This morning I downloaded and installed Hydra. It's a very nice MacOS X application. Basically a programming-oriented text editor where more authors can work on the same document at the same time, and I mean really at the same time: you see text changing in real time when other people edit it. Since it is rendezvous enabled, it's a zero configuration application: you see a list of documents opened (and shared) by other users and you can request permission to edit them.

I'm not a programmer, but I'm not sure that this kind of approach could actually help development. What I saw is a very interesting collaboration tool. It's better than IM (anyone can edit text in any part of the documenet) and it's a very fresh and interesting new approach to collaboration. Build an outliner in the application (programmers should love writing code in an outliners, and if they don't they should try), and I'm sold.