I upgraded one of my Mac-based systems with OS X Leopard. It is great. I like it. But from the subject-centric perspective it is still more or less a traditional application/document-centric OS. How can we make it more subject-centric?
I think that most of my comments from this old blog entry still make sense. Actually, I did many experiments with OS X Tiger, search, subject-centric documents and topic maps over the last couple of years. It is quite promising, but I did not have enough time to do required Objective-C/Cocoa programming to build a real application with full desktop integration. It looks like it can be easier to implement described features with Leopard:
- Objective-C has now a garbage collector
- built-in Ruby-Cocoa bridge and Xcode integration (good news for Ruby enthusiasts)
- streamlined support for document types (Uniform Type Identifiers)
- Dashcode (simple way to create widgets)
- and… it can look so nice …
We also have much better understanding of how public and personal subject identification servers can work based on our experiments with Ontopedia and PSI server. Missing part is desktop integration.