mvaerle

Make sure you watch this guy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84zqbXUQIHc (presentation at google).

They developed a lot of systems using OT, even going so far as doing collaborative autocad. There are papers on that if you search for CoMaya and CoAutoCAD. The complexity, especially of the last one, is mind boggling though.

I was also wondering about the difference between patch theory and this. I wonder if one of the reasons for operational transformation is that it is more feasible in semi-realtime environments, for example because transforming the operations is (computationally) easier than doing a merge on the data itself.

I hope for the same. The Bespin project by Mozilla is also interesting in this space, they've built a text engine based on canvas. They target code editing but at least they're solving a (very important) part of the same problem.

They should've written unit tests obviously ;-)

I'm interested too, I'm in Eindhoven but any big city is ok.

I don't know if this is already done. But the second point really begs for an entrepreneur to solve this. A simple model for payment for web apps, you could support one off sales, subscriptions models etc. Make an API for developers and handle all the credit-card processing stuff.

I call B.S on this article. This is so easy..

In other news:

Nobody is perfect.

There are no silver bullets.

Fix it yourself if it's open source.

Why don't you use something better then.

It's free so you can't complain.

According to google's official blog (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/surfs-up-wednesday-go...):

- They're sending 100.000 invites starting from today

- They'll ask some of the invited users to nominate others to also receive early invites

So they're probably not giving all of them away today, not everyone will get invites to share and if you do they won't be direct invites but nominations.

If you get this far down the list then I'd love an invite! http://mailhide.recaptcha.net/d?k=01V37yrpy3chd_pTAtE2rghA==...

Hi, thanks for your response. I think I just expressed my hopes so I understand it's just a start. I am currently researching annotating / versioning 3d building models however I feel greatly restricted by all the format wars in 3d / CAD land (collada, csg vs brep, autodesk land, ifc (2x3/2x4) and on and on. Does anyone have thoughts on this subject?

I think the title (and article) is a little over the top. The audit trail is a nice feature but the rest is just sharing files?

The real problems are in annotating these drawings collaboratively, merging separate parts and layers of buildings and in general managing the actual flow of information in a design process instead of merely the drawings. Solutions with versioning IFC files, IFD libraries and solving the problems in this area are far more important (and complicated unfortunately). Think like: Which parts of the building were modified in the last version by the architects and how does that influence the building costs? Is the old construction still valid and if not which parts cause conflicts, etc...

EDIT: I forgot to mention that the innovation that woobius does on the user interface side is really great and that they managed to get featured on techcrunch is also great to get more attention to this topic, so all the good to them!