A Web App For Real-Time Collaborative Writing 157
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.
Re:Google Docs, Abiword Collaboration,IRC, SVN etc (Score:3, Insightful)
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...
Re:Google Docs, Abiword Collaboration,IRC, SVN etc (Score:3, Insightful)
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:Handy for telecommuters and the like (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Looks great! (Score:2, Insightful)
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?"
Re:Looks great! (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Limiting Participation (Score:3, Insightful)
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.