Tech warning: this page might not make much sense unless you already know what Manila does and at least heard about Pike.
First – I think Dave is doing something very beautiful here, by letting the public come to the party! He – and many other people – have had dreams about the perfect editor for years. This has failed – ultimately because everyone has stuck to his own vision. I hope Pike can really become “The web’s first outliner”.
OK – so I create a story and post this sentence, just to get started.
Then I click the Pike button and switch to Pike – the story is there! But… I can’t enter any text. The mouse works, but it’s impossible to click into “edit mode”. Many seconds later, it suddenly works.
Meanwhile, in the Pike Beta discussion group, Frank McPherson has posted some very astute observations about what it feels like to use Pike. Since this is a beta, it’s obviously no big deal that the renderer still needs some work.
But how usable an outliner eventually can become for a “naive” user is a question that’s been around for many years now.
Someone (I will find the link!) recently wrote very eloquently about the magic of outlining – and finished by saying that he had been writing his outlines in Word for years. Well, so do I. Even though I own Frontier I don’t use it as a general writing tool.
Also, I find myself wondering about the rules in Pike. Why not use standard CSS or XSL – and why not use templates, a la Manila?
Frank (and obviously many others) didn’t understand why web pages open Pike, instead of the other way around: “Why not start a new story from Pike?”. Dave had two good reasons on the webcast: configuring Pike to listen to servers is error-prone and unfriendly for the user, and polling can become very hard on the server. These are good but not obvious reasons.
Pike is amazing – but Dave is raising the bar here. I think Pike has to become a little easier than Frontier’s outliner, or the users who never edit an HTML template or a site structure in XML just won’t get it.
I will share a little story: I recently tried to build a Word-compatible, XML-based, multi-user editor that transparently streamed documents to the server. We did – and it worked, all the hard parts eventually became easy! We had a nice lightweight network protocol, we could handle multiple users, stream objects over the wire, persist documents to a database, even render XML as RTF (using a customized XSL-processor)… I could go on. But the users didn’t like it. Why? Because the text area where the end users spend their time didn’t work according to expectations. And it proved non-trivial to fix this quickly.
Anyway, that was in-house (where access to users is always a problem) – this is the web! I hope Pike will continue as it has started, as a great learning experience for everyone.