My New Years Wish - Bonjour Support

[James Moore]

On Jan 1, 2006, at 10:40 AM, Kirk Biglione wrote:

> I've emailed OmniGroup support about this in the past, but I thought
> I'd post here to see if there's any interest in Bonjour support for
> OO.
>
> Specifically I'd like to do the following:
>
> 1.  Open an outline on my desktop system then easily connect and edit
> that outline from my laptop.
>

If you want real-time updates then I'm afraid it will be awhile  
before OmniOutliner can do this. If you simply wanted your changes in  
one place to appear a short time later in another place then document  
synchronization might provide enough functionality satisfy you. We  
would of course have to add document synchronization to OmniOutliner  
first. Apple has made this task at least possible by opening up  
SyncServices. I'll add your email to the feature request we have open  
for this.

> 2.  Collaborate on outlines with other users on my network (similar to
> SubethaEdit).
>

Apps like SubEthaEdit have very cleverly created multi-user text  
editing, and made it look a little too easy. The main thing to keep  
in mind is that SEE only operates on plain text. Because Outliner  
files not only have structure but text styles, the problem for us is  
many orders of magnitude more difficult.

If Outliner does ever get multi-user functionality it will most  
likely come in the form of a client/server.


> 3.  Sync outline changes via Bonjour.  In other words, if I made
> changes to an outline on my laptop while I was out of the office I'd
> like to be able to sync those changes to the outline on my desktop via
> Bonjour.  I suppose this could also be acheived with .Mac sync
> support, but I'd prefer not to be dependant on the .Mac service.

What you're describing here is document synchronization.

Bonjour is simply a service discovery system. It provides a way for  
an application to advertise a network service and for clients to get  
a list of available services on the network. Unfortunately Apple's  
marketing of Bonjour (formerly Rendezvous) has caused many to believe  
that *it* is what's responsible for SebEthaEdit having document  
collaboration. Really Bonjour simply solves the problem of how you  
find servers on your network without knowing anything about the  
network configuration.


--
-James

Technical Support Engineer
The Omni Group