 13 Jun 2005 @ 22:58, by Flemming Funch
This is a snapshot that Michael Heileman took from his iChat program during the Reboot conference.
If you didn't know, Apple has this protocol called Bonjour, which used to be called Rendezvous. That was a better name, but somebody else sued them for the rights to it. Anyway, what it does is, quite automatically, to notice who's close by on the same local network. So, this is not this person's buddy list across the net. Here it is the people who're present in the same room. Which he might or might not know.
You open up your laptop computer and, bing, right away you see this. And you could of course send these people messages and chat with them, if you had the need. The point is that it is super-easy and automatic. You don't have to go and ask anybody for their username or anything.
This has so far been a Mac-only trick. But Bonjour has just become open source and will become available for any other platform too. There's no particular reason for it to be Mac only. David Weinberger was sitting typing away on his IBM Thinkpad, so he didn't show. It was about 1/2 each of Mac and Windows in that particular location. Windows has never been cool, and amongst famous techie bloggers, a Mac Powerbook is by far the platform of choice. Anyway, that's not the point. Would be better if this worked, no matter what you were running.
Bonjour/Rendezvous is also what enabled instant collaboration through a program called SubEthaEdit. It works over Bonjour. So, you open it up, and instantly you can see who's working on documents in your local area. And if they let you, you can join in in editing the documents. Which looks absolutely magical for collaborative note taking. Each person gets a different color, and all changes are being shown in real time. And it actually works. You can add to other people's notes, take turns, make corrections, etc. Some people are good at taking quotes down verbatim, others are really good at organizing the whole document. And it is basically done when the speech is done, and can be uploaded to a website, for even more people to look at.
I stayed at a Hotel in Vienna for BlogTalk last year. Nobody had said anything about the connection in the hotel, but there was a plug, and as a good techie I scanned the ethernet traffic and guessed at what settings to use and got online in no time. And lo-and-behold, a few other people showed up on rendezvous who had done the same, and I could instantly ask them when the program started, which I somehow had missed too. Plus help somebody who hadn't guessed what IP number to use for the router.
Anyway, nothing new for the folks who're using this all the time, but a little technical magic to share with the people who don't.
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