Show HN: FastDocs – Speed up creating Google Docs at home or work | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: FastDocs – Speed up creating Google Docs at home or work

fastdocs.co

46 pointsflinner14 comments

Somewhat relevant to this topic: If I'm editing a Google Doc in a Driver folder, and I create a new document, I want that document to be in that same folder, like all other programs that have this functionality. Does anyone know how I can do this? I keep getting my new documents showing up in my root folder so I end up with a bunch of missing docs when I'm creating a lot of them at once.

yeah that's the trick. I don't want a million untitled docs at my root. Launching the doc from a Drive folder is critical for many/most user's mental organization. Will be interesting to see how fastdocs will solve this without reinventing the Drive, err.. wheel.

....I love it already. I practically live inside Google Drive for work.

Question for the maker or anyone else: how can I turn these into bookmarklets so I can save them with favicons to my bookmarks bar?

Bookmark https://docs.google.com/document/create ? Or am I missing something?

Yeah, I don't see the point also. You can also create a shortcut in Chrome or Firefox for it.

I hope all users do create the shortcuts. It's definitely a better experience. But if you're using a friend's computer or are on a different browser where you don't have the bookmark, fastdocs.co is a friendly, fast way to quickly access the shortcut.

There are unique URLs for each document type, and they are also different per platform (web/iOS/android). So, yes bookmarks are great, but it's helpful to have all the necessary links in one place.

the different urls are in the source:

    var urls = {
				"web": {
					"doc": "https://docs.google.com/document/create",
					"sheet": "https://sheets.google.com/create",
					"presentation": "https://slides.google.com/create",
					"drawing": "https://drawings.google.com/create"
				},
				"ios": {
					"doc": "googledocs://docs.google.com/document/create",
					"sheet": "googlesheets://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?new",
					"presentation": "googleslides://docs.google.com/presentation/create",
					"drawing": "https://drawings.google.com/create"
				},
				"android": {
					"doc": "intent://#Intent;package=com.google.android.apps.docs.editors.docs;end",
					"sheet": "intent://#Intent;package=com.google.android.apps.docs.editors.sheets;end",
					"presentation": "intent://#Intent;package=com.google.android.apps.docs.editors.slides;end",
					"drawing": "https://drawings.google.com/create"
				},
			}

Creator here. Yes, bookmarks are the best user experience here. That's why direct links are included on the about page (or you can right-click, save-as on the homepage links too). You can drag/drop the bookmarks on the about page (fastdocs.co/about.html) to have the bookmarks pre-populate with relevant text titles. Thanks for the feedback!

Bug report on the "about" page: http://screencast.com/t/xdSZrifx5Ct0

Had exactly the same reaction.

Quick google yields: https://github.com/kyletns/quick-docs

Bit involved to set up, but does the trick.

@flinner - would you be prepared to host something similar as an improvement on the bookmarks?

Useful. Interestingly, starting a clean and blank new doc is notably faster from this page than from the Google Docs/Drive file listing page.

Thanks for the feedback! Yes, on my computer it's 85% faster using the direct links than loading drive.google.com. See the head to head matchup on the about page: fastdocs.co/about.html

The act of starting the document takes roughly the same time (a few miliseconds of difference on my average work PC).

However, this doesn't apply to the "waiting" time required for the Google Drive UI to load, which does take an awful lot of time (compared to the minimalistic FastDocs UI).

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