I run an independent software development company, ‘The Augmented Text Company’, where we produce the macOS software ‘Author’ & ‘Reader’.
Alan Kay, who contributed to the first volume of The Future of Text, is noted for having pointed out that the best way to predict the future is to invent it. In that spirit, and with the perspective that to truly understand interactions with text we have to experience the interactions, I produce software for real-world use.
- Author provides rich views and interactions, including an integrated Concept Map of your the concepts you are working on. When done, you can export to PDF with Visual-Meta attached.
- Reader is a PDF viewer which is compatible with all PDF documents, but provides you with extra interactions when the document has Visual-Meta appended, such as better navigation and citing through copy & paste.
Reader supports OpenAI with an ‘Ask AI’ command.
Both have free ‘Basic’ evaluation versions available.
Reading plain text alone may not persuade you how important the future of text is. Experiencing new interactions with text may help convince you.