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A Web App For Real-Time Collaborative Writing
Posted by
kdawson
on Fri Nov 21, 2008 12:05 PM
from the write-on dept.
from the write-on dept.
adamengst writes in with good news for anyone who needs to collaborate remotely on a writing or editing project — coding too. It's especially good news for those using Windows and Linux. Mac users have had SubEthaEdit for a few years now. With EtherPad, two or more people can edit a document and see all the edits simultaneously. EtherPad's main differences from SubEthaEdit: it's a Web application that de facto supports many platforms without the need for a central Mac OS X host; and it's free. Here is a comparison of EtherPad and SubEthaEdit.
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Mmm... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Wikipedia is the largest Massively Multiplayer Online Notepad installation in the world!
(I just forwarded a link to the app to wikien-l.)
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but it's not real time, it's turn based :)
Re:Mmm... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
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Ah. You youngsters use the CTRL keys differently. :-)
CTRL-C: Terminate (SIGTERM)
CTRL-Z: Suspend (SIGSTOP) (resume with "fg")
Undo? "u" does that. Followed by "." to undo again, or another "u" to undo the undo (redo).
And yes, it also allows multiple people to work on the same document.
(Ten points to anyone who can identify my editor).
Re:Mmm... (Score:4, Funny)
Those darned youngsters you speak of simply lack vim! Not to mention vigour.
Parent
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Emacs under X can do it as well:
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Multiple-Displays.html [gnu.org]
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Just then, his eye caught the movement of a curtain. Turning, he could see the buxom blonde looking out at the night.
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He hadn't seen the house earlier, but it's hard to see when you are skydiving on dark rainy night. He hadn't even seen the tree coming at him as he crashed.
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He hadn't seen the house earlier, but it's hard to see when you are skydiving on dark rainy night. He hadn't even seen the tree coming at him as he crashed.
Nor had the bowl of petunias as it muttered 'Oh no, not again'
Looks great! (Score:4, Interesting)
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Have you tried using a version control system such as Subversion or Mercurial? You don't all see the same screen in real time, but it automatically coordinates changes that need to be merged in.
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99% of the population would have no idea where to set up a Subversion or Mercurial. Even in engineering this would have saved us a ton of time. My girlfriend (med student) often has to write reports with a partner. This would allow her to be on the computer anywhere and on AIM or even in the same room and start knocking out the same report instantly.
This is how 'merging' usually goes. Everyone works on their Word / Powerpoint presentation separately. Then you set up a group meeting and merge it together in
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I think perhaps you give people too much credit.
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perosnally I used writely (before it became the google app). And there's some even better ones now like Zoho, which is a ms word look-alike for collaborative writing.
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Yes, it works with text files. (You can store binary files but they can't be merged automatically.) So that does make it unsuitable for documents saved from a word processor, unless you save in text format and add the formatting as the last step.
Well, you can use all sorts of tools to show you the diffs. On Windows I use TortoiseSVN, which shows the two versions of a file with d
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So that does make it unsuitable for documents saved from a word processor, unless you save in text format and add the formatting as the last step.
No, actually, line-based diff is almost entirely useless with written documents. You either have "soft" or "dynamic" word wrap (one line per paragraph), or "static" word wrap (newline on the end of each line). In the first case, a single change in a paragraph marks the *whole* paragraph as changed, and in the second case, a single change causes the paragraph to need to be re-wrapped and again the whole thing is marked as a change.
For written text (latex, html, or plain text), you probably need to use someth
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This looks like a very promising App. As a student, we are assigned group assignments which often involve a partner and an essay. It's always stressful to try and edit our assignments together because it involves emailing it every time we make a correction. This would completely eliminate that frustration, can't wait until this comes out!
I'm surprised no one's mentioned Google Documents [google.com] yet. I've been using it for group assignments since late 2005, when it was called Writely and hadn't been bought out by Google yet.
The first thing I thought when I saw this article was, "This is new?"
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This looks like a very promising App. As a student, we are assigned group assignments which often involve a partner and an essay. It's always stressful to try and edit our assignments together because it involves emailing it every time we make a correction. This would completely eliminate that frustration, can't wait until this comes out!
We use Google docs for this.
Handy for telecommuters and the like (Score:3, Interesting)
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Keep in mind that you expose the documents to people not in your company. A careless remark about something that might affect future stock prices could very well be exploited by someone with access to the servers. Not to mention trade secrets.
Keep communication in-house if you can.
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Re:Handy for telecommuters and the like (Score:5, Insightful)
With phones, you have a contract with the phone company, who accept responsibility for keeping your transmissions private. It's even mandated by law. If someone at the phone company listens in on your talks and acts on the proprietary information, or by negligence allows others to do so, you have a legal claim to redress.
With a web server, no such protection is in place. In fact, most public web servers require that you abide by their EULA, which further reduces your legal status.
You don't have to be paranoid to use common sense. You just need to avoid unnecessary risks. And this is one.
Parent
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There's also the Eclipse Communication Framework (Score:5, Informative)
ECF home [eclipse.org], articles at IBM DeveloperWorks [ibm.com], InfoQ [infoq.com].
From the latter: ECF is...
Interesting (Score:2)
and pretty well-implemented. It doesn't handle deletions, though - something like Word's Track Changes for deletions might be nice.
There's a test room here: http://etherpad.com/as9F1Jh5cu [etherpad.com]
screen -x (Score:2, Informative)
I use `screen -x` for collaborating on anything.
And, to add to this flamebait, I use a good editor (i.e. vi or vim).
Gobby (Score:5, Informative)
Linux and Windows users (And I think there's an OS X port too) can use Gobby [slashdot.org], which is like SubEthaEdit, but free, written in GTK+, includes a free server for collaboration over the net, and zeroconf support for finding users on the local network. Since it's based on GTK+, it has things like syntax highlighting, spellcheck, etc. already available. It should also be in most popular distros' repos already.
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I don't know what kinda busted-ass network you run, but I have used Gobby over a local network and over the Internet to work on everything from documentation to source code to HTML and CSS files. It works like a champ. Several other admins and developers have started using it at my company for collaboration, both "extreme programming" type and "can you help me figure out the problem with X?" things.
The ONLY thing I want from Gobby at this point is an easy way to see who is where within the document.
No Internet? (Score:2)
In the 2 minutes I played with etherpad it blows Gobby out of the water
But which one works over a LAN that is not connected to the Internet, such as an ad-hoc Wi-Fi network or a Wi-Fi network whose access point/router has no ISP uplink? Not everybody can afford a 3G card and a tetherable data plan.
Limiting Participation (Score:5, Interesting)
I've gone through and I haven't seen how one keeps anyone with the url from participating. If there is no mechanism to do this, how long before someone has a script out there that generates random urls and looks for matching documents? I can see how this could become somewhat entertaining or infuriating depending on ones point of view.
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Couldn't this be gotten around by requiring a login password along with the URL that you're about to send to your collaborators? It's unlikely that such an attack could find BOTH the URL and the password at the same time.
The application could generate the password along with the URL, to ensure that it's both random and not readily guessable.
Drawing version? (Score:3, Interesting)
Does anybody know of a collaborative drawing tool in the same vein? This would be great for a play-by-IM roleplaying game, so I could draw a battle map for my players. I could draw the map and they would be able to move their characters when it was their turn. I could even use different background textures to give the maps more character.
Cross platform would be ideal so that I don't have to use Windows...
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Does anybody know of a collaborative drawing tool in the same vein?
You could start your research at Wikipedia: Oekaki [wikipedia.org] and Paint chat [wikipedia.org]
Slashdot EtherPad (Score:2)
Slashdot Etherpad [etherpad.com].
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So, we're having a Slashdot discussion there. Full of "your mom" jokes and other mindless crap. And all of a sudden - BAM!
We're hit by an ASCII goatsex.
Ah, thank you internet for inventing another way to make me want to gouge my eyes out.
EtherPad is dead to me, as of 11:52 AM, CST. lolz.
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Seems like they locked it down, at least the multi-user aspect. Or can other people get in to it?
emacs (Score:2)
You can do real-time simultaneous editing with multi-tty mode in Emacs 23. I don't know how useful it is though.
Google Docs (Score:2)
Google Docs does this really well with shared version control. I've used it several times to do this sort of thing.
Google Docs (Score:3)
I love sub-etha edit and used it for a long time.
But for almost all the same functionality and the ability to do presos, documents and spreadsheet collaboratively and simultaneously Google Docs is pretty awesome.
What could possibly go wrong (Score:2)
Boy, I hope some suckers use this for ultra secret stuff. I will be firing up my script soon enough to figure out those "non-gues
Thoughtslinger (Score:2)
How do these compare with Thoughtslinger?
http://www.thoughtslinger.com/ [thoughtslinger.com]
online + publishers == be careful (Score:4, Interesting)
CollabEdit (Score:4, Informative)
This has been done before, http://collabedit.com/ [collabedit.com] :)
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And while it is true they need a "google docs" account, you can do that with any e-mail address, not just a gmail address...
Google Docs seems just as good, already in place, and better integrated with things like OpenOffice/MS Office, already has spreadsheet/powerpoint capability, etc. I fail to see the point or the hype.
And Google Docs allows you to have collaborators and just viewers...
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Google Docs is great, but it doesn't update in real time. There's always a lag that gets in the way for quick collaboration.
Re:Google Docs, Abiword Collaboration,IRC, SVN etc (Score:2)
> Give us the code, let us host it locally, force user accounts if desired.
In addition, please come mow my lawn, give me some of your famous home-made myrtleberry pie, and a copy of your house keys.