Ah, yes, by 'offline' I did mean outside of the mailing list, but that was purely out of consideration for the list. If the list wants to hear it, far be it from me to keep it from them.
For my part, I am a graduate student working on my dissertation, and I have been trying to build tools to facilitate that as I go, from taking and sharing notes, to visualizing primary material, to (eventually) organizing and writing the dissertation. I have been following Offray's updates with interest, as I think my goals are very much allied, but I am starting in a slightly different place, if I have understood correctly (research and organizing, and not yet writing, sharing, or publishing). My efforts thus far have been concentrated in two repositories: Chancery (http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~EvanDonahue/Chancery) is an early prototype for a note taking system. I am coming from taking notes in emacs org-mode, and so Chancery right now is the most straightforward collapsable tree outliner/note taker that could give me functionality basically equivalent to what I had in org-mode, and serve as a platform to co-evolve my research methods and their supporting technology. The near-term goals for this involve adding metadata (authors, dates, etc) to the sources I am annotating and using that for various kinds of historical visualization (and further, attendant annotation) eg who wrote what when, referencing who, influenced by what, etc), and can I edit all that directly in its graphical form. The status of this project is that it is usable by myself and those I have worked with on it (and I use it as my primary note taking system), but I'm not sure what it would look like to someone loading it at the moment (no real intro/docs, as it was just a quick prototype to provoke further design discussion). Trantor (http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~EvanDonahue/Trantor) is a disttributed p2p system for incrementally keeping data structures in sync between multiple, asynchronously connected pharo instances across the internet without requiring human attention to resolve merge conflicts (think laptos where data is edited offline and then automatically synced when they connect to one another); it is my answer to sharing and collaboration for things created in Chancery (although it is a more general purpose project). Functionally, Trantor provides a set of common datatypes (set, dict, text blob, etc) and a means to run nodes and peer them for synchronization of said datatypes. The goal with respect to Chancery/personal information management is being able to easily grab some structured set of notes or writing out of the note taking system and share it with collaborators or colleagues with a button click, and without having to go through the whole export/send/manage versions dance. This project is about 85% complete, the proof of concept works, it just needs a big refactor to make it usable and quash some bugs. I guess my observations on using Pharo thus far are first, that it is absolutely ideal for evolving prototypes, since you get a sort of poor man's gui and persistance (object inspector + image serialization) basically for free, which is 90% of the work of such a simple information management app prototype. I have a fully functional tree outliner at a point when in another language I would still be trying to hack a low functionality command line interface. The other thing I've found refreshing is that my application can live as one among many within the image, sharing data with other programs by passing objects around in a way that is impossible to do with a standalone application running on a modern operating system. the dream of the web is, I think, heading more in this direction, but working with the browser (as I was before I came to pharo) requires coordinating a separate server process, compressing everything into http/html/json, and a host of other problems that vanish when you can just serialize objects between pharo instances. In short, I'm getting a lot done in this language and I expect I'll be around for a while. Cheers, Evan
