Flow? What's that? Matt Willmore gives you the inside track at Near-Time's flagship collaborative application.
In March of this year I received an e-mail from Near-Time's director of sales, Scott Hoffman. Scott was interested in introducing my user group to their upcoming product, Flow. While I didn't think the user group would be too interested, I knew that it'd be a perfect review for the site. Based on what I had seen from initial descriptions of Flow, it was shaping up to be a killer app in the collaborative software arena.
Since March, I have used build after build of Near-Time Flow, and now that it has reached version 1.0 and has been unleashed upon the Mac community, I'm finally able to talk about this great product and ask you one question: why haven't you bought it yet?
Note: This review has been updated to reflect the changes in Flow 1.1, as well as the introduction of Near-Time Relay. Flow 1.1 also resolves the security concerns that existed in Flow 1.0. All communication is now secure in nature, and Flow overall has evolved into an extremely secure collaboration package.
What is Flow?
This question was on my mind for a long time and still lingers. Near-Time defines its flagship product well:
"...the breakthrough content and knowledge manager for Mac OSX Panther. Near-Time Flow provides individuals powerful authoring, gathering, organizing and publishing resources while enabling groups to collaborate with unprecedented power and ease. With Web familiar interfaces and standards based services, Flow extends the Internet."
Want something easier? According to Reid Conrad, CEO of Near-Time, the driving force behind developing Flow was "...the need to provide an integrated content & knowledge management experience for individuals and groups."
When you read something like that, you can't help but be excited. Right away, Flow promised to be a solid replacement for many existing tools I use now. My best example is development for MacZealots.com. We do a lot of collaboration on articles, stories and tutorials, as well as planning, chatting and team writing. Right know I use any number of apps to accomplish this, including an e-mail client, AIM client, phone calls, SubEthaEdit for the team writing, and other apps. If Flow lived up to its claims, it could very possibly replace some, if not all, of those tools. In the end, it did just that. With Flow, I was able to accomplish all of my communication and collaboration needs all through one app. Here's how Flow made it possible:
Understanding Flow
In many respects, Flow reminded me of an app called Tinderbox that was very powerful and scared the hell out of me because it was so overwhelming. In a sense, Flow gave me a similar feeling. When you first open it up and see all the folios and the sparse documentation, you might think, "What am I doing here?" Like Tinderbox, however, this is ultimately beneficial to the user. Instead of laying out every possible scenario and mouseclick for the user, the instructions provide enough to get you going, and then you're on your own. Flow encourages you to click and drag and create Smart Folios and share stuff and just see what happens. By doing this, I found more use in Flow than I ever could have by reading the manual. While discussing bugs with Scott Hoffman, I was using Flow in ways he hadn't thought of before. Why was it a bug? It just hadn't been used like that before. It worked (for the most part), but it was just a different way to do it. This is the beauty of Flow - it's like Make-Your-Own-Adventure for information management. My recommendation is that you go click-wild and see where you end up. If you get stuck, Near-Time is there 100% to support its customers.
Information Gathering
As you can imagine, gathering information for pieces I'm writing is more valuable than anything. I spend a lot of time reading Web sites, RSS/Atom feeds, news items, press releases, etc. on products and technologies that I would like to discuss on MacZealots.com. Before Flow, I was using VoodooPad Lite, which does a great job at what it does - organizes documents in a wiki-like fashion. And, it still serves me well today, taking notes for class, work, etc. With Flow, I could gather the same information on pieces, but also share it with Ryan and Justin. Additionally, they could also add information to pieces I was writing without sending an e-mail or IM. Plus, with its offline support, I was able to add stuff on the road and then sync it when I had access to the Internet.
Flexibility
The fact that I can view RSS/Atom feeds (screenshot) Web pages (screenshot), and text files (screenshot) in the same application just blows my mind. While this is at the very least a convenience, imagine what happens when your whole team uses Flow (which I know Near-Time wouldn't mind). Suddenly all of your collaboration can take place within Flow. You could do this all in Flow:
- View your Web site, and that of competitors and suppliers
- Read RSS and Atom feeds from anywhere
- Publish information to the web, e-mails, iDisk account, FTP servers, WebDAV servers and of course, Flow users
- Collaborate with Rendezvous over local networks
- Track changes on everything you edit
- Edit information offline and synch up when you connect to the Internet
- Use Smart Folios and Digests to summarize information on the fly, eliminating the need to search for relevant items
- Utilize templates to make formatting pages easier (read: the easiest way to add author footers to MacZealots.com articles EVER)
So again I ask: why aren't you using it yet?
Standards Support
Like I said earlier, I read a lot of RSS/Atom feeds, Web sites, etc. Standards are very important to me, and I really believe they are a crucial part of any technology succeeding. Luckily, Flow is as adamant as I am about standards. I was happy to learn that they support both the RSS and Atom standards, and plan on updating the software to support these evolving standards in the future. Support for additional standards like POP3 (to communication with near-time.net), WebDAV and Rendezvous only helps their position in the market.
Weblog Support
I'll say it again - if anyone understands standards and what's hot, it's Near-Time. I was pleasantly surprised to learn of blog support in the 1.1 release of Flow, although I probably shouldn't have been. As of 1.1, Flow supports publishing to the most popular formats, including WordPress, Movable Type, TypePad and others. This eliminates the need for a separate blogging app, or using the limited web-based posting interface of your particular blog engine. With this comes the richness of Flow's collaboration and sharing, which can combine to create a powerful corporate blogging tool, or simply the tools to be the best-researched personal blogger on the web.
Relay Server-Spaces
New to Flow 1.1, Relay server-spaces are a new one-way publishing tool collaborative users of Flow can use to distribute information quickly and easily to your Flow-based team. The included Relay server-space broadcasts news and updates from Near-Time to Flow users, and it's just as easy to distribute updates, news breaks or daily reports to your team the same way.
Script-Based Publishing
Along the same lines as blog support, Flow allows you to write scripts to publish to other mediums, such as and existing publishing platform, alternative blog engine or an existing content management system (CMS). This extensibility could be extended even farther and potentially allow Flow to tie in with a wide array of publishing and text tools.
Relay 1.0
Perhaps the biggest announcement is Relay, Near-Time's server solution that powers Near-Time.net. Now, instead of relying on Near-Time.net for your synchronization and collaboration, Near-Time has released Relay, an in-house server solution for Flow that can safely sit behind your firewall and give you complete control over the sharing and collaboration environment. [screenshot] In addition to OS X, Relay can run on Red Hat and Gentoo Linux distros, making it a more attractive package to those with existing Linux servers.
Costs
Some people were confused by the pricing plan. Here's how it works: first, you pay a one-time fee for the Flow application. This includes updates (minor fixes, etc.), but not major upgrades. If you want to collaborate as well, there's an additional $29.95 yearly charge for that feature. This is for each person who wants to collaborate — and by collaboration, that means you get a spot on near-time.net, Near-Time's collaboration/synchronization server. The subscription to near-time.net also entitles you to major product upgrades for free during your subscription period.
In addition, there's also educational pricing for those who qualify. If you do, the price of the subscription to near-time.net remains the same, but the cost of Flow drops to $79.99.
Conclusion
Flow is an unmistakably a cool app. Having said that, there's also room to grow for Flow. Imagine extending Flow to Windows, your PDA or even your iPod? According to Reid Conrad, CEO of Near-Time, any of that is possible if the market demands it.
If all goes well for the team at Near-Time, it looks like clear skies ahead for this start-up wonder from North Carolina. I encourage everyone to visit Near-Time's site and try out Flow for yourself. You may like it, you may not. In either case, it's worth trying out this powerful application as an addition to your arsenal of killer apps.
Special thanks goes out to Scott Hoffman (Director, Sales) and Reid Conrad (CEO) for their time and assistance in making this review possible. Special thanks also goes out to Justin Williams for conducting the interview with Reid Conrad at WWDC 2004.
Matt Willmore is a founding partner of MacZealots.com. Matt is also a Resident Assistant at Owen Hall and does Mac support at ECN, and is active in PUMUG. He can be reached at .
Reader Comments (4)
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#1) On July 7, 2004 10:08 AM
I was also a beta tester, and have to agree that Flow is an interesting beast. Obviously it’s 1.0 release, and the developers seem pretty realistic, but more importantly, responsive.
I’ve yet to fully try it out in an actively collaborative sense, testing more as an information manager/knowledge base.
I’ve tended to nit-pick about the interface a bit, and look forward to a few more releases, but am interested in where this app might lead. In some ways it is very similar to other info managers, DEVONthink, for instance, but is currently unique in it’s ability to share and collaborate. Compared to Tinderbox, it’s not as programatic, but then it’s also probably a bit more accessible.
Likewise, I was using VoodooPad, and would really like to see the linking in Flow be a bit more automatic. I’m also quite a user of OmniOutliner, so the RTF-based outlining in Flow is a bit of let down. There are also interesting things they could do with finding structure within, and relationships between documents, but that’s probably asking a lot of a v1.0 app… I’m keen to see where they go from here.
I find myself starting to use Flow as an RSS reader, more and more, and could even see it one day becoming a usable browser, thereby giving the Mac a very decent answer to OnFolio for WinIE.
This is a very interesting app to follow, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it build a following.
As I said, I’ve been using it on my own, and I’m quite interested to see how other people are using it… it’s one of those apps that bend to fit the user, and their particular way of working.
#2) On July 19, 2004 2:34 PM
I was also a Flow tester. While I’ve been happy with a lot of the things that Flow does, it has two big shortcomings in my eyes:
1. It’s slow. On my Powerbook G4/550, it’s really sluggish. It also eats huge amounts of RAM, so I end up killing it off when I’m not using it, just to keep it from slagging my poor system down.
2. The built-in editor is really weak. It suffers from all of the usual word processor editing problems (hidden font changes, inconsistent formatting) AND the problems that you usually get with HTML-ish editors: limited formatting options, ugly text layout, weird formatting model. In addition to those, Flow adds it own idiosyncratic text formatting toolbar that is entirely unlike anything I’ve used before.
I’m hoping the future releases will fix both of these issues.
On the plus side, I love the way web browsing works in flow. You can use it as a browser and then sort through the history, marking which pages to keep permanently as a part of your folio. This makes online research really easy—just do the research and then stop ever 5 minutes or so to flag important pages for archiving.
#3) On July 27, 2004 7:52 AM
I have just downloaded the trial version and agree that this is very promising and easy to use. I have hardly scratched the surface yet but I did immediately run into trouble. Flow cannot deal with document titles with unicode accents. Nor can it deal with docs with titles in other scripts (I tried Hindi). This is a rather surprising limitation, for its wordprocessor is happy to work with unicode keyboard layouts and even right-to-left scripts. If the title is changed to plain ascii the unicode docs read as expected and canbe searched.
The Search facility is comparatively primitive. What would be a huge improvement is decent support for regular expression searches (preferably Perl compatible) as SubEthadit now supports. Also some kind of global regular expression search and replace for document conversion would be very welcome.
I also had a few crashes when “accidentally” clicking on its web search function without being connected to the web.
#4) On August 16, 2004 3:41 PM
I don’t have any criticisms yet and I’m just a biologist but I have to say that, from what I’ve seen playing a little with my trial version, I’m excited about how much fun Flow could make my literature research and idea development, even if I work solo a good bit.