http://www.acrocat.com/bbs/forum_posts.asp?TID=516

Topic: Timeline for release? Posted: 19 February 2006 at 2:34pm

Will there be a new version out reasonably soon? …

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Posted: 14 March 2006 at 10:24am Is acrowiki a very secondary priority to pdaabs?

Please acrocat, tell us whether you intend to do anything more with this product.

And, if you don't, please sell it to someone who might.

Thanks, M.

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Posted: 14 March 2006 at 6:37pm

Thanks for your interest! Unfortunately, we're not free disclose future product plans, but we do appreciate that folks are looking forward to new versions of AcroWiki and we do have new features planned, based on the Wish List and other topics.

Michele (Acrocat)

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Posted: 19 April 2006 at 4:50pm Originally posted by Acrocat

Thanks for your interest! Unfortunately, we're not free disclose future product plans, but we do appreciate that folks are looking forward to new versions of AcroWiki and we do have new features planned, based on the Wish List and other topics.

By not disclosing such plans, you are treating your community of users like a foreign entity. You should embrace your community of users, since they are providing much constructive feedback in the face of an apparent lack of product release, and therefore are obviously quite enthusiastic about AcroWiki.

I'm sure that if you disclosed at least some of your plans, and were more active in following up feature requests (where's the feature request poll you promised in June 2005 to post?), you'd get more enthusiasm from your community of users. I'm keen to join that community, since I like AcroWiki, but if it appears to be unsupported then I will be reluctant to spend my hard-earnt money on it.

I was asked by a colleague the other day about purchasing a new PDA and/or smartphone, and should he go Windows or Palm, and can he get some sort of interlinking document editing system. I remembered AcroWiki and decided to revisit it to see if it would be suitable (for him and for me). I have found some shortcomings in the software, but nothing too serious. My biggest concern is lack of new releases, as this implies lack of support.

I hope that my feelings are wrong (as your recent return to the forums may indicate), and that a new release (even minor) is just around the corner, as I'm keen to purchase and use AcroWiki as soon as a couple of minor problems on my Treo 650 are solved (see my posts in http://www.acrocat.com/bbs/forum_posts.asp?TID=375 for some additional info).

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From http://response39.blogsome.com/2005/07/04/wikis-and-palm-handhelds/ Wikis and Palm Handhelds Filed under: Palm GtD – Administrator @ 3:21 pm

Wikis and Palm Handhelds Another factor in my organizing style is that I see connections everywhere. I have notes about someone that lists the phone number or address, which connects in my mind to my address book/PIM/Palm. That’s why I was very excited to find wikis. My preferred wiki, only because it acts mostly the same on Palm or on desktop, is Note Studio. There are things it doesn’t do that I’d love to have it do. There are things it does that I’d rather it didn’t do. But all in all it does onething quite well – behaves the same on desktop and on Palm.

Before I bought my Palm T|E, I had an older Palm IIIC. It was fine, but I had to turn it back in when I switched assignments at work. The new office didn’t allow any Palms of any kind in the office area. When I switched, I lost my then favorite app – MegaWiki. That app was a neat gadget! I could link things all over my Palm. I could link to or from appointments (or create one if none existed), addresses, memos and todos. BUT… (there’s that big but again) it only worked on the Palm, there was no desktop equivalent. I didn’t realize how important that was until I used Note Studio. I tried several other MegaWiki-like apps – Acrowiki, PSLink, Mobile Note (the freeware ver 0.6), etc. – but none of them really fit the bill. Then I tried Note Studio and found out that the plus – desktop behaved the same as the Palm app – far outweighed the shortcomings.

Notestudio: http://www.dogmelon.com.au/NoteStudio.shtml

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And given the fact that you cannot be bothered, after two weeks, to respond, I can only conclude that you are misserving yourselves and your customers. The fact that you have no messages for 6 months in your beta forum is further testement.

Acrocat has a good foothold in the PDA fitness market. With this it seems it does not need, care or have the ability to serve the wiki market.

So it should not bother. My advice – for what its worth – is that AcroWiki, has more value in the marketplace than it has in your firm. I suggest, Acrocat, that you divest by selling it to another vendor before lack of action further damages the Acrocat name.

From a market perspective, providing a wiki on the desktop goes a step towards enabling the mobile professional to work with wiki content. Lotus Notes is probably most people's experience with replication: content changes are permitted either on the desktop or on servers. When the two connect they share the list of pending changes.

Already there are wikis that provide replication from the handheld to the desktop: I'm currently experimenting with Dog Melon's Note Studio, which has a Palm – Desktop component. I don't know how well it handles conflicts, though this is less of a problem between handheld and desktop (two devices used by the same person) as it would be between a corporate wiki and potentially hundreds of users. Dog Melon also have a Pocket PC – Desktop edition. These cost $50, a bit unnecessary considering the open source options, especially considering that some stuff on my Treo I'd want to sync up to a server.

In July last year, during a quiet period at work, I built out a working prototype of replication between two instances of TWiki using Unison, a file-based replication tool. At the time I was excited about Acrowiki, by Acrocat software (formally called HWiki), a TWiki-markup compatible wiki that works on my Treo 650. Acrocat have gone shy about revealing anything about future versions and I drew conclusion (that they have yet to refute) that they've practically abandoned it. I can't even use the existing version as I'd need it to use files from the SD card in order for my unison solution to work with it.

Exchanging the content between unlike servers involves not just file replication but data transformation too. This problem is well understood by the Messaging Middleware people (I used to work with products such as TIBCO and IBM MQ) and would likely best be served in an XSL transformation mapping gateway. It'd also require an XML represention of each wiki's text. To my knowledge none of them have XML representations butall will export to XHTML as they have to get their content accepted by the browsers. Bayle Shanks did some pioneering work with the wiki-gateway, but I don't know whether that's progressed at all since.

Quite separately I read that Socialtext has built online access in miki a mobile-enabled version of socialtext. That's not replication, however, I imagine that its an appropriate set of skins formatted and laid out for the mobile device.

I'd like TWiki to become installable and useable by end-users, not just techies. On their laptops, PC and Mac.

There's something really attractive about having a wiki run on your desktop. Wikis provide a conversational context for content way more powerful that the single-category of files and folders view allowed by Windows Explorer. Windows explorer does allow a user to store a HTML file next to folders, but gives no way to generate this. Without lowering the effort required few people bother. Providing the wiki-context would allow for tagging and mapping and (collective) sensemaking / trails that wikis are now embodying, all on the local filesystem.

I first remember running TWiki on Windows back in 2002 when I helped roll out an installation for Arthur Andersen. Yet 4 years later this option is not generally accessible to the public as there is not a sensible windows build. Oh, techies can work it out, after say a couple of hours of effort following the IndigoPerl build instructions, or download the 200mb VMWare build, but long or technical installation instructions and enormous downloads are a real barrier preventing end-users trying out TWiki for the first time.

By opening TWiki to use by end users, would open the door to amplify usage to all the non-technical users, and in the process draw more technical users back into the fold.

To make such a point and click install possible what TWiki needs is a Windows Native build that double-click installs from a .exe and that does not involve an emulation layer such as CygWin or VMWare.

This integration build effort started – see TWiki:Plugins.TWikiInstallerWindowsContrib: we have the components and the approach but not the build. Like too many of TWiki's projects it has failed due to poor coordination.

TWiki, Confluence, Note Studio – I use all of these and they all have proprietary mark-up (e.g. text-only representations of how to do *bold*)

Its not a problem until I want to push the content beyond the scope of the application. I enter stuff on my Palm Treo 650 copy of Note Studio – I want it to appear on the company wiki. Even if I can get the content over there it would need reformatting.

Bayle Shanks (who I met at WikiSym2005) wrote a wiki gateway to handle the API part of submitting content to a generic interface. I wrote the TWiki:Codev.SyncContrib (although it remains fairly uobscured in TWiki's SVN) but that only handles TWiki-TWiki syncronisation. And AcroWiki appears to have been completely abandoned by Acrocat software presumably because they have made a name for themselves on pdaabs and acrowiki is not core to what they do.

This leaves me with an integration gap. And while I as a techie could solve it I neither have the time nor inclination to do so. Further, integration is a key step to simplicity: most users see such problems as completely insumountable.

People (myself included) have always thought of JotSpot, Confluence and Socialtext as being the commercial wikis that generate the most buzz.

These pail into insignificance compared with the coverage of the twiki & mediawiki.

Mediawiki's use on wikipedia makes it the defacto php wiki. Shame for PhpWiki really: http://google.com/trends?q=mediawiki%2C+phpwiki&ctab=1&geo=all&date=all

I took socialtext out of the comparison as Google does not have stats on it since Q3 2005. Their stats look wrong anyway so its best to simply not talk about them. http://google.com/trends?q=socialtext%2C+jotspot&ctab=1&geo=all&date=all

Confluence as a term is too generic to reliably pull stats from, as it is also an English word. "Atlassian Confluence" returns fewer hits than it deserves.