At the recent No Fluff symposium in St Louis, I was privileged to see a pre-release demo of Near-Time's Flow application. Stu Halloway’s been talking about his latest venture for a while now, but to be honest it always sounded too good to be true. Now that I’ve seen it in the flesh, I realize that he wasn’t just being the proud parent—Flow really is something special.
Imagine something like a wiki: an information system that simply accepts text and stores it away in a simple hierarchy. Now imagine it accepting that text from just about any source and (here’s where it gets fun) imagine it remembering that source. Say you’re doing web research on "rubber ducks." As you browse the web, you highlight paragraphs from interesting pages and drop them into Flow. Gradually you build your research into a local Flow document. You can annotate that document, adding your own notes. And, if you need more details, you can click on any of the original text and Flow will pop you over to the original web page. The linking works with files, images, whatever (we worked hard on Stu to get him to support e-mail too, but there are some issues with Mail.app to contend with).
Flow also contains smart pages: pages whose content is generated dynamically from other pages. Think of it as being something like an RSS aggregator for all the work you do. And if the aggregation doesn’t help, Flow has a speedy built-in full-text search engine.
Then (it keeps getting better), Flow maintains the full history of each page. Down the bottom, there’s a slider. Move it across, and Flow rolls back time, showing you the page as it appeared in the past. Slide the other way, and you move back to the present.
And then (better, again), Flow supports collaboration. But this isn’t your your father’s standard centralized-database-style collaboration. Instead, Flow is like a push-version of P2P: you tell it to share subtrees of your information with other Flow users, and it works out how to get it done. Say I was sitting in the airport using a wireless network and I tell Flow to share a 10Mb folder with Andy. Half way through, the flight is called and I close down my laptop, with only 8Mb transferred. When I get to my clients, it turns out that their firewall blocks Flow, but allows e-mail. No problem. Flow works it out and sends the remaining data in a bunch of separate e-mails. At the other end all this data gets reassembled into my original folder.
From an individual perspective, Flow looks like it could be a life saver: I’m constantly dropping bookmarks into folders, and then forgetting them. I’m constantly struggling to maintain to-do lists from a variety of sources. And I’m always trying to keep track of ideas for talks. Flow seems ideal for all these things: it becomes the drop target proxy for my atrocious memory.
Then, if I could convince Andy to switch to a Mac, I can see the collaboration stuff really suiting the loose way we work.
Flow is a great example of taking a couple of metaphors, then writing a whole bunch of intelligent code to make them look simple and intuitive. That’s not easy: my hat’s off to the Near-Time folk.
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