For a while, I have been curious about Spring,
a Mac OS X application that can’t really be categorized. This very fact is what intrigues me.
To use Spring, you create a “canvas” and you drag various “objects” on to it. Objects are represented in the canvas by images, but once they are in the canvas, they are much more than an image. You can control-click (or right click if you’re a two-button mouse type) on the object’s image and get a menu of various things you can do with the object. If the object represents a person, for example, the menu might include options for emailing or instant messaging that person, or even link to his Amazon.com wishlist. Apparently, it’s not too hard to add your own functions to the menu. Spring also has ideas about how to handle places, products, and Mac OS X applications. In fact, Spring has special handling so that you can drag product images from Amazon.com into a canvas and get an object, even though Amazon themselves haven’t done anything special to their site.
Anyway, I decided to go ahead and make my own Spring object. If you’re a Spring user, you can just drag the image at the left of this paragraph into a Spring canvas, and there you’ll have me. It may even work just to click on it.
For no good reason, I even whipped up a little “Steal These Buttons” style button for Spring: 
. I use a trimmed down variation of these for some badges on my home page. Given the way those badges work, it would be most appropriate if clicking on them would somehow cause an object to be added to Spring, but it doesn’t work that way, so instead, I guess people will have to link the buttons to a web page which has a Spring image on it.
. I use a trimmed down variation of these for some badges on my home page. Given the way those badges work, it would be most appropriate if clicking on them would somehow cause an object to be added to Spring, but it doesn’t work that way, so instead, I guess people will have to link the buttons to a web page which has a Spring image on it.
Update: Spring registers a URL protocol, “spring-add”, so you can make links which talk directly to Spring: click here to add my personal Spring object
To be honest, I’m not sure the visual metaphor for Spring is really going to do much for me. It just doesn’t seem to match my working style, which tends to be all about the command line and keyboard shortcuts more than dragging and dropping. Still, the basic idea making “objects” out of a couple of XML documents in a structured directory is pretty brilliant, and I bet it wouldn’t take too much to figure out a way to do some things with Spring objects even from the command line!