[General] Some Existing & Yet Distant Software Inspiration, Fodder

[Philip Weaver]

These are just a few software apps I've been using recently with
some concepts I like and would like to share. Some of this is potentially
very distant and beyond the current scope of Lively. But these are some
things what I would like to personally work toward in Lively.

1. DrawIt (http://www.bohemiancoding.com/?DrawIt#Compose)

DrawIt is an exquisite, novel drawing application which I recently
purchased. The app can occasionally be cumbersome but its more usable once
you get used to it. The shape/layer navigator is pretty cool but even better
is how every sort of element attribute is accumulated by drag and drop on
the right - instead of having too many palettes and inspectors.

2. Bento (http://www.filemaker.com/products/bento/)

Bento is a personal database and organizer. I wish the Mac Finder worked
more like Bento. My favorite feature of Bento is the ratings field. I wish
that I could attach a rating to any object of my filesystem as an attribute
or to any element in a Lively world. Beats filing. Ratings and tagging.

3. iWork Numbers (http://www.apple.com/iwork/numbers/)

My favorite Numbers feature is that spreadsheet tables can be spread out all
over a sheet. Before Numbers was released I had imagined spreadsheets as
opening a new window from a folder like in the Mac Finder. Tying this in to
the concept of subworld is pretty interesting to me - where each subworld
could return a calculated value.

4. Web Pages

I don't want to ignore vertical scrolling like web documents are able to
scroll. One of my initial goals with Lively is to also enable a document
feel using vertical scrolling. I realize that in the future Lively could
support a zoomable UI but I want to do this anyway. I want to explore a
traditional web document feel in Lively and scroll wheel support be nice to
have as well.

Philip
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