Show HN: Jotleaf is a free-form, collaborative canvas for web content | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Jotleaf is a free-form, collaborative canvas for web content

jotleaf.com

68 pointsbdr21 comments

I upvoted this because I upvote every genuine Show HN, but I think you need to give more compelling reasons to use the product over what I (and I'm sure others) are already using.

In what ways is this more useful than the Google Drawings already in Google Drive? Google drawings lets you:

* Edit drawings online in real time with anyone you choose, and invite others to view your edits in real time.

* Chat with others who are editing your drawing, from within the drawings editor.

* Publish drawings online to the world as images, or download them in standard formats.

* Insert text, shapes, arrows, scribbles, and images from your hard drive or from the Web.

* Lay out drawings precisely with alignment guides, snap to grid, and auto distribution.

* Insert drawings into other Google documents, spreadsheets, or presentations using the web clipboard, then tweak them inline.

Why would I use Jotleaf instead?

Hacker News would be a much better place if everyone would hang around on New for a couple minutes just to upvote every genuine Show HN. I may not have a use for it, but someone might, and most hackers showing their stuff on here get no eyeballs on weekdays.

Thanks for your feedback! There are three categories of usage for an app like this. The first is document creation, where you're trying to produce some content to use somewhere else. Google Drawings is better at this one than Jotleaf. And it shows in their design, which looks and feels like an Office app. The second is social. You mentioned chat. This has been the biggest driver of Jotleaf usage so far, and I think we're better at it. People make a Jotleaf for a group of friends, and follow each other around in realtime, creating different spaces, and talking to each other freely. It's like a spatial chatroom, or a playground. Finally, there's creating destination pages, and we're better at that too. You can create a beautiful Jotleaf and send people a link to it. With the Drawings interface, I don't see that happening. We've tried hard to make your work look good.

I'm curious: you've mentioned a lot of features of Google Drawings. What do you actually use it for?

Awesome job, Andrew. It's very cool what you've built.

A few nits:

- I didn't realize "Try It Now" was a link to play with the product without signing up. This might do better as a button.

- I think the great Jotleafs that people have created really show the potential of the product and provide the inspiration. It would be great to put that stuff at the forefront a bit like you've done with Your World of Text (the homepage is a canvas).

> I didn't realize "Try It Now" was a link to play with the product without signing up. This might do better as a button.

Same here. I was about to _complain_ about the sign up requirement to demo the project. I'm glad I saw your comment. I agree a button would make the link much more obvious.

Same here. You might want to consider making the "try it now" button/link more prominent and above the login form. My 1st instinct was "Oh I have to sign up, forget it."

Ok, I tweaked it a little, see what you think.

Thank you, Walter. I'll take a look.

edit: the link should be more obvious now

It's very nice, I hope it does well.

I may have missed it, but does this do collaborative editing between 2 or more people? That would be the thing that could convince me to use this or something like it. Otherwise it's just a really nice drawing app whose drawback (others would call it a feature) is that I have to get to it through a service.

What I'd really like to see is something that two or more parties could install locally, and collaborate interactively without a server in the middle, or only the lightest of facilitation by a server. Which is not what you're trying to do here and I apologize. What you've done is pretty sweet.

Thank you! Yes, it does. The way this currently works is that you can add people as members to your page, from the settings pane. What's your use case for a locally hosted version?

No specific immediate need. In general I prefer to use things that won't go away when the proprietor does, or that can be implemented and sold by anyone, like email. Anyone can lose interest; Google killed Reader for example.

It's confusing that you have to go into settings then page options to get them back after closing. I'd leave a little tab on the right side of the page so you can toggle it back and forth.

I like it. Can you tell how you do the infinite scrolling bit, or at least give me some hints/links? I've been trying to do something similar, but it's been a pain.

Email me

Your landing page doesn't compel me at all to provide my email address & sign up for an account. The blurb of text is great and all but a few pictures or even a short video clip would go a long way.

Would help to expose padding and box sizing to the user.

What is your tech stack?

Django, Heroku, Postgres, Backbone, CoffeeScript, Pusher, Redis

Love how you do the text handling - click, with little draggable, resizeable text area with handle; how did you build that - jQueryUI with lots of mods, or something even lower level?

And have you seen paperi.st? (http://paperi.st/) Similar kind of idea as far as text entry - and i'd also love to know how they did it.

Dang, works on iPad too.

Thank you! It's basically jQueryUI + lots of thinking about what different user actions should mean. I hadn't seen paperi.st, but the basic effect isn't hard: just create a new auto-focused input where the user clicks.

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