Near-Time Inc. is releasing Flow 1.5 now, and company CEO Reid Conrad and software developer Blake Watters talked to Publish.com while at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference here.

"Our sense is that desktop and Web-based content should be merging. Our sense is that using Web-based standards to transmit content is the right way to go," Conrad said.

Rule No. 1 for Flow, Watters said, is that everything is a page. Pages are used to author and gather all types of content in Flow and Current. Text content takes the form of editable, WYSIWYG text pages. Pages also can be used to display Web sites or to read syndicated content (RSS and Atom feeds). Finally, pages can be used to store your application files of all types.

Near-Time's Conrad said he doesn't see his company's product competing with the QuarkXPresses or InDesigns of the world. "We're managing text-based content. We output in HTML and support many Web standards, but our whole focus is text-based content," Conrad said.

"We grab static Web pages, grab and archive links, and grab RSS feeds. Flow adds to that collaboration—a virtual space to share this content. It is all collected and aggregated, and is available for versioning, repurposing."

Click here to read more about Near-Time.

Conrad said the user base for Flow has been professional Mac users, business-orientated users and many in the higher-education field who do a lot of collaborative products.

"They see e-mail as broken," Conrad said. "From their standpoint, anyway, you have to deal with spam and viruses, and there's no rich collaborative environment using e-mail."

Probably the closest competitor for Near-Time is Groove Networks' Groove Virtual Office. Microsoft finished its purchase of Groove on April 5.

"We're working from a standards-based arena for collaboration," Conrad said.

The basics for this integrated information life cycle within Flow include:

Author: At its core, Flow is a hypertext authoring system. Flow's WYSIWYG text editor produces standard RTF output and includes some styling options. Flow has both word processing and Web authoring tools, and text pages can be linked to other text pages, to Web pages, to syndicated feeds, or to files in the same way that pages are linked within a Web site. There is also version and change history via archiving.

Gather: The content you encounter—from plain text to binary applications—can be added to a Flow page through drag-and-drop or through a "Gather into Flow" option of the Services menu. With text editing, Web browsing and RSS/Atom news reading built into Flow, you can gather and archive text and Web resources.

Organize: Flow's organizational system supports many organizational schemes and provides various ways to access the same page of information. Flow automates some organizational tasks. A user can sort a wide range of metadata and dynamic, rule-based aggregation through smart folios (similar to a Smart Playlist in iTunes) and digest pages. Flow offers a set of organizational structures from folders to folios to pages to marks.

Marks add another layer of structure to content and pages. Any chunk of selected text can be marked by selecting from a list of built-in marks. A user also can create new marks.

Collaborate: A Flow share space enables multiple users to access, organize and edit the same content. Sharing within Flow is peer-to-peer—the pages you create in Flow always stay with you, stored on your computer. When a folio is shared among a group of peers, Flow's synchronization process ensures that the latest copy of the page on a computer matches the copy stored by others.

"Everything is always with you. It's on your desktop, but Flow is managing all of it for you," Conrad said. "You have a Web browser, text editor, all your information right at your fingertips, and you can manage it and view it in any number of ways."

Publish: Flow's server spaces enable you to publish your content to different audiences, including non-Flow users, via a host of standards-based options. Content can be uploaded to a Web server or iDisk, posted to a Weblog, syndicated as an RSS feed or sent to an e-mail address.

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