_here_ is where people (including the developers)
are talking about sophie. good to know…

-bowerbird

I’m not suggesting that programming something like this is easy. I look forward very much to seeing the next version – and I look forward even more to hearing you guys talk about what novel uses Sophie can actually be put to.

However you look at it, the simple facts are that Sophie does (within the limitis of bugs and available developer time) provide an editing tool for structured text, with searching, spellchecking, undo/redo, markup, annotation (for both author and reader, independently sharable by groups working on the same book) *as well as* assembly tools for other content formats.

re: the GUI
I think it’s nice. I don’t understand why you’re avoiding menus though.

re: documentation
maybe you could open up your Drupal site so people can create content
or you can set up a wiki

re: confusion, what is it exactly etc.
I think with something as revolutionary as Sophie (yes, I believe it is…) it’s important to get the terminology right and then to educate the public in an easy to understand way. I found some documentation on your developer site that explains the architecture… I think the same content can be rewritten so that an “average Joe” can understand it and will provide a great description

However, I think you’ve proven my point yourselves somewhat: Tim Rowledge, one of the lead developers, says that Sophie is a content creation tool; Bob Stein, Director of the Institute for Future of the Book and founder of The Voyager Company, says it’s not. That alone should make you worry.

It’s great that some example books have now been made available, as I think this is key to explaining Sophie – but I’m afraid I found them pretty disappointing too. As I expected, they look exactly like old encyclopaedia CD-ROMS, like the World Book or Encarta. And while it’s great to make a tool for creating anything available for free, I do not get what’s so unique about Sophie’s approach – I’m only getting the bad stuff, like the fact that the Reader mode isn’t a true reader mode, but tries to edit stuff when I click on it, and there’s no obvious, intuitive internal navigation – I’m still using the back/forward buttons in the Sophie app.

With respect to design – please just look at things like writeboard, Keynote, scribd – even Thinkfree – to see how easy creation and collaboration should be. This is what you’re competing against.

I know this is your baby guys, and I want to support it (did you see my excited post earlier last week?), but you have to give your users – particularly the early adopters who will or will not create some buzz for you – a bit more to go on than this. They certainly don’t want to hear about your problems with O(N^2) algorithms, for example.

Without instructions it’s unclear how to sign onto the Sophie Server and access the books, so they are available for normal downloading now.

thank you for taking the time to review Sophie. here are some answers to a few of your questions:

• sophie is NOT a content creation tool per se, but rather an assembly tool. we haven’t set out to replace graphics, audio or video editors. we’ve put a couple of demo projects up today with more to come in the next days and weeks. if you want to get a full sense of what Sophie can do, try to download the Mozart Dissonant Quartet demo. and please remember that it isn’t the form that’s unusual here, but rather that this was made by a non-programmer in a long day (including lots of bug reports).
• sophie makes standalone documents (the file format is based on XML). for now you need to “read” Sophie documents in the workspace. come the fall there will be a Reader which will allow documents to be free-standing.
• although the Sophie server is working, right now you have to upload to it via a browser. soon you will be able to upload to the server from within Sophie.
• i agree with all of your constructive criticisms. we will be working hard over the next several weeks to provide some documentation. the programming team will be working hard over the next several months to make the program better.

I am Steve Riggins, one of the Sophie Engineers. We take all feedback seriously and appreciate it. The File menu is a mess because we try to avoid menus, and its been sort of a dumping ground for things we have not found a better home for yet.

We have not shipped a Reader yet, which is where published books would be read in, so that explains some of the confusion. Sophie will output stand alone documents, which you can distribute in any fashion similar to PDF, or via the Sophie Server, which is young also. The idea being a repository to not only distribute books, but to then share conversations about them.

There is a fine line when building tools for the average person that can also do sophisticated things, such as time based media. We’re open to all feedback in this regard.

Some of confusion can stem from the fact that a Sophie document can either contain manually made pages, or pages created from a flow of text, and terminology can always be worked on.

As far as documentation, help and examples, yes we need much work in that department. Anything you generate we’ll be happy to link to!

Steve

“Can you imagine the code?”
Well, yes, since I worte a chunk of it. Its not Flash. It’s written in the Squeak dialect of Smalltalk. It is written in such a way that we hope people will be able to use our interfaces to add new capabilities later.

“Smarten it up and Speed it up – it looks terrible and handles worse.”
Do feel free to offer constructive suggestions about smartening it up. Quality input is always welcome. As for speeding it up, well we’re concentrating on making it correct first and speed will come later. We know about a number of problems with O(N^2) algorithms for example.

“Really open source it” – It’s as open as we can make it. The source code is all there. There is an open mailing list. It’s free as in both beer and speech. What other things can we do to make it open in your view?

I really don’t want to be down on this program, but I’d really like to see some actual use cases.

http://sophieproject.org/about