Patera – Dynamic Documents | Hacker News Reader

Patera – Dynamic Documents

patera.io

30 pointsthunderbong12 comments

Reminds me of Tangle (reactive documents) by Bret Victor

Tangle reminds me of mavo.io, although tango is older. I think Mavo aims for more UI heavy stuff (display and editing of structured data) and can read/write a backing store.

I thought I saw something else very similar to tangle years ago, but maybe it was tangle. It'd be interesting to try to do something like tangle from a markdown source.

From the web page, Patera looks similar to coda.io - a wysiwyg editor that tries to expand spreadsheet-like programming to documents.

Yes, I'd say what we're fundamentally trying to do at the moment is make an extensible GUI for Tangle so both technical and non-technical users can build these kind of reactive documents.

This looks cool.

It’s like Excel but instead of a spreadsheet you have a document. Some numbers in the document can be adjusted and other numbers get recalculated from them.

It could also work as a template for e.g. legal documents, where you fill in some text and the rest is boilerplate. And some of the text which is numbers e.g. finances gets automatically calculated from what you input.

I'm a huge fan of assistive note pads. I wish the one I use was more stable and supported multiple files and more solvers: https://parnold-x.github.io/nasc/

Hopefully more tools like this and the OP come out.

The sad thing is the website is basically just a glass pane showing static images. You can't even interact with any of their demo documents (and I assume the underlying tech is such that most of the work happens client-side).

Hi! Maker here -- didn't expect this to get posted so quickly here. Yes, you're quite right this is simply a placeholder while we work on the product.

We should have some real demos to play around with in ~2 weeks time.

Looks quite a bit like GRID: https://grid.is/

Down to the font style and example. Kinda not cool imo. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

There are literally a hundred startups that GRIDS is like, don’t be ridiculous.

Hey cool, can you give me some more examples that fit the description?, down to the font style and example?

Maker here! This is the first time I've seen Grids (which looks incredible). They seem to be taking a slightly different approach but very inspiring.

However we've taken zero inspiration for the page from Grids and I don't feel the brands overlap in any way (although they do use a nice serif).

The example is a document that we're currently using so it seemed logical to put it there as a video. We have some other demo documents that will be added in ~2 weeks.

Didn't expect the site to get posted on HN so quickly.

FileMaker

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