Some interesting pieces of software have been developed in recent years that aim at replacing the venerable Word as an authoring tool for large and complex writing projects. On the Mac side, two humbly named applications, Ulysses and Scrivener, have most notably emerged as popular writing tools. While everything is nice and fine as long as you write, sharing your output and delivering well-structured (in a technical sense) and formatted documents is a bit cumbersome and usually requires dreary manual intervention. As I had written a script for Word for Windows back in my, well, teens that did just some of that things I until now had to do manually on the Mac, it should be fairly easy to update and extend that thing and write some code.
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Writers love having written. Problem is the time, work and brain twisting necessary between an idea to produce something and actually having done it. Well, it’s not that bad, sometimes you love writing, but sometimes you hate it. Or it bores, is cumbersome, and annoyingly laborious. This is why the human species loves to create machines: to enjoy the fruits of life, ransomed from the need to plug, wash and process them. With the field of information production, it’s about the same. The invention of computerized information processing has led to the rise of numerous attempts to create machines supporting human efforts of thinking, understanding, and creating meanings. In a sense and high on the abstraction layers, this is what computing is about in general. More narrowly, the question is how and which kind of software can support individuals in their efforts to gather information, grasp it, recombine it, and create new insights, new meanings, new information, new knowledge. What would be the equivalent of exoskeletons for the brains, which would enable the average brain to easily jump on the notorious shoulders of giants and beyond?
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