Hacker News Reader

Comment by Filligree | Hacker News Reader

My main use case for Docs is collaborative fiction writing. There's no concept of "paragraph ownership"; there will be two or more people editing the document, and we'll go over it a half-doze or more times, editing as we go.

The ability to make arbitrary changes is essential for this.

View on HN

There's no permanent paragraph ownership in Airborn OS either, but it's locked for about 10 seconds when you edit a paragraph. Or are you saying that the two editors would be editing the same paragraph at the same time?

Yes, that also happens frequently.

To offer a different use case: as a high school English teacher I will commonly work through a paragraph with a student, commenting and modifying as we discuss. The lock out would be quite frustrating.

I use Google Docs only for work. It never happened that we inadvertently deleted each other's work but it happens that we have cursors in the same paragraph.

Maybe there are multiple reasons for that.

One is that we're not in the business of trolling coworkers and losing time, quite the opposite. However I can understand that when I was little that would be fun sometimes.

Another reason is that we often use another channel to coordinate our work, email (I'll be working on that), chat or voice calls. The risk of undoing someone's work is nil.

With the approach of Airborn it could happen that I have to say "please move your cursor somewhere else so I can show you an alternative" or fix a typo. That would be odd and make us lose time.

Or, you could just wait the ten seconds the lock lasts.

Sounds really pragmatic. Two people editing exactly the same thing at the same time sounds confusing; not just really hard to implement. i.e. Why would anyone want someone amending as they type. This approach makes the user experience simpler and simplifies the implementation. I like it :).

The only scenario where I can see this being a bad decision would be for bots. For example, if you had a spell checker loaded which ran as a separate user rather than under your own session; so the spell checker couldn't auto-correct words until you'd finished typing the sentence. Here I'm imagining something like Rosie the translator bot from the original Google Wave demo... But I don't think you have bots anyway, so this won't be a concern for the present anyway.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com