SocialCalc and Javascript

Dan Bricklin gives an update on WikiCalc / SocialCalc (the browser-based spreadsheet he wrote). It seems to be having a new lease of life as a web-app embedded in native Android / iOS apps.

Nice!

Also some interesting news about javascript.

Horizontal Applications And Popular Data Structures

Joel Spolsky : "The great horizontal killer applications are actually just fancy data structures."

See post on Composing about Kill Math, dynamical systems visualisation.

Compare spreadsheets.

Resolver Systems have a new "cloud-based" pythonic spreadsheet called "Project Dirigible"

SocialCalc comes out of beta.

EditGrid is going free.

Spreadsheets are 30!

Worth reading "Where's your data?"

Remember, your Mind Traffic Control data is easily exportable. Just go to : http://mindtrafficcontrol.appspot.com/exports (Via the "Export Data" menu item) and choose whether you want your data exported in CSV format (which you can import into Excel or EditGrid etc.) or OPML (which can be read in the OPML Editor or (less conveniently) in any XML editor).

A couple of great videos via Zbigniew

Avi Bryant's powerful spreadsheet editor that remembers changes that you make by hand and can apply them in bulk to the rest of the lines in your spreadsheet. Note that Avi's a Smalltalk guy, and a more primitive version of this (repeat last replace) has been in the Smalltalk environment for decades. Cool to see that Smalltalk ideas are still proving revolutionary 30 years later :-) (And cool of Avi to keep discovering them and taking them further)

Another way of doing something similar : Mass Edit which puts simultaneous editing cursors under the user's command. Very clever. That's from a video by David Huynh who seems to be involved in a lot of other neat research, like this mashup tool.

A Platform Wars post on spreadsheets.

Jocelyn Paine is one of the more interesting thinkers about evolving spreadsheets. Here's some recent stuff about components in Google Sheet.

More playing with online spreadsheets.

Here's a cute example. This is an EditGrid spreadsheet that pulls book data from Amazon (including price in dollars), currency data from Yahoo, and then calculates the price in pounds of the books. It's a "calculator" meaning that I've set up only one field to be editable (the search term for the book, in the white cell) and you can change this in your local copy, without it changing my original.

Looks like spreadsheets really are evolving to be the online user-programmable dashboards which people can use to create and publish their own mashups and other software. Very exciting.

Wow! Manuel Simoni is on fire! with BuckyBase development :

- Import into Google Spreadsheet

- Google Gadgets Visualization

- RDF triples (ah well ... if it makes him happy)

- and is this a TreeGrid???

This is seriously exciting.

What is Flying Logic?

Google's whole Gadget thing is becoming increasingly impressive. Look at the dynamic widgets which can hook up to and pull data out of online spreadsheets. You can also embed Gadgets in online spreadsheets etc.

Making your Gadget collaborative is pretty straightforward too.

A while ago on Platform Wars I wrote :

99% of the world's "semi-structured" data is not in Microformats but in tables in spreadsheets.

Wildly inaccurate estimate I'm sure. But I'll bet it dwarfs XML formats including RSS. So where's the Yahoo Pipes for CSV and spreadsheet data? The mashing, pivot-tabling, cartesian joining of live grids?

Yahoo Pipes does have a CSV reader ... but I'd like to see more. Particularly pivoting and SQL-like selects, projects and joins.

Dan Bricklin :

Socialtext is announcing today that they are adding integrated spreadsheet capability to their enterprise-level wiki, making use of the new SocialCalc code I've been developing with them. This isn't just a repository of separate spreadsheets, nor a separate standalone system like wikiCalc, but rather a full wiki where a page can be either the traditional paragraphs of text or a spreadsheet grid.

Cool ... now, if they could just *also* add network diagramming as another page-type that would really be getting somewhere. (Not, of course, that the grid pages in SdiDesk really achieved "spreadsheet" status ... but that was always a long term hope.)

Ah ... well ...

Actually, there may be some SdiDesk news soon ... you never know.

Update : Bricklin has longer background piece.

A very natural conjoining ... spreadsheets become wikis.

Resolver Systems seem to be a cool, python + spreadsheet company based in London - with the right attitude. Nice demo.

Hmmm ... and they're hiring ... (drifts off into daydreaming)

Listen everyone, I gotta come out to you all ...

I am now officially an outliner.

For a long time I thought that outlines, like all hierarchical documents, were limited and inferior to graph-shaped wikis.

Now I get it.

The point of the outliner is not the hierarachical structure as a navigation aid - free-form hypertext is still superior.

No, the point of the outliner is the collapse which lets you manage and manipulate bundles of items at the same time. That's something I never managed to get right in SdiDesk. Although I perceived the need for a "PageSet" to create a bundle that could be used for, say, exporting etc. I a) never got that working technically, which was partly because b) I never really made sense of it "conceptually" to myself.

What's great about the outliner is its "scale-free" / "fractal" / "recursive" / "self-similar" nature - which means the same operations (collapse, copy, move, publish) can work on anything from a short list, to a chapter to a volume composed of multiple chapters. I've really started to realize this over the last few months as I've used the OPML editor for more things that I'd have once used SdiDesk for.

Now, don't get me wrong. I still love wiki. It's still my favouritest type of software in the world, ever. And I still use SdiDesk every day. But now, I'm starting to appreciate that there's a need to manage a hierarchy of scales, and until I find out how to combine that with wiki-nature (and into SdiDesk), I'll probably be outlining most days too.

(In my day-job I also spend a whole lot of time with spreadsheets, but that's another story. SdiDesk was always meant to handle grid-shaped data, it just wasn't developed enough to be really usable.)