Flex and OpenDoc

This post is about in-place editing with user-selected editors.

In the early 90s I had the privilege of working with some wonderful developers on a project at Apple called OpenDoc. The Wikipedia description is decent. We made many mistakes and the project was ultimately canceled when Steve Jobs returned to Apple, but I still long for the user experience and component market we were trying to create, and I wonder if it will happen on the Web, and what that will look like.

In a nutshell, OpenDoc allowed you to edit a compound document (eg. image embedded in text) using the editors of your choice (based on preferences), and without leaving the document context or doing any import/export operations. The whole system was document-centric; you never launched an application – just opened documents (or stationery, if creating a new document).

Microsoft’s OLE was supposed to accomplish the same thing, but the user experience was poor. In OpenDoc documents, a single click on an image would activate the image (no matter how deeply nested), and the tools of your preferred image editor would appear.

A structured storage API allowed each editor to insert and extract its portion of the document data. Importantly, the overall document type did not need to be linear text or page layout – it could be a spreadsheet. Nor did all editors need to support the embedding of others – but all were embeddable in those that did.

I like to think this is still something users would appreciate, but our applications are still monoliths, for the most part. Adobe has worked hard to integrate the applications in its Creative Suite, but they’re still separate (and large) applications.

Today, Flex is enabling the development of sophisticated online authoring tools. Examples include Buzzword for word-processing, and Picnik for image editing. The ambitious Aviary project appears to be re-creating the entire Adobe Creative Suite!

The Picnik image editor does a nice job of integrating with different photo-sharing services. But wouldn’t it be nice if I could use the Picnik tools (or those of any other image editor) to edit images embedded in my Buzzword document?

Adobe has an excellent platform with Flash, Flex and AIR. It includes a decent imaging model, and the infrastructure for shared components (Modules and RSLs). I’d love to see an open extensible authoring platform emerge, rather than a series of rich, but monolithic applications.