The main focus of Hyperwords is to augment knowledge worker teams.
For Knowledge Workers we built Hyperwords for Firefox and we will soon have Hyperwords for all Windows applications.
Why?
Hyperwords was created from a dream to make networked computers more useful to help people think & solve problems.
Direction
The philosophy and work of Doug Engelbart (who essentially invented interactive computing - www.invisiblerevolution.net & www.bootstrap.org) came to influence our thinking and outlook. His philosophy is based on his interest in:
...augmenting people's ability to solve complex, urgent problems collectively.
Focus
With Doug as inspiration and collaborator, we decided to scope down to build something which would be useful as a 'force-multuplier' (to use a military term): something that doesn't intend to be introduced as a whole new system, but something which makes what you already have more powerful. This was necessary since we are a very small team!
We also looked at what aspects of knowledge work was not receiving as much attention as others. Advanced 3D modeling, image editing, video and audio was receiving serious attention we noticed but plain old text was a bit neglected.
Text
We decided to bring more of the power of the computer to bear to make text more usefully interactive.
Text is after all the medium through which much of knowledge is communicated and stored.
Hyper
All words on interactive computers are 'hyper' in that you can do more with them than you can with words on paper. We aim to make this 'hyper' aspect of electronic text more accessible and more useful.
So why not just call it 'Hypertext'? The reason is that Ted Nelson's idea of Hypertext has a very precise meaning: "Non-sequential writing with free user movement" and what we experience on the web today is the simple and powerful 'hyperlink' devoid much of Ted's original ideas.
Doug asked the audience at a Hypertext conference what they mean by the prefix 'hyper'. We aim to define it simply as deeply & usefully interactive'.
This is better explained at the web site for the 40th anniversary of Doug's 1968 world-changing demo: www.68anniversary.org/tools
In Reality...
After spending a significant amount of time questioning what interactive text is, we decided to build simple and effective methods for applying commands to selections of text. That is the essence of Hyperwords.
For Knowledge Workers
The user Hyperwords aims to support is the knowledge worker - defined by us as:
Anyone who is serious about how they interact with their information.
As a knowledge worker your job is not to simply read what's out there and write about it.
Your job is of course to critically review the information available by comparing and contrasting it with other information and when you have gained a good understanding, to produce useful results in a coherent form which is useful for others to understand and act upon.
Would you agree?
This is where making text more usefully interactive can help you.
Useful
Hyperwords helps you by providing frequently needed knowledge tools at the tip of your finger - in terms of giving you more information, dealing with what you already have and sharing it with others.
If you want to look something up in a dictionary, encyclopedia, wikipedia or in any database you yourself have added, it's one simple click.
If you want to share what you have found - just one click.
Just because Hyperwords aims to augment your knowledge work doesn't mean it should be hard to learn. A smooth learning curve with different types of interaction accessible at different levels of familiarity with the system is essential.
Since it's impossible to make everything equally easy to do, it's important to prioritize what functions need to be at the forefront of your command arsenal and what would serve you equally well if it's put a little to the side.
Or to put it in a different way - some commands just won't get used if they are not incredibly quickly accessible with absolutely minimal cognitive load (such as searching the web, since you already have relative easy ways to do this) while others provide a more substantial benefit and can therefore afford to be a small distance further away (such as reformatting a long document to give you better understanding of what you are looking at).
Powerful
One-click simplicity is great but as you grow more familiar with the system it can seem a little slow to mouse through the hierarchical menu to choose your command. This is when it becomes useful to start using the keyboard shortcuts. Most of the keyboard shortcuts are the same as the first letter of the command. So for example:
To look something up in Wikipedia, which is in the 'references' section of the Hyperwords menu, you can select the text you want to look up and hit 'r' for 'references' and then 'w' for 'wikipedia'. Done.
If you want to translate from English to Chinese you select the text you want to translate and hit 't,e,c' for 'translate - from English - to Chinese'.
We built advanced features for the serious knowledge workers.
For example, the Views lets you change the layout of the page. Have a look in the User Guide for more Information on Views and other more advanced features such as Keyboard Shortcuts and Auto-Contents.
Relevant
You can see how the Hyperwords features map on to the knowledge work process in this pdf:
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Cost Effective
Hyperwords for Firefox is free from payment but as with any new tool there is of course an investment in time and effort. Therefore we have a guarantee: If you have a problem with Hyperwords or you feel there is something it can do better or in a different way - we will listen to you.
Hyperwords' continual growth and evolution is very much a result of the user-community.
Get in touch, we'd love to hear from you!
Frode, Fleur, Rob & Mikhail
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