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Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

"A fresh take on documents" that's limited to Apple devices seems like a problem. People usually make documents to share. I suppose there are embubbled Apple users who don't even know anyone who uses something else and who they'd want to share or collaborate with. But that must be an exception.

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Love the word embubbled. Never seen that. Nice. Weirdly I would have gone with enbubbled. I'm not sure why. I know Jebediah Springfield would have preferred the em- to en-. But for some weird, unknowable linguistic reason I would go with the en-. Anyway (and apologies for the offtopicallity), I reckon we should now include embubbled as a key factor in startupland. We have Inadequacy Analysis, Exploitability Analysis and Low Hanging Fruit Analysis. I think it's time for Embubblability Analysis. Phew - whole lotta red underlines in that!

https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2017/04/were-all-e...

I find no occurrences of enbubbled in the ngram viewer.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=embubbled

This new word is poised to liftoff into the Twitter Sphere.

This exchange made me happy. Thank you both.

Have we just witnessed the birth of a word?

I spent a few years on iOS and the number of notetaking apps that only use iCloud or Dropbox was infuriating. There was very rarely a WebDav or NextCloud option.

This is something I've seen an awful lot on iOS. Clearly having Apple give you an SDK is convenient as a developer, but for a huge segment of the market, storing randomly on "someone else's computer" just isn't an option - professionals and others that Apple tends to target.

With the storage framework in recent iOS versions, maybe we'll see more apps support it? It surely can't be too much effort, but I guess the demand is limited.

Do you have any insight into that segment being huge? I’d think it wouldn’t be a very big segment. Some subreddits and HN discuss things in a way almost no one else does. Like privacy and security.

"Huge" is a tough one to quantify, but in speaking to a lot of the regulated sectors like legal, this is a big area, and one that people are waking up to.

One part of the issue is most aren't even aware they're breaking the law (or their regulatory obligations). You're right, there's certainly an online "bubble" around privacy/security, but equally, from the other perspective if you speak to people outside of the "startup tech" industry, they'd say the notion of randomly using third party services with unmanaged storage on personal accounts (a la iCloud) simply isn't an option for them.

I guess when you add it up - regulated financial services, legal, anyone falling under GDPR who needs to show systematic measures in place, any serious business that needs to have processes that out-live any individual staff member, systems based around "convenient personal cloud" suddenly start to become the minority.

Most serious companies won't allow company IP/data to be stored on "personal" systems (which would encompass iCloud and similar).

This is why I require any app to be able to use a hierarchical folder of markdown documents as its store, even if the app is single platform. Currently using Obsidian on the desktop and MWeb on my iPhone, but the docs are just such a collection of markdown so easy to share and no lock-in.

The "cross platform app" ecosystem seems fractured in a way that you must either add 2x to 5x the effort to achieve it, or sacrifice performance and UX.

Software development technology is getting close. A couple few more years maybe and that problem will start to go away fairly rapidly [relatively speaking], like possible 30-40% cross platform by the end of maybe 5 years-ish. 12 year android dev here seeing the light at the end of the tunnel with some newer performant (dev wise and user wise) frameworks and architectural patterns. Of course this all depends on Apple not saying FU to the entire industry in a dramatic, squashing those frameworks with their iron fist sorta way.

How could they? It's not like they tend to use undocumented APIs, do they?

Something along the lines barring the compilation of iOS apps with 3rd party tools or some such in TOS or blocking apps made with them from the App Store outright. Not saying the would, but if they had reason to fear they are losing control of something in their ecosystem, no telling what they would do. Just would not give a zero chance of something crazy as such happening.

They started off like that and got rid of that rule a few years in.

> Software development technology is getting close.

That was the sentiment about wxWidgets and QT in 2006. Reality is, native platforms will always be a moving target.

QT in particular has come a long way and is used today for a lot of enterprise software, but it’s not the panacea that was once envisioned.

The conventional wisdom in those days was that users wanted native look & feel. The success of Electron has pretty much disproven that.

The conventional wisdom was that accessibility was something worth caring about.

It’s totally possible to build accessibility into web apps, including Electron apps.

Accessibility does matter. It’s a fundamental element of usability.

Also "Frictionless sharing and collaboration" seems not valid at all when it exists in the closed ecosystem that is Apple. Probably the decision is to follow with Android and web [windows+linux].

The sharing links send people to a website where they can see a read-only view of the notes which seems pretty good for an app which isn’t cross platform. If you want to collaborate with people in an office then it is likely that either no one has macs or most people have access to them. If you want to collaborate with people outside of an office then there can be similar problems (what if your collaborator doesn’t have MS office?), or I guess you could use LATEX with git or google docs, but they come with their own issues.

That would be more convincing if Notion, Roam, etc., didn't exist.

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