Philosophy and Lore of the

Swiss Army Fork

The venerable Swiss army knife is the mother of all "Multi-purpose Tools". In the software world, when your program performs multiple tasks, it often becomes known as "The Swiss Army Knife" of a particular class of programs. PhotoShop, Cool Edit, and the Norton Utilities are all examples of programs commanly referred to as a Swiss Army Knife in their respective fields.

The problem with a successful Swiss army knife is that it inspires countless knockoffs and "work alike" programs. For example, all the current image processing programs are very similar: Photoshop PhotoPaint, Picture Window, and even the GIMP. If one introduces a really cool feature, you bet the others will all have it in the next revision or two.

The Swiss Army Fork (pictures coming soon) is a symbol that stands for:

Finding out what the actual work is, then creating a workflow that accomplishes that task efficiently, even if that means doing something in a way that has never been done before. The Swiss Army Fork has been with me for years, mostly in my speech recognition and audio editing tools, such as "Talk V" and "Word Whacker".

It's my reaction to all the "look alike" tools, and the continual comparisons of programs to the venerable "Swiss Army Knife".

In audio (my main field) "Cool Edit" isn't very much different from "Gold Wave", for example. They're all "electronic tape recorders", very much geared towards cutting and splicing "tape", running it through effects boxes, etc. Phonetic labeling tools are quite similar to each other. There are more similarities between “SFS” and “EMU” than there are differences.

My "Dicer" and "Word Whacker" ultimatly end up with the same results as these programs, but they do it in such a different way that the workflow bears no resemblance to a tape editing session. It's all about labling, then telling the editor what to do with the labeled sections.