Some time in the past, Sirius-Beta made a few tools. These are no longer available for download

Pomegranate

Pomegranate was a tool that took a process model, parsed it into speech acts and developed a comparating "agility distance" metric. It, and the method it uses, is described in the book on agility.

Turnip

This pretty cool application took collections of well formed process models -- like those from Pomegranate and casts them into a three-D agility metric space so that you can make agility cost benefit decisions. The manual is here.

NisusOutliner

Nisus Software made an authoring tool for Macintosh that was truly outstanding. When I write this (July 2003) there has been no other tool on any platform that has been as strong in writing support. I wrote in Nisus Writer and exported to Framemaker for publishing. But Nisuswriter, great as it was, had no integrated outliner. So I wrote one. It had some features that no other outliner has had and was FrameSGML friendly.

Nisuswriter was not ported to Mac OS X, so is dead. Here is the manual.for my NisusOutliner.

Palimpsest Files

John Alsopp of Western Civilization once wrote a hypertext application called Palimpsest. It supported some very advanced features only present in research tools. I was the world's heaviest user of this tool. One very large piece took about 4000 hours: a copy of Finnegans Wake with about 70,000 annotations and a particular link to two views: a map of Dublin (and environs) and a geometric cosmology. Palimpsest did not survive the transition from System 7 to 9. The FW source has some contested property rights issues as well. I intend to remake this in an Eastgate product for my own use.

Microsoft

Some recollections and an essay on Bill Gates and Microsoft practices has been removed by request.