I promise you that there's absolutely loads of demand from companies for things like this, so long as they can be deployed inside their own network.
On the plus side, you can charge them lots of money. On the negative side, it's not as easy (or cheap!) to market to these people and take care of their needs.
Couldn't you offer something where you host the UI, but you allow a client to provide their own data source? That way the data stays on the client-side, and they never have to worry about upgrades, since you host the UI?
Confluence is the wiki we use where I work and I absolutely hate it (ending tags is like you are opening a tag, so {bold}this would be bold{bold} (example, I don't remember any tags off the top of my head).
If something better came along that helped us rather than slowed us down it would be fantastic.
Oh god. I helped support an overly customized Confluence wiki that was to be THE wiki for the entire company one summer. I quickly grew to hate the software quite strongly. Took me a while to be objective about JIRA's other products when I used them later.
JIRA is the bug tracking software. Atlassian is the company.
JIRA is absolutely terrible as well. I can't express in words how much I hate and dislike JIRA, it's horribly slow and bloated user interface and how complicated it makes certain tasks... using it as an Agile tool makes it even worse especially with Greenhopper the add-on.
I agree... Multi resistant TB is to be preferred, compared to the black plague. :-(
(Mantis might have less capabilities than Jira, but I almost enjoyed working with it. That might have depended on the project. [Edit: On consideration, Mantis was simpler and didn't make me scream from pure hatred.])
After a long journey we settled on Basecamp. It is kind of shitty until you nail down your own workflow and the API allows you a lot of scope to do that through automation.
Redmine here. Currently loving it. Tried lots of others but the multiple projects and the fact that I could use plugins helps.
BaseCamp was by far the worst for me.
Yeah, I've had a hard time figuring out why Atlassian's products became so popular. Good corporate sales people I guess. They charge a lot and the software is nearly universally terrible. Can anyone tell me some reasons I would want to use JIRA instead of Trac or Bugzilla?
We use JIRA + Confluence. We are a huge installation. Both work well, JIRA breaks much more often than Confluence, but then again we are adding a ton of records every single day. To be fair, JIRA breaks because some third party programs are really careless about how they call the API (ask for way too many records, and that sort of thing), if we shut off API access (and only allow JIRA access on the web interface), then all is well.
Confluence is very stable. We have a ton of content in it, and without it we are completely dead in the water. It works well.
Yeah the tags are a bit ambiguous, but I have never seen the tags get in the way. Downtime would get in the way much more.
I'm also a frequent complainer about exactly this sort of thing.
Maybe there is some space in the market for a B2B company which could package up software like this for deployment within the firewalls of the ultimate customer...
"Etherpad Lite" is built on node.js which to me makes it more desirable from a developer standpoint for a number of reasons, mostly for the same reasons one would generally favor node.js over Rhino, so I would definitely look into that one first. https://github.com/Pita/etherpad-lite
Hackpad might have a few advantages but the basic concept of tracking individual changes with colors is built-in to Etherpad and Etherpad Lite.
I really don't like that I have to sign in with Google or Facebook to try it in read/write mode. Read-only mode is not good enough for me to tell if it's something I want to use, and having to use Google or Facebook just to try it is a dealbreaker for me, sorry. Which is a shame, because it looks neat.
Fix that, then I'd be interested in giving it a try.
Edit: I missed the ability to sign in without Google/Facebook. It was a bit too small to notice. That being said... I signed up and gave it a try anyway, despite my misgivings. It's a neat product.
About your login issues, I integrated BrowserID to a project I'm working on the other day, and my god, am I in love. BrowserID.org is beautiful and very well made, easy to use and easy for the users to understand (you don't really realize you're at a third party website).
Integration with django took about ten minutes and I don't have to wrestle with all the forgotten password templates and workflows, changing passwords, storing them securely, etc etc any longer. Also, it doesn't depend on Facebook, Google or anyone else (if I want to run the verification myself).
I really hope it catches on, and I'd strongly recommend it to any dev.
BrowserID looks interesting, but what about on public terminals? The average user may not understand that they're logged in to your site and BrowserID, and as such would leave themselves mistakenly logged in.
See the BrowserID demo site - http://myfavoritebeer.org/ - as an example of this. Once you're logged in, the "logout" button does not truly mean logout - anyone could log you back in in two clicks.
That's a good point, they need a "public terminal" option at browserid.org. I'll email them now.
However, considering that it's pretty easy to add two-factor authentication to the provider (in this case, browserid.org) using Google's open source libraries or any other way, I'd say this is a huge net plus. After all, logging in via Google, Facebook, Twitter or any other such provider has the same weakness.
...to be able to try it out without signing into Google or Facebook. Doesn't do anything fancy, just overrides the function responsible for the "Sign up" pop up, and replaces it with an empty function.
Hope this doesn't piss anyone off, just trying to be helpful. Seems like a nice product that people will enjoy thoroughly.
We do it in order to let you auto-complete your contact's names in order to invite them to pads. We absolutely never email your contacts unless you explicitly invite someone. That said we understand your concern and hence offer the regular email sign-in option.
Consider saying this explicitly during the sign-up process! I avoided using my Google account to log in, but I probably would have gone ahead and done it if I'd known that you weren't going to email my contacts.
I really like the execution of this. It's like the Quick Notes web extension, however my beef with Quick Notes app is that I've lost some notes because I didn't realize that there might be a maximum character limit (not sure if there is or if my notes got wiped some other way).
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mijlebbfndhelmdpml...
Could you make this into a Chrome web app, please?
A long time ago in a startup far far away a friend and I built something like this. Ours was nowhere near as elegant. We would look for CamelCaseWords to kick off the autocomplete but your use of @ is much better.
Delightful moments: pasting an image url embeds the image. Consider letting me backspace the image to get back to the url.
The multi-user edit seemed very smooth. Better than collabedit to this user.
The task list is nice. I'd love to have a title to the task list and be able to query for and surface all task lists across pages.
Please consider supporting #hashtags if only so you can show a tag cloud. The built-in search is great.
I couldn't figure out how to link to a person.
Finally, for users who login with their own email address, please consider letting them in right away. At most have the confirmation step be something they can complete later. Eliminate friction at every turn.
Select some text. Click "Create Pad" and give it a name. The new pad is created with the selected text and the name links to it. This was a little disconcerting at first but it's absolutely the right thing.
I got the @User stuff to work. I think it matches contacts from my google contacts against other users who have signed up for HackPad. That's reasonable.
I can do this in Chrome windows. I can check a checkbox or type a few letters; I get a popup saying "sign in to make edits", but my changes still happened. I can dismiss the popup and again type in a few more letters before the blocking popup.
Designer of EtherPad here. I'm a big fan of HackPad and I encourage people to give it a shot. I get a lot of questions about the best version of EtherPad out there, and HackPad is the one I recommend.
It might not look that different, but they handle similar features in smart ways.
Some of hackpad's features are: task-lists, inline linking and page creation, simple image embedding, search, deep email integration, dropbox integration, mobile (iphone,android) support, an osx launcher/search app. The way hackpad handles basic editing and authorship annotation has also received a lot of attention and iteration. Play with it and let us know what you think!
Inline linking and page creation, image embedding, and search are plugins that are part of the etherpad source and just need to be enabled.
When you say it supports iPhone, does that mean you somehow made the contentEditable issue go away and can edit on iPhone, or is it just read-only support?
Good point. It's very much fun to see more realtime interaction with a forum. You feel less like a lurker and more like a real participant. Still, I think that in itself is good feedback about the product more generally--how you market it--rather than about the specific features.
This looks very interesting! I hope you guys keep improving it. I really would like something like Google Wave/Etherpad that is robust and is actually being developed.
I would happily pay money for something like this if the performance and features can be maintained.
There's no point in including formatting/wysiwyg if the formatting options are so limited. not even the possibility of writing headers?
There's no way to view the source. We're stuck on the wysiwyg editor, include a source view or tab.
No picture upload. While I understand the challenges this raises, you did include a picture embedding feature. Why would I keep my notes on a service that doesn't give me any warranty that the pictures will not be there when I need to access them?
If you offer such feature, you should commit to it. Include a picture upload option, limit user diskspace usage and hotlinking if you're worried about server resources.
Keyboard shortcuts. This targets power users, no keyboard shortcuts is a huge deal breaker. No way I'm going to take my hands away from the keyboard while typing. Include keyboard shortcuts.
On the other hand, there are some really cool details. Flawless implementation of linking and searching, the way it should be done.
Is it possible to embed a hackpad in a site? I really looked around for an embed-able etherpad that can be easily made available into pages for users to collaboratively note down stuff ...
Very neat. I actually had a similar idea 2 or 3 months ago (although I'm sure this is older than that) to modify Etherpad Lite into a wiki to replace the Dokuwiki we currently use at work. I was going to just build a front-end that managed the documents, though, and only pass it off to Etherpad for the actual editing. This is a much more elegant solution, and the "@" linking is genius!
If you were ever considering contributing your modifications back to the community/Etherpad/Etherpad Lite, I would certainly make good use of them. Unfortunately our wiki is a highly integrated component of our custom-built Intranet, so we couldn't make use of a SaaS solution for it. But congrats all the same! I will keep an eye out for potential non-work uses.
Some iPad bugs: I can type newlines and backspaces, but no characters. And when I leave the site, my keyboard stays open on whatever site I visit, which is really strange.
85 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] threadOn the plus side, you can charge them lots of money. On the negative side, it's not as easy (or cheap!) to market to these people and take care of their needs.
If something better came along that helped us rather than slowed us down it would be fantastic.
JIRA is absolutely terrible as well. I can't express in words how much I hate and dislike JIRA, it's horribly slow and bloated user interface and how complicated it makes certain tasks... using it as an Agile tool makes it even worse especially with Greenhopper the add-on.
Having used Bugzilla, Trac, Mantis, MediaWiki, and several other tools I 100% prefer Jira and Confluence...
(Mantis might have less capabilities than Jira, but I almost enjoyed working with it. That might have depended on the project. [Edit: On consideration, Mantis was simpler and didn't make me scream from pure hatred.])
I tend to use Trac most.
Confluence is very stable. We have a ton of content in it, and without it we are completely dead in the water. It works well.
Yeah the tags are a bit ambiguous, but I have never seen the tags get in the way. Downtime would get in the way much more.
Maybe there is some space in the market for a B2B company which could package up software like this for deployment within the firewalls of the ultimate customer...
"Etherpad Lite" is built on node.js which to me makes it more desirable from a developer standpoint for a number of reasons, mostly for the same reasons one would generally favor node.js over Rhino, so I would definitely look into that one first. https://github.com/Pita/etherpad-lite
Hackpad might have a few advantages but the basic concept of tracking individual changes with colors is built-in to Etherpad and Etherpad Lite.
Fix that, then I'd be interested in giving it a try.
Edit: I missed the ability to sign in without Google/Facebook. It was a bit too small to notice. That being said... I signed up and gave it a try anyway, despite my misgivings. It's a neat product.
Integration with django took about ten minutes and I don't have to wrestle with all the forgotten password templates and workflows, changing passwords, storing them securely, etc etc any longer. Also, it doesn't depend on Facebook, Google or anyone else (if I want to run the verification myself).
I really hope it catches on, and I'd strongly recommend it to any dev.
See the BrowserID demo site - http://myfavoritebeer.org/ - as an example of this. Once you're logged in, the "logout" button does not truly mean logout - anyone could log you back in in two clicks.
However, considering that it's pretty easy to add two-factor authentication to the provider (in this case, browserid.org) using Google's open source libraries or any other way, I'd say this is a huge net plus. After all, logging in via Google, Facebook, Twitter or any other such provider has the same weakness.
Hope this doesn't piss anyone off, just trying to be helpful. Seems like a nice product that people will enjoy thoroughly.
It's totally awesome that you're poking around in the code :)
Could you make this into a Chrome web app, please?
A long time ago in a startup far far away a friend and I built something like this. Ours was nowhere near as elegant. We would look for CamelCaseWords to kick off the autocomplete but your use of @ is much better.
Delightful moments: pasting an image url embeds the image. Consider letting me backspace the image to get back to the url.
The multi-user edit seemed very smooth. Better than collabedit to this user.
The task list is nice. I'd love to have a title to the task list and be able to query for and surface all task lists across pages.
Please consider supporting #hashtags if only so you can show a tag cloud. The built-in search is great.
I couldn't figure out how to link to a person.
Finally, for users who login with their own email address, please consider letting them in right away. At most have the confirmation step be something they can complete later. Eliminate friction at every turn.
All in all a really nice product.
Select some text. Click "Create Pad" and give it a name. The new pad is created with the selected text and the name links to it. This was a little disconcerting at first but it's absolutely the right thing.
I got the @User stuff to work. I think it matches contacts from my google contacts against other users who have signed up for HackPad. That's reasonable.
I clicked a checkbox within the page copy, and the entire page suddenly blanked. (It may have just been a coincidence, though.)
Otherwise, looks great. :)
It might not look that different, but they handle similar features in smart ways.
When you say it supports iPhone, does that mean you somehow made the contentEditable issue go away and can edit on iPhone, or is it just read-only support?
Just my 2 cents so that you can try to isolate feedback taking that into account.
I would happily pay money for something like this if the performance and features can be maintained.
There's no point in including formatting/wysiwyg if the formatting options are so limited. not even the possibility of writing headers?
There's no way to view the source. We're stuck on the wysiwyg editor, include a source view or tab.
No picture upload. While I understand the challenges this raises, you did include a picture embedding feature. Why would I keep my notes on a service that doesn't give me any warranty that the pictures will not be there when I need to access them? If you offer such feature, you should commit to it. Include a picture upload option, limit user diskspace usage and hotlinking if you're worried about server resources.
Keyboard shortcuts. This targets power users, no keyboard shortcuts is a huge deal breaker. No way I'm going to take my hands away from the keyboard while typing. Include keyboard shortcuts.
On the other hand, there are some really cool details. Flawless implementation of linking and searching, the way it should be done.
[0] https://github.com/Pita/etherpad-lite/wiki/Sites-that-run-Et...
I think it's best to show that its the best product (by being the best) rather than to explicitly to say it.
Hackpad: The best wiki ever?
If you were ever considering contributing your modifications back to the community/Etherpad/Etherpad Lite, I would certainly make good use of them. Unfortunately our wiki is a highly integrated component of our custom-built Intranet, so we couldn't make use of a SaaS solution for it. But congrats all the same! I will keep an eye out for potential non-work uses.