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.

Mmm...

Finally, a cross-platform version of Mulitplayer Notepad!

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

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

Re:Mmm...

http://gobby.0x539.de/trac/ [0x539.de] seems very cross-platform to me too. Who needs ctrl-z anyway if not using bash?

Re:Mmm...

Those darned youngsters you speak of simply lack vim! Not to mention vigour.

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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!

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!

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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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So you think 1% of the population knows how to set up subversion or mercurial?

I think perhaps you give people too much credit.

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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

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.

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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.

Re:Handy for telecommuters and the like

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.

There's also the Eclipse Communication Framework

ECF home [eclipse.org], articles at IBM DeveloperWorks [ibm.com], InfoQ [infoq.com].

From the latter: ECF is...

• Real-time communication and collaboration features for teams using Eclipse such as peer-to-peer file sharing, remote opening of Eclipse views, screen capture sharing, and real-time shared editing.
• A set of communications APIs and frameworks built upon existing protocols (like Google Talk, XMPP, SSH, HTTP/HTTPS, Rendevous, IRC, and others) for developers to add communications and messaging to their own Equinox-based plugins, or customize and extend the ECF applications.

Interesting

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]

Gobby

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.

Limiting Participation

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?

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]

Google Docs

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.

online + publishers == be careful

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.

CollabEdit

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.