
“Doo – the document app” will be shutting down - antr
https://doo.net/story.html
======
calinet6
Someday we have to figure out this app-death thing. There has to be a better
way.

If anything, this highlights a problem with the model of SAAS in general:
whether it be 3 years out, 10 years out, or 25 years away, these companies and
the tools we might begin to depend on are not reliably sustainable.

Is there a better model? What if we all had our own private cloud servers,
running apps that we purchased that communicated with each other independent
of a central entity? What if they were as easy to set up as the current SaaS
signup we know so well? What if it were even easier?

Personally I would love a personally-curated library of tools, on which I
could control the end-of-life story. But this also brings up many new
problems. New and interesting problems.

~~~
ChuckMcM
FWIW I think this is _the_ killer issue of this particular point in time. So
far the only idea I can see all the pieces for is a new kind of appliance
which is your personal "cloud." This would be analagous to an air conditioner
or refrigerator in your house, but built with massively open sort of
infrastructure (much like existing appliances use standardized fittings and
filters and what not). Then into this home 'cloud' a platform for hosting
"apps" which you buy and install, and basically run forever until you de-
install them or replace them with something better. A server appliance for the
rest of the world as it were.

~~~
pavlov
So instead of doing timeshare on a remote computer, people could have
appliances that do computing and file storage directly in their homes. We
could simply call these "personal computers", to emphasize the shift in
control.

Imagine how amazing it would be if there was a standard for processor
architecture and a standard for operating system software, so that you could
write software that runs on any such "P.C." appliance out there. (But if that
standard fell into the hands of a corporation, there would certainly be
potential for some scary monopoly abuse.)

~~~
chc
I sense sarcasm here, but there actually isn't a good solution for the
situation you're talking about. PCs are absolutely not standardized and
universally compatible (even ones without ties to a corporation), and none of
the ones we have are a good substitute for a cloud service in many respects.

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
What exactly is not standardized about PCs that would matter for this kind of
application?!

~~~
chc
What is "this kind of application"?

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
Not a BIOS, bootloader, OS kernel, hardware driver?

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skolos
Right about the time doo started we applied to YC with the similar idea and a
working prototype. We were not accepted with the comment that they don't
believe that dealing with documents is such a big problem for most people. We
continued with the app, but eventually realized that was true. This kind of
app would be nice for organizations dealing with tons of documentation - for
example legal services, hospitals. But those organizations face their unique
challenges and general purpose app will not work for them. Figuring out what
would work for them was outside of our expertise and interest, so we shut down
out project. Luckily we spent just half a year on it, not 3 years, like doo.

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mynegation
Incidentally, I checked out doo on OS X just few days ago, thinking it would
help me with my OCR problem. It was a huge install and in the end it could not
connect to my scanner. Not sure it was their problem per se, could be some
peculiarity of my OS X setup, but I figured their main purpose was not what I
wanted.

Here is what I want and it would be interesting to know how other people on HN
solve that. I have no problem managing my digital documents, I have that
covered. However paper (carbon-copy, dead-tree) - now this gives me a lot of
headache. Even though I subscribed to electronic everything I could, I still
many documents coming in paper: user manuals, medical test results, credit
card agreements, some bills etc etc.

I hate managing and storing paper. I tried to setup a system that would scan,
clean up, OCR documents, store searchable PDFs and (the key part) stored PDFs
into folders (in my online backup provider's folder of choice) according to
keywords or even performed some kind of machine learning classification (rent,
medical, receipts, etc).

I had even created a concoction on Linux from SANE command line, ImageMagick,
bunch of Python scripts that did that more or less, but once I moved to OS X
that stopped working and I did not have time to port it yet.

~~~
kstrauser
On OS X, I use DEVONthink Pro Office with a ScanSnap iX500 scanner, and does
pretty much what you're describing. OCR is really good.

While it manages the directory structure, all documents are stored "bare" in
its filesystem folder. That is, you can create a Foo.pdf in DEVONthink and
then access it from ~/Documents/whatever/PDFS/Foo.pdf (or however it names the
directories).

Machine learning classifies incoming documents and can suggest relationships
between them.

I'm not related to them, I promise. :-) I'd bought DT a while back but hadn't
used it much until I got Doo as part of a software bundle. I played with it a
while, realized I already had DT which was much more powerful, and started
using it more.

~~~
rsanders
DEVONthink Pro Office doesn't have the beauty of Doo or a name that's even
remotely decent from a marketing point of view, but it is a workhorse of a doc
processing engine. And it even syncs between multiple computers and Dropbox
for your own private cloud.

The only thing I'm missing now is an Android "client" for it.

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momchenr
Shutting down on St. Patty's day. I have one guess what the team will be doing
that night. Irish style wake.

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dublinben
Their execution history looks really problematic. Launching on Windows 8, then
OSX, then Android, then iOS, then desktop Windows is probably the exact
opposite of a successful roll out. If they were constrained to only releasing
one platform at a time, they did it entirely the wrong way.

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zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
I guess it's a good sign that not that many people are quite that stupid,
despite the cloud hype?

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dewey
And that's why I'm still hesitating to use some kind of proprietary document
management solution like evernote, doo, etc.

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computer
Any chance you'll open source the products?

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almosnow
Except death. Don't kill yourselves kids...

~~~
almosnow
Ok, maybe I'm wrong and there's already a way to cheat death you cunt...

