

Show HN: type to me, old-school unix talk for the web - dmd
http://typeto.me

======
dmd
We've created a simple two-person character-at-a-time talk utility modeled
after old-school unix 'talk/ntalk/ytalk' (or, if you like, VMS PHONE).

As far as we're aware, this is the ONLY existing implementation of character-
at-at-time chat available anywhere on the web; we looked pretty hard and
couldn't find any, so we wrote this to scratch our own itch. (The best we'd
come up with prior to this was a shared etherpad doc.)

We would love help (a) making sure this scales to high loads and even more
crucially (b) getting it to work under IE8.

~~~
koopajah
That seems fun! I remember loving this kind of chat 10 years ago when using
ICQ. But on my side it seems buggy. If I connect to myself, one in Firefox and
one in chrome (under linux) only the chrome one is "connected" not the firefox
part. If i try with a friend under chrome and me under firefox, I see him type
but he does not see anything!

Possibility to erase what was typed before could be fun too.

EDIT: tried again and my friend has a message asking him to give me the same
URL I gave him but we are not connected together.

~~~
dmd
I've seen this a few times, and refreshing always fixed it... unless your
friend is on Firefox 3, which we don't support.

~~~
koopajah
Hmmm he is using chrome 5, I tried with latest firefox and chrome too but does
not work even after 10 refresh from him or me.

~~~
dmd
Odd. I can't seem to reproduce this. Anyone else?

------
piranha
Do you take feature requests? If yes, then I would like to have:

\- ability to have multi-user chat (side-by-side rather then one under
another) \- ability to remove arbitrary symbols \- ability to highlight (when
you select some text, it's displayed as highlighted on the other side).

I hope I'm not asking too much. :) And, anyway - thanks! I've been thinking
about writing my own, but was too lazy to experiment with it.

~~~
apgwoz
I think you're missing the point. This implements some nostalgic feature of
Unix. <http://www.manpagez.com/man/1/talk/>

~~~
piranha
I know what it implements, but it could be much more. :P There were few
different implementations of talk which had mentioned improvements (not all of
them in the same time though).

------
medium
INSTANTLY crashes Safari 5.0.5 on OSX 10.6.8 works great in Chrome 7.0.517.41
on OSX 10.6.8

Been using it for 20 minutes, works great, and I love seeing the
typing/mistakes correction.. Parsing links would be helpful.

OK, now friend says I was disconnected ("User Disconnected") on his end and
there was no message for me on my end.

Can reload page and it resumes same chat, without previous chat but same user.

~~~
dmd
Unfortunately I don't have access to that particular configuration; if you or
anyone else has any ideas as to why it crashes we'd love to hear them here or
over at the Github page!

------
tlack
Works great and looks brilliantly simple.

Old timer story: reminds me of the old MajorBBS direct /chat mode. At the
time, the chaotic neutral people would "moof" the other person by sending a
bunch of invisible characters (^H back then) and disconnecting the remote user
as the FIFO buffer filled. I wonder if such a thing would be possible with the
socket-like interface used here and in other apps.

------
lysol
To add to dmd's goals, I'd like to also package up the code socket.io-style,
so character-level updates can be utilized for other types of applications.
The frontend uses Google's diff_match_patch library
(<http://code.google.com/p/google-diff-match-patch/>), which is serving pretty
well so far.

------
chromium
I'm curious, where were you able to host this?

The interface looks fantastic, the simplicity is the killer feature.

------
dmerfield
Ascii dick.

