writing software which plays back all the changes a text go through

March 25, 2011 5:59 AM

i saw a video of software that played back the history of how a text was written, showing all the changes the text went through. I can't remember whether it was existing software or a mock up. Do you know what it was?
posted by compound eye to Computers & Internet (13 answers total)

clearly you needed to develop the text with this piece of software, you couldn't just drop in shakespeare and see how he did it, that would have been a big clue that it was just a mock up
posted by compound eye at 6:05 AM on March 25, 2011

Are you thinking of Google Wave?
posted by Andrhia at 6:07 AM on March 25, 2011

I could be,
I was hoping it wasn't because isn't that gone now?
posted by compound eye at 6:08 AM on March 25, 2011

oh it's still there for now
posted by compound eye at 6:09 AM on March 25, 2011

Yeah it might have been,
maybe I'll set something up with subversion instead then

thank you Andrhia,

I'll leave the question open a bit longer in the faint hope that someone might know something that does exactly what i was imagining
posted by compound eye at 6:17 AM on March 25, 2011

Were you thinking along the lines of IBM's History Flow?
posted by anildash at 6:33 AM on March 25, 2011

This reminds me of Heavy Metal Umlaut, it's an animation of the evolution of a Wikipedia page.
posted by Tom-B at 7:00 AM on March 25, 2011

Paul Graham writing an essay in EtherPad? (no longer available since EtherPad shut down)
posted by djb at 7:14 AM on March 25, 2011

The main Etherpad site has been shut down, but you can still use the software on a number of sites. I like iEtherpad the best---free for public documents or private/group accounts.
posted by aparrish at 7:16 AM on March 25, 2011

Doesn't Wikipedia do that?
posted by musofire at 9:51 AM on March 25, 2011

thank you all those things are very interesting, and in some way achieve what i am looking for.

Etherpad does exactly what I remember, so chances are it's probably the tool from the video I half-remember.

Best of all, it's open source, so I'll download it and have go.
posted by compound eye at 4:07 PM on March 25, 2011

eg. wikipedia, or wave,

I remember a video which you were able to replay each keystroke and past, not just committed edits
posted by compound eye at 4:09 PM on March 25, 2011

on OSX iTerm2 has a replay feature.... it can record terminal sessions and replay them like a video.
posted by TravellingDen at 9:33 PM on March 25, 2011