Airborn OS – Open Source and Private Google Docs Alternative | Hacker News Reader

Airborn OS – Open Source and Private Google Docs Alternative

airbornos.com

4 pointstwiss5 comments

Hi HN! I made this. Questions welcome.

In my humble opinion, the most interesting/novel thing about this project is the approach to solving the classic "the code is coming from your server every time I open Airborn OS, so why should I trust it" problem. Basically, I'm using Service Workers to install a small piece of code which from that point on checks that all code matches the version on GitHub [0]. There's a blog post with more info here [1].

[0]: https://github.com/airbornos

[1]: http://blog.airbornos.com/post/2017/08/03/Transparent-Web-Ap...

This is a fairly neat thing! I am a Sandstorm.io user, so stuff like this is always particularly intriguing. I'm not sure I'm sold on the pseudo-desktop design style, but this looks really clean.

I noticed you have some apps in the marketplace (how'd you get Cut the Rope?), though I see some pretty big gaps, you might want to get a good spreadsheet editor in there by default, for example. The market, as I currently see it, looks like what I expect at the bottom dregs of an off-brand Android phone, despite the notable good examples like Cut the Rope and Telegram.

Do you have a good path for users to import/export their content? This is probably the number one thing I think platforms like this need to focus on. Making it as easy as possible for people to migrate from proprietary sources, and of course, making it easy to leave is just as important.

The marketplace is Firefox OS apps. Those are web apps, although Airborn OS also contains a fair amount of Firefox OS-specific code to be able to run them.

Yeah, spreadsheets is probably the biggest missing thing. There's EtherCalc, which I could port, but I don't think it really qualifies as "good" at the moment (the UI is especially bad). Building something from scratch seems like too much work for one person. If anyone wants to help, I'd be glad to hear it :)

The default file format is HTML, so you can export as that, and ODT is also supported, so you upload and edit (and download) ODTs.

RIP Firefox OS. :/ It might be a little challenging to base on a platform with not a lot of future support.

I use EtherCalc as my primary spreadsheet editor, and I can definitely agree it's UI is not it's strongest feature, though, it's way better than having nothing. I definitely noticed how clean FireText looks and feels compared to Etherpad, which is my main text editor.

Regarding export/import, I think the biggest thing (and Sandstorm doesn't do this well either currently) is an easy way to do that in bulk. For example, I'd want to export all of my documents in one batch, so it's something I can quickly do regularly as a backup. And for import, I'd want to see something someday like where I log into an OAuth for Google Drive and it auto-imports all my crud. Consider the import flow for most email services: You log into your old provider, and it uses IMAP to pull all your old mail in. One and done.

That's not to suggest I think this is a quick or easy thing to implement, just food for thought.

> RIP Firefox OS. :/ It might be a little challenging to base on a platform with not a lot of future support.

Yeah, it would've been nice if more apps for Firefox OS had been built, but it's also just web apps, and those are alive and kicking. For example, the Strut presentation editor is a web app which I ported with very little effort.

> I'd want to see something someday like where I log into an OAuth for Google Drive and it auto-imports all my crud.

Good idea, thanks. It seems Google Drive has an API with which you can export documents to HTML, so it should be possible to build.

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