and influence developments via the Sense Forum.
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Microsoft Windows XP® and Windows® 7. Read more on Editor Plugins.
Silva Elm Ltd was established for the purpose of developing software products as an independent software vendor.
The ethos of the company is to provide innovative designs that aspire to technical excellence in originality and implementation with a sensitivity to user expectations.
Reflecting this ethos, Silva Elm is committed to a process of continued enhancement of its products based on feedback from its customers.
Where customers suggest requirements which are not suitable for incorporation as mainstream product enhancments, Silva Elm is willing to consider bespoke software solutions .
Through the Silva Elm name the company founders have stamped a memorial to the elm tree which suffered a huge decline throughout England during the 1970's due to Dutch Elm disease.
To produce a text editor that was highly navigable via a structural view.
The requirement was dictated by the need to provide a common look and feel user interface that would easily integrate into an existing product under development.
There was also a need for a flexible arrangement that would accommodate programmatic editing -- that is, the ability of an external program to edit any line within the document remotely.
The choice of a XML document format required little consideration and similarly so for the use of pre-allocated unique identifiers as navigable tags in preference to more conventional bookmarks.
An object-oriented document editor was born in concept: uniquely identified document objects would comprise collapsible sections, paragraphs, bullets and so on.
With the object-oriented structure, it was apparent that significant user handling qualities would be realizable:
- Tightly controlled line-by-line layout management.
- Remarkably easy structural control.
It also became apparent that the editor might serve two quite separate types of usage:
- As a simple to use editor with low-level (re-)learning curve providing better layout and structural control than many (if not all!) conventional editors.
- As a cross-referencing tool by nature of its programmatic interface and navigable tags.
The object-oriented design naturally imposed a small number of constraints on typical user text entry expectations: once mastered, editing is then found to be surprisingly conventional.
The SENSE Project is not finished: like so many software projects! - However, there becomes a time to release what is, warts and all, and go forward -- there are so many (large and small) improvements, refinements and features that can be added but these will need to be implemented later.
SENSE is therefore offered at two levels of license based functionality:
- Personal Edition : Aimed at anyone who finds freely available editors too limited and high end editors too complex or expensive. SENSE is aimed at a middle ground market providing commonly expected features.
- Professional Edition : Aimed at any organisation that might benefit from robust cross-document referencing and / or ability to apply changes programatically. An API is available with some simple demonstration programs to indicate application - albeit the potential awaits realisation via real application.
Why the name SENSE?...the project was initially attributed the name Notability - it is ideal for making notes. During an early development stage demonstration, it was commented that it is a structured editor. Hence we have Sense - an acronym derived from the Silva Elm Notability Structured Editor. I thank Dave Anders who was a project manager at High Integrity Solutions (HIS) in Romsey, England for that inspiration. I also thank him for the initial encouragement to continue with the development.
I've also got to thank and apologize to Alec Bray, a Principal Consultant in the area of Process Engineering (also my neighbour in Reading). Firstly, thanks to his enthusiasm for the product and sorry, it's simply too much work currently to port this to Linux.. at this time it will only run on various flavours of Microsoft Windows operating systems.
Finally, I must thank my wife for her support while I've toiled away on this over the years (maybe more bearable in Paphos, Cyprus) and also for various sparks of inspiration from the rest of the family. I must particularly thank my son Antony for his unstinting support and valuable suggestions but particularly for putting so much inspired effort into designing the icons and logos.
Dave Ewins.
Company Details
Silva Elm Ltd is a company registered in England and Wales
Registered Number: 06546280
Registered Office:
22 Goodliffe Gardens,
Tilehurst,
Reading,
Berkshire,
UK.
RG31 6FZ