![]() In one package-which reminds me a lot of Squeak-the OPML Editor bundles a crazy amount of integrated machinery for both Windows and Mac OS X: It's like potato chips: Jump to an outline here, tweak some code there, mangle an outline node up there, reload a browser page, watch things go-lots of moments of instant gratification all building incrementally atop one another. This Frontier / Radio / OPML Editor environment is undeniably satisfying for me to work in. Here's the thing: It was a lot of addictive fun, and it takes me back to the love/hate thing I had with Radio, back toward the first days of this blog. (Oh, and it is a platform, maybe more so than even emacs-don't let the moniker 'editor' fool you.) So, while working through some writing blockages last weekend, I started doing some hacking on Dave Winer's newsRiver running on the OPML Editor platform. Ancient code drifting down the newsRiver Janu06:08 AM UTC I would love to see that happening one day – maybe even as a hybrid desktop/web environment with cool collaboration features.Ancient code drifting down the newsRiver - 0xDECAFBAD 0xDECAFBAD It's all spinning wheels and self-doubt until the first pot of coffee. Dave Winer himself is hinting about maybe he wants to rebuild Frontier in JavaScript one day.Although he said he is very slow via Twitter! (Update: He wants to develop a clone called Rainier now!) Brent Simmons is working (more or less) on a port of the original Frontier application to Swift.And Dave Winer made clear to me that OPML Editor is basically pretty much the same application that Frontier was. Ted Howard is maintaining a version of Frontier that is released as OPML Editor.There has been some discussions on the SourceForge site of the project though. But this wiki has not been maintained and most of the pages are not accessible. There was effort to better talk with SQL databases. The Community has not changed anything since 2007.He basically used the original Frontier application, rebranded it and developed new ideas on top of it (digging heavily into Web APIs, JSON, node.js, JavaScript, a.s.o.). In 2005 Dave Winer branched off a release of Frontier which is now called OPML Editor. I was occupied with teaching and other projects, so I lost track of Frontier. And while the operating systems evolve the original Frontier code does not compile on new OS releases. ![]() So Frontier became an open source project in 2006 and a small community continued to work on it for a while.īut there were only few people actually contributing to the Frontier base application. Dave Winer convinced UserLand to open source Frontier as Userland was marketing applications based on Frontier (Manila and Radio). UserLand was the company that continued to distribute Frontier (and some applications based on its scripting language). Brent Simmons was one of them and he runs the blog. In the 90ies there were other people working with Dave Winer on Frontier at a company called UserLand. AppleScript never really took off, because it was missing a good environment to develop and without a good object oriented persistent storage it always felt like just a macro language to automate some OS tasks. If Apple would have chosen to include Frontier in MacOS it would really have changed the Internet. But compared to Apples own AppleScript UserTalk was much faster in Frontier. It even could interpret and execute AppleScript. We learned to think this way when we learned to think & understand (or use computers).įrontier application showing the ODB and an outline Outlining is a good way to break down things - and much of what we do in our heads is basically creating meaning by deciding what is inside or outside of a concept. The database, the scripts and some texts could be presented and edited in a text window in outline fashion. I think originally it was created as an application development tool in 1992 for automating MacOS with a script language called UserTalk (before Apple came up with its own script language called AppleScript).Įverything was organized as collapsible and expandable outlines. An object in the hierarchy would automatically be accessible in the script like a variable. The database could contain other stuff like texts, outlines, binary data, simple values - all in a hierarchical structure. The scripts were edited and stored as objects in the very same database. It also came with an object database and an editor to edit scripts as outlines (something some modern IDEs try to adopt and to better organize source code!). This application taught me, that the Internet is actually a programmable environment.įrontier was a genius concept invented by Dave Winer, because it was not only a script language (called „UserTalk”). Over 24 years ago I learned about a Mac application called ✿rontier«.
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