Who is the target audience? If the target audience is software engineers then I think the marketing text is okay, but could use some simplification as well as a brief description of why I would care. In other words, why aren't my current tools good enough? If the target audience is Google Docs and Word users who are not software developers, then I think they would be lost. For example in the main intro video, one of the first things said is "If you kill -9". I know what that means, but my sales, marketing, etc friends would have no clue.
The product is an objective c library. So yes, it's targeted at developers. This blurb is front and center:
> CoreObject is a version-controlled object database for Objective-C that supports powerful undo, semantic merging, and real-time collaborative editing.
Yes I read that. Then further down I see the following in User Experience:
"Collaborative editing on any document, Easy data sharing between applications, Everything is searchable, past and present"
"On any document" doesn't sound like Objective-C any more. One of the videos shows drawing shapes not source code. If it had "library" in big and bold somewhere then I would probably be like "Ah I see". But the word library is not found on the page except in the description of a minor feature.
Bottom line: I was (still am) confused what this thing is other than it does some cool version-controlled, collaborative editing.
Those are features of the library, and the videos are of the example projects built on the library as a demonstration of what CoreObject enables you to do.
I'm not sure where collaboration enters into it, but it appears to be a storage library for a traditional desktop application that uses a custom file format, like a drawing editor or a spreadsheet.
For every commit on a versioned document (or branch more precisely), CoreObject will compute an object graph diff, and save it as a new revision in the store.
For the collaborative editing, we have a distinct and optional synchronization layer, that can observe in-memory changes to versioned documents, and push the latest object graph diffs over XMPP, between a server (the person sharing the document) and some clients (the invited persons).
Also CoreObject is not strictly limited to GUI or traditional desktop applications, we plan to port it to iOS, and nothing prevents you to use it in a command-line application.
I think many programmers in the open source world are put off by custom file formats and custom network protocols that are only supported by one library. Of course, basing the file format on SqlLite certainly helps, but that's only the bottom level.
It would be nice to have a design doc that explains the SqlLite schema and network protocol, and least a proof of concept for another library that speaks the same protocol that's not written in Objective C. Perhaps this would be the start of a standard that more people would use?
