Via [Solid Office](http://www.solidoffice.com/archives/545) I found our
about a new OpenDocument format based collaborative editing tool called
[Thoughtslinger](http://www.thoughtslinger.com/learn.php). Free to use
at least for now, but no visible means of support, I'm wondering what
the business model is, maybe just get bought.
Here are my very first impressions, even before trying out the
collaboration features.
I opened the [paper I've been working
on](http://ptsefton.com/blog/2007/05/15/etd_paper) with the
[ICE](http://ice.usq.edu.au/) application in Thoughtslinger (only runs
on Windows so I used a virtual machine in parallels).
Look ma, no styles!
This is what it should look like, where I [used
styles](http://del.icio.us/ptsefton/usestyles).
We're going to give this a go to with some of the document processing
folks at USQ to see what the editing capabilities are like, but without
styles it's a stretch to say that this thing uses the OpenDocument
Format and to me it's basically [no more use than Google
Docs](http://ptsefton.com/blog/2006/12/06/goog_docs), which also doesn't
let me use my styles.
Rick Walker of Thoughtslinger sort-of acknowledges this, but I don't
really think styles are an optional extra in this kind of proposed
workflow.
> We believe Thoughtslinger is complementary to Writer. A team would
> collaboratively edit an odt file in Thoughtslinger, then use Writer
> for final formatting, headers, footers etc. We embraced odt class="spCh spChx2019">’s because the specification is open and
> very clean.
>
> <http://www.solidoffice.com/archives/545>
In fact I'd love to see this tool ship with the ICE template, and have
the buttons actually apply styles. We're currently working on a really
smart ICE toolbar along the same lines.
Oh, and there's no undo button which is a real problem.
[UPDATE: I just read the
[license](http://www.thoughtslinger.com/legal/eula.php) for
Thoughtslinger. It says:
> 4\. Restrictions
>
> \(a) You agree not to reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or
> otherwise attempt to discover the source code, underlying ideas, or
> algorithms of the Software.
Not try to discover the underlying ideas? I work for a university! I'm
deleting it.]