Xy Phoenix rises

[Stephen Shaw sshaw@xxxxxxxx]

I have enjoyed low-visibility participation on this listserv since learning
of it 6 months ago. I have been delighted by the discovery of the cadre of
people on this listserv who share my passion for Xy/XW. However, my
concerns about the long term viability of XW have been mirrored in many
comments on this list. I am pleased to say that this week my concerns have
vanished!

I visited the TTG President Kenny Frank in order to discuss my information
strategies for a large project I will be undertaking at the National
Institutes of Health: establishing a WWW site maintaining current reviews on
all human proteins (estimated to be about 100,000 all told). I hope that it
will be an international collaboration ultimately involving thousands of
scientists on a voluntary basis. During my meeting with KFrank, he outlined
the concepts of the new software they are developing, and showed me many
parts which are operational.

I was enormously impressed by the creativity and vision reflected in his
comments and by the emerging TTG product. It is unlike any PC product with
which I am familiar, and therefore defies simple categorization. The
simplest description I can offer is that it is a text-oriented system which
introduces a wonderful amalgam of spreadsheet and database concepts. In
short it promises to provide new levels of control and structure into the
text-oriented tasks which many of us do. The model applications he used to
demo it was the generation of legal documents and letters regarding
transactions. It is sensational in the generation of a richly varied set of
logically-controlled documents. In addition, the underlying concepts allow
enormous diversification from this starting point. I'm in the process of
thinking through its implications for the way I handle my own rather varied
strategies of organizing scientific information.

Lest this sound too congratulatory, I'll add some caveats.
1. I doubt that the full ensemble of elements in this product (including web
integration) will be ready before the end of the year. However, TTG is
talking about September as a target for the first release, which will
include the core elements.
2. This is not going to be a breakthrough for people who write one-time
pieces of a non-technical nature [although it will continue to serve them
well since it will feature a suped-up XW-stype text editor]

If Xy/XW has been dying, then this product promises to be the Phoenix. It
looks to me like it will be worth waiting for.

Steve Shaw