Flow1.6

Name: Flow
Rating: 4.75 (5 reviews)

22 July 2005

Peer to peer collaborative content/knowledge manager.

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Overview

[ Via MacInTouch ] Near-Time Flow is the first integrated peer to peer collaborative content and knowledge manager for individuals, groups, organizations, and enterprises using Mac OS X Panther. Flow's interface is intuitive and engaging, allowing you to begin creating, collecting, and integrating digital content immediately. With a powerful, standards-based peer-to-peer collaboration engine, Flow takes content sharing well beyond traditional publishing, email messaging, and shared folders. Flow affords real interaction through collective editing and context-driven discussion, keeping teams on the same page... literally.

A better way to organize - Flow Folios provide unparalleled integration of authored, web, and application content. Flow allows you to quickly collect the information pertinent to a topic or task on the same page or across a collection of linked pages. Moreover, Flow's collaboration engine grants users a whole new level of context-driven and association-based integration.

A better way to work - The pages within a Folio are both organizational units and work-areas. Flow's toolset intelligently adjusts based on the content of interest, allowing you to edit text pages, browse and archive Web pages, or subscribe to and manage RSS feeds within a single, easy-to-use interface.

A better way to collaborate - Configuring a Folio as a share-space* is easy -- just drag and drop the relevant Flow-peers from your work-group or social-group into the Folio. By providing a targeted channel and interactive page-based sharing, Flow promotes organic content growth and breaks digital communication free from rigidity, segmentation and noise.

*collaboration services require a subscription to Near-Time.net - Near-Time.net subscription services are $29.95 per user, per 12-month period. Subscribers to Near-Time.net receive product updates and upgrades free of charge during their subscription period. Academic pricing is available for Flow, inquire by email.

What's new in Flow

Many enhancements have been made in this release, including:

Access to your recent work has been enhanced through a top-level user home page. The home page loads in a separate window (called the Start window) upon launch and serves as a launch pad to your content. The Start window summarizes space and category informations and reports recent page activity.
Growl notifications have been added to keep you better informed of key events as they occur. For example, you will receive notifications when a feed page updates. To enable Growl notification, select the Enable Growl notifications option of your Preferences (Flow>Preferences>General).
Reorganization has been simplified through new menus enabling you to place a check box next to the space(s) the active page should belong to. The space-level filing menus can be accessed 1.) via the the Space context button at the bottom of Flow or 2. by clicking on the Spaces option within the Info panel.
Help documentation has been enhanced and is now available at: http://www.near-time.net/docs/Flow/15/Flow%20Guide/.
The initial configuration of your weblog space has been streamlined as you can now select your weblog type and only need to specify the URL for your blog along with your username and password.
Flow now synchs with your weblog, automatically pulling in any new categories and posts uploaded outside of Flow.
You can now edit the template Flow uses when you move content to your weblog server space via Share>BlogThis. To edit a template, ctrl-click on the weblog space and select Edit "SpaceName". Select the Post Template tab.
A number of UI enhancements have been made.

Many fixes have been made, including:

Word documents are once again now treated as file pages instead of text pages.
The find menu now works within Web pages.
An issue that prevented some users from locating Flow content via Spotlight has been fixed.
Links pointing to marked text within a page (Copy>Link) are now converted to intra-page links when published as HTML.
Bullets are correctly formatted when publishing to a Web server.
And many more....

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2 Reviews of Flow

I'm very tempted to give this program 5 stars, but I won't do that for now since I've only been using it for a day, and I will not use its "group" features so I can't really offer a thorough review. I used Idea Keeper in the past, and so far I have not found a single OS X program that can compare (until now?). The features are different, the interface is different, the way each program works is different, yet there is something to both programs that makes them amazing at storing information, structuring ideas, organizing research, planning, etc. With both programs, it really pays to go through the tutorials and learn the sometimes unintuitive procedures. From time to time I get the eternal spinning beachball, and I would like to have some graphic options available instead of mainly text options. The solution could be to link a file created in OmniGraffle, for example, to my Flow document, but it would be nice to have some graphic features available (arrows, basic figures like boxes and circles, etc.). Another solution would be to insert a picture of my work (e.g., flow chart, organizational chart), but graphic integration within Flow itself would same me many steps :-) Ideally I would love a program such as this one, with some of the graphic capabilities of programs like OmniGraffle (simply great) or Curio (nice idea). I look forward to spending more time with Flow. So far I'm really liking it. G4/800 1GB Memory OS X 10.3.4

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