990s. Why not just jam every application into an IM while we're trying to create an O/S-agnostic platform out of whatever dross floats by?
What Java has failed to do, and what .NET/Mono are trying to do, is just this--create a cross-platform application environment. Trying to jam everything into a freaking HTML document viewer is stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Did I say stupid? Because it is. - Improfane, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4Like the article, how about graphical pipes. Right click a text box, say in your web browser and click "Pipe This" then you choose an output of another application for a continuous pipe's input - one that doesn't mean you have to continually recopy and paste?
- chime, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5To elaborate my simple point above (that somehow people think warrants a thumbs-down):
Anil Dash makes a very valid obversation that no matter how nifty and cool these different applications get, there isn't a way to string them together into one single group/document etc. for anything. Like 'improfane' said above, some sort of graphical pipes | could work too. Personally, I think this sort of thing can be done by better feeds and simple CSS.
Suppose I am writing a document in say Writely and want to list the top 10 movies of all times between two paragraphs on page 3, I should just be able to query IMDb, get a permalink to a snapshot of the movie listings as of right now (or some fixed time in past, or live if I choose), and then be able to paste the permalink into my Writely document. Writely should realize this is a permalink and import the relevant data from IMDb.org and merge it with my stylesheets if provided. If I choose to make my document public, then anyone else can link to any page on my document, including the IMDb chart from their Gmail, Wiki, Movable Type blog, or even their own IMDb. profile page.
Right now, people are already doing that by simply using img-src tag on their profiles, where src is a funny picture posted on dilbert.com - we just need to make it easier, more controlled, and more structured. I want to make live charts/graphs available on my personal site that anyone can embed into their web-based documents, emails etc, without using complex object-embed tags or JavaScripts. I guess some form of BBCode that browsers don't choke on and isn't a security issue. If I want to embed my home video in my web-based document (blog/email/IM/PDF), it should be easy to do so without purchasing any software. If Google Video doesn't want the paid videos to be embeded while making its free videos embeddable/copy-pastable, there should be a way to do so. But once imported/embedded, it should be up to the document creator to customize/skin the content. I don't want round-edged rectangles or faded backgrounds. I want high-contrast colors that print well.
A lot of this is possible on desktops because you can just copy paste from one application to another. Ever tried right-click copying an eBay auction invoice into your QuickBooks Online account and having it merge automatically? If I could just somehow copy paste my flight information into my Kiko.com or Memotome.com account that'd be awesome. Whether you want to do it or not is up to you - privacy etc. will of course have to be handled and I'm sure it's not impossible to make it relatively secure. But I agree with author that once these web-apps start talking to each other, or rather, save us the effort of doing the same thing in every app (recreating my address book in 4 different places), things will get a lot more interesting. - rmassie, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2No, XHTML is a presentation format. You nead a pure data format to do this right. Just need to define a set of simple XML schemas for charts or spreadsheets or whatever. Spreading adoption of the formats is the hard part.
As for image data, you can store binary data in XML by using base64 encoding in a CDATA tag. Not pretty, but effective. - deusx, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I think a lot of people around this thread aren't getting it. This isn't just copy & paste with bits of text. Yeah, duh, that works cross platform - even on OS X. And you even get fonts sometimes!
No, this is copy & paste of structured data between disparate web apps. It works on the desktop just fine, thanks to years and years of work. Try copying from Excel and pasting into Word - you get fonts and even table structure. Try copying an address book entry between two different web apps in two different browsers. Can't do it. Or can you? [1]
Imagine copying hAtom [2] entries straight from a blog and re-blogging [3] them to a new blog with a simple paste action.
[1]: http://spaces.msn.com/editorial/rayozzie/demo/liveclip/liveclipsample/clipboardexample.html
[2]: http://microformats.org/wiki/hatom
[3]: http://www.reblog.org/ - isoprophlex, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Why do Windows users think OSX users GIVE A ***** about what operating system they use.
You pretentious douchebag. - MonkeyBoy87, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0this was tried before and it failed. we had OLE from MS and we had openDOC which was supposed to be x-platform. the both sucked and nobody adopted them...
- amygdela, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Boring!
- deusx, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0This isn't an issue of data independance - we've got perfectly fine formats for this stuff. No, this is about both settling on a shared neutral format, and the user interface to transport capsules of data from one app to another once we *have* settled on a shared data format.
- myobie, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1The current XML formats that are suited for this are XHTML and SVG, so we have the groundwork layed. For bitmap images, I don't really know.
- chinolofus, on 10/12/2007, -6/+5i would have dugg it...but since you only did because kevin submitted it and not because you enjoyed the article, i wont...i figure things are evened out now.
gotta love those fanboys. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -13/+11I don't know about "numsum" or whatever, but in general, there are very few things you can't directly copy and paste AND retain their entire formatting on OS X. In fact, when I sit down in front of my Windows box, I often try to drag and drop or copy and paste things that I'm used to being able to do on OS X only to find myself frustrated because I can't drag it over into the other application at all or it gets totally munged in the process.
Also, OS X has plenty of awesome copy/paste/clip doodads you can install from various third-parties that enhance the ability and experience greatly. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -11/+8Kevin submitted the digg.
- Orangutan, on 10/12/2007, -9/+5i find that copy and paste works well for almost everything i use on a regular basis. but, it would be awesome for it to work on everything. I liked it, but howd it get front page with only 28 diggs?
- isoprophlex, on 10/12/2007, -10/+5woo, kevin post... quick digg it.
(sarcasm) - petard, on 10/12/2007, -9/+3But do you really think that posting comments like that on a site like this will get people to move over? It really just annoys people. I also love it how my comment got negative diggs so fast!
- psxman, on 10/12/2007, -8/+1Yeah, it kinda does matter, seeing as operating systems with less people using them are less likely to get ports of programs.
- luckyschop, on 10/12/2007, -8/+1holy pink
- neggbird, on 10/12/2007, -9/+2They are due for a revamp.
- hankyone, on 10/12/2007, -13/+6cuz kevin dugg it
//edit
beaten - SODA8297, on 10/12/2007, -8/+1i just dugg it, cos i can HEHEHE jk dont get mad guys come onnnnn
JUST KIDDINGGGGG - isoprophlex, on 10/12/2007, -10/+1well, osx can do everything... haha
- isoprophlex, on 10/12/2007, -11/+2-deleted-
- petard, on 10/12/2007, -15/+4Wow right to OS X can do this OS X can do that junk. Why does it matter if OS X can do it? People will not look at your comment and say "I should switch to OS X"! WHY do people care what other people use? Just use what you like, you dont need to advertise it all over the internet! You gain nothing from it, just waste your time.
- KevinJ, on 10/12/2007, -16/+1
This is a great article A+ to Anil.
Why can't all the blogs be this informative and proffesional
LIKE MINE!
http://www.xanga.com/kevijaco - digger_twit, on 10/12/2007, -21/+4Good read.
- beelz, on 10/12/2007, -22/+1digg for kevin.. story is ok i guess.. digg.. i guess..
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