
Show HN: Collaborative Markdown Trees – write Markdown blocks in a tree - marb
https://markdowntree.com
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stephenr
A description/demo might help sell this better than a static image.

I love markdown but I'm not sure I understand what a "markdown tree" is
supposed to be?

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marb
Thanks for the advice! We thought it should be quite clear from the the image
what it does. But probably you are right. We should make an animated gif.

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stephenr
Can you explain what you might use it for?

It may just be me, it's 10pm and I've only had 2 coffees today.

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marb
It could be useful for study notes, programming notes (and code), project
planning. It's like a simple Markdown text, but you can nest one Markdown text
block to another. You can fold branches you don't need now.

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stephenr
I see. So kind of an outliner meets markdown?

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marb
Yes, or maybe markdown meets mindmap

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brudgers
It's an interesting idea. But because we just met, I don't want to provide my
Google identity just to learn more. Is there a demo that does not require my
identity?

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marb
Yeah, many people asked this. Well, I think it's time to add a simple
email/password registration. Come back in a few days! Thanks!

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brudgers
For a 'Show HN', no registration is better for me because I'm just going to
put in a fake address and a guessable password anyway...if I bother to provide
anything at all.

I'd put it this way, 'Show HN' is a good potential way to get feedback on the
implementation and idea for the purpose of improving the project/product.
There's a lot of expertise here.

On the other hand, for most projects it is probably about average in terms of
garnering emails and page views. PR and marketing aren't going to do better.

Finally, in terms of the project, it looks like something I'd expect to see as
open source rather than a product/company. It's cool and potentially useful
and if it were rolled into an IDE or an editor it could be a great feature.

But it's harder to see how much I would gain by a _business_ commitment.
Collaboration means convincing other people to try it, hoping they find it
useful, and then learning how to coordinate use.

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marb
Opensourcing could be an option in future. For now, we would like to see how
people adapt it to their needs. Because it's quite untraditional tool.

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brudgers
But for the collaboration part, it reminds me of Emacs org-mode (which uses a
different markup language than MarkDown). Being open source, org-mode might be
worth looking at because there is a well-established community of users and a
tool that does a lot but does not have strong interactive collaboration. On
the other hand, feature parity with org-mode would be non-trivial.

There might be a Github like business model there: a business that improves
upon an existing tool and grows by expanding the market.

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marb
Speaking about collaboration, most Linux epoch tools don't have a real
collaboration and only synchronize files. Current web apps are much more
oriented to conflict-free synchronization. Markdown Tree also is.

Now if you can format branches in Markdown, drag & drop images and other
files, keep documentation, study notes, code examples and simultaneously write
information with a few more colleagues - that's quite useful I think.

Next version of Markdown Tree should support various embeds like: Youtube,
codepen.io, Google maps, etc. That would allow to have a nice workspace for
various kinds of tasks. And only web apps are capable of it too.

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brudgers
When someone does all those things, what are they making? That is what is the
artifact or useful work? For example, a single Emacs org-file can produce
calendar entries, a web page, source code files and/or administer a server. It
makes stuff that is useful outside of org-mode or Emacs.

In a sense, it captures one of the *nix principles of outputting to
conventional interfaces...it makes things rather than being an end in itself.
If it had collaboration, people might use it to collaborate on writing a
program or a web-page.

