A Web App For Real-Time Collaborative Writing

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.

Looks great!

[XTrollX]

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!

Handy for telecommuters and the like

[Beyond Opinion]

I work for a web design company which has most of the employees working in one office, and a few employees (including myself) in a separate office in a different state. This could be very useful for making edits, teaching interns, etc. I'm definitely going to show this to the other team.

Re:Mmm...

[David Gerard]

Wikipedia is the largest Massively Multiplayer Online Notepad installation in the world!

(I just forwarded a link to the app to wikien-l.)

Limiting Participation

[stoolpigeon]

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.

Drawing version?

[pzs]

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...

Re:Handy for telecommuters and the like

[arth1]

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.

Re:Gobby

[kwalker]

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.

online + publishers == be careful

[forevermore]

For those of you intending to actually publish your work (but not having actually sold it yet), be very careful about what you do online. Many publishers will not even glance at a manuscript if it has been published in any part before, and online forums (even private ones) and document sharing services are still a very grey area.

No Notepad++?

[Anonymous Coward]

Notepad++ (http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm) has recently come out with version 5.1. One of the best features of this release is the document sharing plugin to go with a very powerful (though, scin regex kinda blows for positive look aheads) notepad tool. I give it full stars as a sharing tool. able to customize ports and you can even have multiple of them on 1 host if your only way to go is to have buddy SSH into your comp and pull up his own session of it.