Mac OS X Unwired: A Guide for Home, Office, and the Road

One of the challenges in working in a group is maintaining version control on shared documents. SubEthaEdit (created by a group of three computer science students known as "The Coding Monkeys ") redefined the meaning of collaborative working. Using SubEthaEdit, multiple users can edit a single document at the same time. SubEthaEdit uses Rendezvous to discover other users who can join in and collaborate.

You can download SubEthaEdit from http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/.

1. Launch SubEthaEdit.

2. You can start editing or writing your document in the text editing area Click on the Share button (see Figure 8-15) to share your document with other Rendezvous users.

3. SubEthaEdit will reveal the access control list, showing the people who are currently editing the document (see Figure 8-16).

4. Other users who want to join in need to run SubEthaEdit as well. To see a list of shared documents, click on the Rendezvous button (see Figure 8-17). Here, you can see that Wei Meng Lee is editing a document entitled Untitled.txt .

5. Double-click on the document that you want to edit, and your name will appear in the access control list of the document master (see Figure 8-18). The document owner can then simply select your username and click on the check (to allow access) or cross icon (to deny access).

6. By default, text that every user types is highlighted with a pink background. To choose your own color , go to SubEthaEdit Preferences. You can now distinguish who typed what using the different background colors (see Figure 8-19).