I'm pulling all my data flows, in and out of the World Outline. I'm really narrating my work. Finally.

Today I got RSS rivers to flow through there! Really spacy. Actually wonderful.

It's really something to see. And it's the realization of a vision Dick Applebaum had for outlining back in 1981 or so.

Dick was co-owner of the main computer store in the Apple community, Computer Plus in Sunnyvale. All the Apple people shopped there, and so did the developers of the day. Any Saturday you could go down there and be sure to see a few people you knew. It was like WWDC before there was a WWDC.

Lots of stories about that place. One of the reasons we were all down there so much is that our hardware was always breaking. We're really spoiled these days. Computers used to be a lot more fragile.

The store was also owned by Mark Wozniak, Steve's brother.

All the Woz's are nice people.

Anyhow, Dick loved outliners. He and I used to talk about them all the time. I was working on one, it eventually became ThinkTank, but in the Computer Plus days we called it FYI. The idea was that all your information would flow through your outline.

Thirty years later, the vision is achieved. We needed computers with 1/2 gig of RAM, and terabyte hard drives, and FIOS-level bandwidth, and cloud services like S3 and Rackspace. Back then we were trying to make all this fit in 48K memory and 10MB hard drives (which were considered exotic).

I think he's out there somewhere -- if so, Dick -- we're getting there.

Not a moment too soon!

 7/4/2011; 8:23:37 PM.   .

Here's a question I'd love to hear the CEO, Drew Houston, answer.

In light of the proposed changes to the Dropbox terms of service...

What kinds of data should we trust to Dropbox and what kinds of data is too sensitive to trust to Dropbox?

What's the intended use of Dropbox?

Examples?

 7/4/2011; 1:29:36 PM.   .

The seventh in a series. 

This one is about why I opted-out of Dropbox now, and why they might be cleaning up their TOS, and what that might mean for users.

Also lots of activity today on the world outline project.

The features should roll out a lot more quickly now, most of the foundation work is done. Lots of cleanups and tie-offs. And docs.

 7/4/2011; 11:51:53 AM.   .