Hydra’s update makes it not-suck

Hydra got an update, and I must say I am impressed. The little app got major praise after its debut for the interesting concept—live group editing of textual data. You just hit share and people on the LAN or via the net can group-edit a file. Your changes show up as one color, mine as another. The third wheel’s yet another. Sort of like a .txt wiki on steroids.

The main problem with Hydra was that it was a marginal text editor. No BBEdit. That was to be expected because it was new, free, and well not from BareBones. It was above TextEdit, but below BBEdit Lite.

Things just got more interesting though, they introduced a new killer feature… Using Safari 1.0’s WebKit engine, the Hydra folks have figured out how to have a live preview of HTML docs. Very cool. I know of no other editor that does this (at least with a developed HTML rendering engine). The editor has gotten better too. It’s no revolution, but it is making for some competition.

Here’s what I want to see with this live editor… Use OS X’s Apache web server to make things REALLY interesting. If Hydra fed the document through Apache first, users could develop PHP/Perl/Ruby/SSI/Whaterthehell applications with live previews (most likely you’d want to preview after a command). The only editor on the Mac that does this is Zend’s, but it only works for PHP (I don’t think it uses Apache at all… but I could be wrong).