Could it be? Could OpenDoc be making a revival, however modest? I was intrigued to see a press release from Nisus Software, The Omni Group, and Blacksmith announcing LinkBack, a new open source technology that brings embedded graphics to Mac OS X. Conceptually, there's nothing new about LinkBack, since Microsoft has long had OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) and in the classic Mac OS there was EGO (Edit Graphic Object). But neither of those technologies is widespread in Mac OS X, which means that when you copy a graphic from one application and paste it into another, you get a static picture. If you want to make a change to the original graphic, you must manually open it in the original application, make your changes, and copy and paste once again. (And yes, I know there are applications that eliminate this requirement, but usually within a limited sphere.) With LinkBack, which will appear in future versions of Nisus Writer Express, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, and Chartsmith, you'll instead just double-click the graphic to edit it in the original application, after which your changes will automatically be reflected in the destination document.

http://www.linkbackproject.org/

So what does this have to do with OpenDoc? For those who haven't been following Apple for all of the last decade, OpenDoc was a technology that Apple introduced at the Worldwide Developer Conference in 1994 and which became real in late 1995 and early 1996. Apple never did a good job of explaining OpenDoc, but in essence it enabled a document-centric interface in which small modules - potentially from different companies - combined to provide the power of a monolithic application. The theory was great: you could put together exactly the word processor you wanted by adding together the best Find module, and the best Table module, and so on, and they would all fit seamlessly into the same interface. Despite the popularity of Apple's OpenDoc-based Cyberdog program (an integrated Internet client) and support from companies like Nisus Software, the reality never quite matched up to the theory, and Apple put OpenDoc and Cyberdog into "maintenance mode" in 1997. Interestingly, the OpenDoc community tried to negotiate a "stewardship agreement" for the OpenDoc Development Framework in exchange for Apple continuing to ship OpenDoc, but the deal fell through when the vice president who had agreed to this left Apple.

http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=02260 http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=02239 http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=01487 http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=01245 http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=04711

Do I really think that LinkBack is the first step on the way back to OpenDoc? No, not really. Or even if it is, the road is so long and involved that it won't be happening any time soon. But you never know, and with LinkBack being entirely open source, it's conceivable that someone would extend it significantly, perhaps melding it in some way with Konfabulator widgets or, when Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger ships, the technology that enables Dashboard widgets. Even on its own, LinkBack is a good thing, and I'd strongly encourage developers to check out the open source code and add support to their applications.

http://www.konfabulator.com/ http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/dashboard.html