Aibase (was Absent Hoisting or a Deeper Problem)

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 4709

Posted by sub
2005-12-12 14:33:38

I once read a Peanuts (Snoopy) comic strip where Lucy commenting on Beethoven’s music played by the kid with the toy piano said “It’s a lot better than it sounds”.

Well, the good news is that Aibase is a much more powerful program than one would guess by using it, IMHO.

First, there’s apparently no practical limit to the number of levels you can have in an Aibase database. It automatically creates a new file for every new document you start within its database; the naming convention it uses provides for two billion unique combinations.

Second, Aibase is completely object oriented; whether you want to type text, fill tables, write equations, draw shapes, import pictures or copy/paste external file paths, it will deal with them just as easily and use them as part of the structures you create.

Third, it is fast! I tried it in my really old notebook and it was as fast as Brainstorm; for a graphical program, that’s impressive.

Fourth, it can produce some aesthetically pleasing and very clear HTML or graphical output; an XML variation (SVG) is also provided and curently undergoing further development.

Aibase has many man-years of development and testing behind it, something one wouldn’t guess as it’s officially a program in version 1.0x launched half a year ago. But as Torsten Walter, the guy behind it, explained to me, Aibase is a spin-off from a program he created for a company’s internal use.

Now for the bad news: the learning curve is very steep. There’s nothing conventional or “intuitive” about Aibase, at least for most PC users in this planet. There’s really only one menu, accessed by a sphere in the toolbar; you navigate into a link with F2 and go back with R (the corresponding toolbar icons are arrows pointing down and up, rather than forwards and backwards); documents don’t have a filename you can refer to, rather a label and a title; you change text style (Bold, Underline, Italics etc) by going to a separate sub toolbar; just about the only thing that’s familiar is Ctrl-Z for undo (multilevel, thankfully).

The program is apparently targetted to scientists and engineers who will appreciate the versatility of Aibase’s tools and documents and may even be attracted to its idiosynchratic jargon and concepts.

That’s the lot; I was ill and immobilised in bed for a week-end; I spent most of the first day with my notebook, just going through the Aibase help-file, getting acquainted with the concepts and tools; I spent most of the second day creating a few simple documents. If I wasn’t confined that way I don’t think I would have managed to comprehend it.

alx

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