Product Reviews

Every now and then a piece of software comes along that prompts purrs of delight because it's just so neat. Hydra is one of those applications, and the delight is doubled when you realise you don't have to pay for it.

Hydra combines two basic functions: text editing and networking. It's a collaborative text editor, allowing several people to edit the same document simultaneously over a network.

The user who starts the shared document has complete control over who else gets to edit it. They are informed of all attempts to join the document, and can approve or ban requests as they see fit. The control doesn't end there; the 'owner' of the document can kick off any of the other contributors at any time if their contributions aren't helping.

Share and share alike

Hydra's attraction is that it enables document sharing over Rendezvous networks, and that feature works well. Once you're connected to the network, Hydra hunts down all the shared documents available to it. You just select which one you want to join in with, and wait for the document owner to approve you.

All the contributors to a document are assigned a different colour (both visible and changeable in the pop-out list of participants), which is used to highlight their text additions and to show their cursor.

Watching multiple cursors bobbing around within the same chunk of text can be disconcerting for a moment, but within minutes it feels quite natural.

When there are many different participants editing at once, there's the potential for all the changes to get a bit confusing, but that's solved by the useful "Follow..." feature, where you select one person and can sit back and watch what they type. Your view will follow theirs as they scroll around their copy of the document.

Better still, the scrollbar acts as another signpost showing, with small, coloured blobs, where different users are within a long file. Lost someone and want to grab their

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attention? Look for the relevant blob in the scrollbar and drag yourself towards it.

Editing on the WebThe potential uses of Hydra are obvious: taking minutes in meetings, writing letters from a group, programming, even as a simple local-network chat program.

If all that sounds great for working on shared documents over a local network, imagine what it makes possible over an Internet connection. Anyone with a static IP address can host their own Hydra files for others to connect to.

Joining a remote document is almost as simple as joining a local one. Simply enter the IP address of the host computer, and after a short wait Hydra displays a list of all available shared documents.

What's fascinating about working together in real time is how quickly tasks can be carried out. Writing a fairly lengthy HTML file with a colleague in preparation for this review was an eye-opening experience. What might have been achieved through days of making our own edits, emailing them to the other person, making more edits, emailing back, and so on, was completed in an evening using Hydra.

Once we had decided who was going to write what, each of us was able to write what was in our minds. Seeing what changes the other author made meant we could instantly add responses, suggest edits, even correct one another's spelling mistakes - although Hydra makes use of the standard Mac OS X spellchecking feature.

It was interesting to see that even in something like a shared text document, it was easy to fall into the conventions used on IRC and Instant Messaging networks during discussions about the document, as opposed to edits made to it.

In the event of some kind of network problem and unexpected disconnection from the remote file, Hydra warns you of the problem. Since you've got the text on your screen, it's easy to save a copy locally before attempting to reconnect to the original file. Since there are likely to be several people doing this for the same document, it makes it less likely that large amounts of work will be disastrously lost.

There's very little to criticise about Hydra. It is limited to plain text files, so there's no formatting available. As a text editor it has limited features compared with flashier, more professional editors like BBEdit, but all the essential features are there, including support for many different syntax colouring styles.

Hydra's multi-user design reflects its potential as a cross-platform application. Programmers and idle gossips alike will find a good use to put it to.