Hot Dog

Sydney Morning Herald

Tuesday February 18, 1997

GARRY BARKER

Automatic document updating comes with OpenDoc and Apple's Cyberdog software, reports GARRY BARKER.

AS the world's commerce and industry turns increasingly towards the use of intranets and the Internet, control of these tidal waves of information becomes vitally important.

For example, engineers need to know that the specification sheet they have is the latest version. They may have downloaded it that morning from their companies' intranet, but they may not know that the numbers have changed in a later version put up only five minutes ago. Purchasing officers need to know instantly about price changes in the commodities they are ordering.

One clever answer is OpenDoc and Apple's Cyberdog software, which allows the creation of documents that constantly and automatically update themselves as information arrives. This is far from all this component software can do, but it's one of its most valuable attributes.

One of the others, incidentally, is to play guard dog. In its e-mail and news guises, Cyberdog can be taught to screen messages. It will, for instance, trash all e-mail from designated senders and will similarly kill newsgroup postings from people you decide are objectionable.

OpenDoc is supported by CI (for Component Integration) Labs of California, a non-profit association of more than 300 computer industry companies, including Apple, IBM and Adobe, and which is now regarded as the defacto component standard. It was originally written for the Macintosh but is now available to run on Windows 95 and NT as well as OS/2 Warp and AIX (a version of Unix).

OpenDoc is an open architecture that allows software components to interact. Thus, instead of having to use a big, monolithic application like, say, Excel, to produce a spreadsheet, you can build your own customised application. Cyberdog is essentially a collection of OpenDoc parts that allows access to the Internet and, at the same time, interactivity with the other OpenDoc parts in the document.

You start with a blank page called a container, which comes up on the computer screen with a palette beside it. From the palette you may drag and drop into the container a series of OpenDoc parts, known as Live Objects. These may be a spreadsheet part, a graphing part, a spellchecker and a word processor, plus Cyberdog.

Each of these parts is interactive. The spreadsheet part can talk to the graphing part, the intranet browser part, and so on. Each may have been written by a different software developer but, because they are OpenDoc parts and comply with that architecture, they share a standard method of information exchange.

Now for the clever bit. Suppose you want to make a document reviewing your share portfolio. You can use the word processor to write the text, and the spreadsheet part to set up your share folder. If you link that document, through Cyberdog, to the share market ticker service on the Internet, share prices and other relevant information will be updated as often as the share ticker changes.

If you then send that document to someone else who has an Internet connection, the information will also be updated all the time by Cyberdog. Transmission of the document over the Internet is easy because the Live Objects parts are small and very compact. Downloading is quick and easy.

Similarly on a company intranet. Intranet servers are set up to exchange information, but one of the problems is that information quickly goes stale. Damage may easily be done if an executive decision is made on the basis of out-of-date information. But if documents are made using Live Objects, then each time something changes anywhere in the database it can be automatically updated right across the intranet through the Live Objects links.

ALTERNATIVELY, a school class may build a document using Live Objects and link its composition to a Web site. It can then send its project document on the Net to other schools. When the receiving school opens the document, Cyberdog will automatically update it from the Web.

Cyberdog is a clever hound. Macworld has dubbed it "a five-star concept", saying it is where the Internet should be heading. "Integrating the Internet into the documents we work with and offering Net access across applications using dynamically loaded components seems natural and intuitive. Once again Apple and Macintosh are on the leading edge," the reviewer says.

Microsoft has challenged the OpenDoc technology with OLE/Active X, but it is much less elegant and allows only one embedded object to be live at a time, whereas with OpenDoc and Cyberdog, everything is always live.

CYBERDOG is a collection of OpenDoc parts: a Net browser, an ftp part, an e-mail part, a Notebook to organise and store Internet addresses (e-mails, urls, references to text and sound documents) which makes finding your frequent sites a simple click of the mouse. It's good in the Internet environment, and for an intranet user it can save hours of frustrating toil.

It allows Internet files to be dragged and dropped right into your desktop, or you can copy urls to the desktop for a later visit. You can even embed urls in your e-mail. It's also possible to create buttons which, like knobs on a magic door, will open up any Net site you wish. Live views of Web sites may also be embedded in the Cyberdocuments you create.

Cyberdog's Web browser is efficient but plain. Indeed, that's the way of all its features so far; more work is to be done. On the other hand, it is not blowsy with code-bloat. The Cyberdog runs quickly and on a minimum of electronic Pal.

OpenDoc is contained within the computer's operating system. (It, and the latest release of Cyberdog, will be included in the next release of the MacOS, System 7.6, due to be released in Australia in March, or it may be downloaded now, free, from the World Wide Web.) Point your browser at http://www. opendoc.apple.com// and follow the pointers.