Near-Time Flow 1.5(EA6) review
DownloadNear-Time Flow™ is the breakthrough content and knowledge manager for individuals and groups.
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Near-Time Flow™ is the breakthrough content and knowledge manager for individuals and groups. Flow allows you to author, gather, organize, share and publish the information you rely on - from documents and correspondences to web pages, images and files - in an intelligent and integrated manner. Flow incorporates an elegant hypertext authoring system, a full-featured web browser, an RSS news reader, allowing most of your digital information needs to be met without ever leaving Flow. Flow is perfectly suited for personal and group information management alike -- publicize your content through Flow's multiple publishing options (web servers, web logs, RSS) or set up a share-space to grant multiple users the ability to edit, discuss, organize and use the same content.
Here are some key features of "Near Time Flow":
Author
At its core, Flow is a hypertext authoring system. Flow's text editor produces standard (RTF) output and includes a set of easy-to-use styling options. Editing in Flow is "What You See is What You Get", with no knowledge of mark-up needed. Flow combines elements of both word processing and web authoring -- text pages can be linked to other text pages, web pages, syndicated feeds (RSS and Atom), or files in the same way that pages are linked within a web site.
WYSIWYG editing with rich text formatting
Version and change history
Quick outline generation
Foldable text (customize the display by expanding and collapsing text)
Hypertext linking
Templates offering reusable page layouts
Gather
Flow excels as a centralized aggregator for your information. The content you encounter -- from plain text to binary applications -- can be added to a Flow page through drag-and-drop or through a "Gather into Flow" option of the Services menu. With text editing, web browsing and RSS/Atom news reading built into Flow, you can gather and archive your important text and web resources with ease -- and within the context of a broader topic or project.
Import (RTF or plain text)
Drag and drop text and image collection
Web page browsing and archiving
RSS and Atom news reading
Native display of text and web-based content
Drag and drop attachment of application files
"Gather into Flow" option on the Services menu
Preview of PDF, Word, and image files
Organize
Flow's organizational system is both robust and flexible, supporting many organizational schemes and providing multiple ways to access the same page of information. Flow automates many of the organizational tasks for you, enabling sorting on a wide range of metadata and dynamic, rule-based aggregation through smart folios and digest pages. Flow offers a rich set of organizational structures from folders to folios to pages to marks. When deeper organization is needed, you can quickly use Flow's hypertext authoring system to create customized organizational and finding aids, such as Table of Contents, Site Maps, and Readmes.
Rich organization and navigation through spaces, folios, pages, and links
Version history (navigation through time via the timebar)
Change history (isolate the changes between versions)
Sidebar aggregating page listings (Favorites, Recent, Related)
Intelligent search, filtering and extraction through Smart Folios and Digest Pages
Expandable links offers "write once, use many" composability
Collaborate
A Flow share-space enables multiple users to access, organize, and edit the same content in a secure and private medium. Multiple share-spaces can be created to support the appropriate granularity of audiences. Sharing within Flow is peer-to-peer -- the pages you create in Flow always stay with you, stored on your computer. When a folio is shared amongst a group of peers, Flow's synchronization process ensures that the latest copy of the page on your computer matches the copy stored by your fellow peers.
Interactive pages (collective editing of the same content)
Synchronization of text, images, web pages, syndicated content, and files across a team
Graphical notification of changes
Targeted Discussion
Content is stored locally and available when offline (no central server)
Multiple standards-based transport options (SMTP, WebDAV/HTTP. Rendezvous)
Private and secure when used with Near-Time Relay
Publish
Flow's server-spaces enable you to publish your content to different audiences, including non-Flow users, via a host of standards based options. Content can be uploaded to a web server or iDisk, posted to a web log, syndicated as an RSS feed, or sent to an email address.
Post to a web log (Blogger, MoveableType, TypePad, WordPress and more)
Upload to a web server or iDisk
Send as email
Page syndication via RSS
Print/PDF.
Limitations:
30 day trial period.
What's New:
Sidebar
A Sidebar serving as a centralized launchpad to your content has been added. The Sidebar includes both user-defined and system generated content collections, including:
Favorites -- user-configured list of favorite pages
Related pages -- user configured listing of favorite pages (this listing is specific to the active page)
Recently visited, created, received, filed pages and recently used folios
Recent search results
Content summaries (marks, RSS headlines, linked pages)
People associated with the active page
Blog Output Control
1.5 offer more control over the output of text when posting to a blog. Select the Output tab of the blog settings window to choose from the following settings:
Plain Text - Content is posted to your blog without any formatting information.
Simple HTML - Content formatting includes character attributes such as bold and italics, but does not set font and point sizes. Use Simple HTML if you do not want your Blog entries to override the top-level stylesheet for your Blog.
Full HTML - Content is formatted in HTML that comes as close as possible to the exact format you used in Flow. This is useful when you want to take complete control of the text format in your blog.
Enhanced Gathering Options
A Gather into Flow option has been added to the Services menu. When this option is selected, selected text within external applications is automatically routed onto a new page in Flow. New buttons also enable you to automatically gather the body of a selected email in Mail or the active web page in Safari.
One-to-One Sharing
In addition to sharing via a share-space, you can now share a page by dropping the page over a user name in the Folios drawer or through a Send Once menu option. This provides a private, one-to-one communication channel between you and each of your Flow participants.
Requirements:
Mac OS X 10.3.x (Panther)
Collaboration services require Near-Time Relay or a subscription to Near-Time.net.
Recommended: Memory: 256 MB RAM, Processor: 500 MHz.
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