Interview: LinkBack creator, Charles Jolley


Last week, Nisus, The Omni Group and Blacksmith introduced LinkBack, a technology for linking objects in documents back to the application that created them. Since then, Stone Design has also signed to include the technology in their products, as well.

These vendors represent the cream the of the independent developers working on the Mac. Naturally, with the "best-of-the-best" commiting their bread-n-butter products to LinkBack, a few questions present themselves.

We spoke with Charles Jolley, LinkBack creator and a Nisus employee, about what this technology is, what it can do and possible future directions:

• Please tell me a little about LinkBack and what motivated you to create it?

I first started thinking about creating LinkBack after creating several Nisus Writer Express [see IGM's review document with diagrams I created in OmniGraffle. I missed the ability to just double click a graphic and edit it instead of having to keep my drawings in a separate document. We also get requests from customers who are in the same situation, so we decided this would be something worth looking into.

We looked around some for technologies that would do the job, but we didn't really find anything. Technologies like Microsoft OLE do what we want but none are widely supported because they are complicated and costly for developers to support. So, we came up with LinkBack, which is really simple for developers, and we decided to make it open source so anyone can use it.

I pitched LinkBack to Tony Rennier at Chartsmith and Ken Case at The Omni Group at WWDC in 2004. We all agreed this would be something that would really help out our users. Since then it has just been a matter of fitting LinkBack into our product schedules.

• Can you explain the relationship between Nisus and LinkBack, as well as how the other vendors relate, as well?

Nisus developed LinkBack in 2004. Chartsmith and The Omni Group signed on in mid 2004 and they have provided valuable feedback and support for the project. LinkBack is only useful if several different vendors support it, so having their involvement has been key.

• Is this a proprietary technology?

LinkBack is available as an open source SDK. Anyone can download the source today from the LinkBack website.

• What extensions of this technology are planned (imagined)?

We are just starting to imagine what is possible with this technology, but mostly LinkBack is about getting developers to work together on this function so we are mostly focused on delivering something that does what it needs to do very well.

• Is LinkBack Rendezvous aware? Are there plans to add this functionality?

At this point, LinkBack is not the kind of technology that could benefit from using Rendezvous. We are thinking about some things in this area, but nothing too concrete yet.

• Is there anything else you'd like to share about LinkBack?

Our primary goal with LinkBack is to make it easier for users to work with all the great independent software available on Mac OS X. I really encourage developers to check out LinkBack and see if they can use it in their own application. Supporting it can require as little as a few dozen lines of code, but as each new developer supports it, the benefits to users grow exponentially.

Thank you, Charles.

You can learn more about Linkback here.