Smart Notebooks: Building a Better Shared Document | Hacker News Reader

Smart Notebooks: Building a Better Shared Document

kickstarter.com

27 pointsrkda13 comments

LiveLoop (http://getliveloop.com) is a PowerPoint plugin that delivers most of the benefits described here (real-time, supports offline, and arbitrarily shareable), with the benefit of working from directly within Microsoft Office. Any number of collaborators can see each other's edits in true keystroke-by-keystroke real-time.

Anyone who signs up from this comment and sends me a feedback email at amal@getliveloop.com gets 2 free years of service.

Disclaimer: CEO of LiveLoop.

Microsoft Office is inherently collaboration unfriendly. It adds platform incompatibilities on top of inertia (which is likely the biggest obstacle).

I'm not sure about totally new document format. But I would like to see something new in file collaboration. A system that is distributed, and standardized (a new protocol for file collaboration, something like http but for binary blobs, p2p is a nice start but something that works better for enterprise collaboration).

Cloud services in this space are nice but they are all centrally managed. And collaboration between different centralized systems doesn't work (say between SharePoint, and Google Drive).

We're trying to use a standardized document format. Building on Atom. Should be able to read serialized format in any blog reader. Microformats will be used to add structure, and JavaScript library will take feed, order elements, and select versions for presentation. Add a little CSS for additional presentation elements (e.g., of an action item list).

I know that. But if you want this to work on broader scale the system needs to support all the files regardless of their format. I'm not saying that what you are proposing is useless, it is just a more vertical solution for a specific needs. Not a general solution for file collaboration problems.

I don't understand why this would have more traction than something either fully-cloud with a central "server" like Google Drive/Docs or Office Live 365 (or even something much simpler like Evernote), or something that's a plugin to MS Office (like the Live bits or Google's Cloud Connect).

In other words, who wants this and for what purpose?

Two reasons: 1. a lot of us like having our own local copies of things (the same rational as Git, when talking a version control system). 2. a lot of use cases REQUIRE a local copy, to support disconnected operations (working on airplanes, working in remote areas with poor connectivity)

Google Drive keeps local copies of things that can be modified offline.

The quality of the introduction video was so poor, I could not even finish watching it. I think the top video is the most important part of any Kickstarter campaign. A properly produced video shows me just how committed the team is, whereas a poorly produced video stops me from contributing immediately.

I wish I were a better video producer. Unfortunately, that started to suck up way to much time, and it seemed better to launch. (It's the old argument - do you put time into fancy PowerPoint slides, or into the project itself.)

Google Docs supports offline duh. What's the point of this ?

If you want to trust everything to Google, and you have reasonable connectivity to Google. Works for a lot of cases, but for things like emergency response and military operations (key targets for the work), one is often working with low-bandwidth, intermittent, mesh networks - choice is set up your own server, or go with a P2P approach, as we are. Also, Google Docs doesn't really do much for version control or allow any kind of process to be added. Now GitHub or Fossil might be better comparisons, but those are oriented toward software development rather than more general purpose document management.

"Also, Google Docs doesn't really do much for version control"

Why would anyone need something beyond Google's 'See revision history' tool? Sure, you're missing some features software engineers are used to, but I'm not understanding why people would need this.

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