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July 7, 2003

Hydra Spawns Many Heads

There's an increasing buzz about Hydra, a collaborative writing tool for Mac OS X that allows people to share a document and then edit it simultaneously over the Internet or local networks. Hydra's uniqueness is in the live editing: you can see other people's insertion points and selections, and use a following function to track someone's editing as they type.

In a daisy chain this morning, I discovered Steve Gillmor linking to Clay Shirky who links to Bill Bumgarner's description of using Hydra at Apple's Worldwide Developer's Conference (WWDC) a few weeks ago.

The organizers of the show had set up Hydra templates to allow participants to make notes on the talk and to queue up questions! Good gravy.

My co-author Adam Engst on The Wireless Networking Starter Kit and I just spent a couple of hours using iChat AV (audio only) and Hydra to rework the outline for the book.

We easily saved 50 percent of the time by both being able to take notes and point out items to each other simultaneously in a long text stream. Reading aloud and working separately on documents just isn't as efficient.

Posted by Glennf at July 7, 2003 1:25 PM

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Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Hydra Spawns Many Heads:

� Collaborative working from Jonathan Sanderson's Weblog
Drat. Reading reports like this, I really want to try scriptwriting in Hydra, but of course the office network is [Read More]

Tracked on July 13, 2003 4:31 AM

� WiFi and Hydra at Westminster from take one onion
Last night at the VoxPolitics event I used Hydra to take notes with Tom and Euan amongst others, Tom has posted the notes we wrote along with a brief reaction to the event. Unlike Euan I wasn't sharp enough to actually blog [Read More]

Tracked on July 15, 2003 7:19 AM

� Hydra Spawns Many Heads from Jeff's Radio Weblog
Glenn Fleishman: There's an increasing buzz about Hydra, a collaborative writing tool for Mac OS X that allows people to share a document and then edit it simul... [Read More]

Tracked on July 24, 2003 12:40 PM

Comments

Posted by: Joe McMahon at July 11, 2003 10:11 AM