LinkBack brings embedded objects to the Mac OS X

Nisus Software, The Omni Group, and Blacksmith announced LinkBack, a new technology that brings embedded objects to the Mac OS X platform. LinkBack makes it possible to edit text or graphics pasted from another application by double-clicking on it. The technology will be included in future releases of Nisus Writer Express, OmniOutliner, OmniGraffle, and Chartsmith. The technology is also available today as an open source framework for use by other Mac developers.

"Our goal with LinkBack is to make it incredibly easy to use the best Mac applications together," said Charles Jolley, managing director at Nisus Software, Inc. "Many writers who prepare documents in Nisus Writer Express include charts and drawings created in other applications. With LinkBack you can update these documents without having to juggle different files."

LinkBack is similar to Microsoft’s Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) technology or the Edit Graphic Object (EGO) technology popular on the Classic Mac OS, neither of which are widely available on the Mac OS X platform. By offering the LinkBack technology as open source, the companies hope to make it easier for users to use applications on their Mac together.

The LinkBack source and several example applications are available for developers immediately while the new products from Nisus Software, The Omni Group and Blacksmith will be available later this year.

"Copying and pasting are fundamental to the Macintosh experience, yet until now there's been no easy way to edit a diagram that you've pasted into another document," says Ken Case, CEO of The Omni Group. "With LinkBack, when you copy from OmniGraffle to Nisus Writer, OmniOutliner, or another application which supports LinkBack, you won't just be copying a PDF picture of your diagram: you'll also be making an editable copy of the diagram itself."

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jimothy

Very cool!

03/04, 8:50am, EST

Let's hope this gains some traction. As mentioned, Apple's previous attempts (OpenDoc, Publish-and-subscribe, EGO [which I had never before heard of]) never took off. Even in Windows, OLE, though more prominent, has not reached its full potential.

Perhaps as an open source project, this will gain the support it needs. At a minimum, developers can take comfort in knowing that Apple cannot abandon the technology as they did OpenDoc, et al.

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madgunde

'bout freakin' time!

03/04, 9:04am, EST

This is one area that Mac OS X has failed to catch up let alone surpass Windows from a technology point of view. I wish I could paste an Excel spreadsheet into Mail as an editable OLE object. I do this at work all the time in Windows.

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Group51

Neat but

03/04, 4:09pm, EST

those of us who saw that old NeXT Step 3 demo by Steve Job will know that this is resurrecting a very neat feature of NeXT Step.

I am very grateful to these developers.

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Nitride

Uhm, okay

03/04, 6:43pm, EST

Apple did this a long time ago with Publish and Subscribe, and then built a whole new app/data model called OpenDoc (which Apple failed to design effectively for non-geeks to use, failed to market and failed to convince the Big Developers to adopt like most of the "advanced" features of Mac OS X that were created a decade or more ago in classic Mac OS).

Whatever. No one remembers or cares what Apple did in the past. All that anyone sees are iMacs and OS X these days.

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