Re: Trapeze

< Next Message | Back to archived message list | Previous Message >

Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 1607

Posted by n.lowe
2003-04-17 10:32:25

This is fascinating! I’ve never heard of Trapeze, but it sounds a bit like the wonderful if short-lived Spreadsheet2000 (formerly the ghastly-named Let’s Keep It Simple Spreadsheet), which Casady & Grene marketed in the late 90s. It had a graphical-oop interface where you built functions out of grids and connectors - very like Cycling74’s music app Max, if you’ve ever come across that. It was absolutely brilliant and completely ruined you for normal spreadsheets ever after. It made spreadsheets creative, beautiful, and (not least) intelligible; you could see the structure of your calculations at a glance, thanks to the flowchart graphical model, and with a bit of design intelligence you could build in visual checks so you could see it was working properly at different stages of complex calculations. But as you say with Trapeze, spreadsheet users are extremely conservative, and it was just too radical to catch on - you had to think in a completely different (better, but different) way about how complex calculations are represented graphically.

Nick.

Back to archived message list