This is a great example of a Minimum Viable Product. It has just enough features to be useful (multiple accounts, search, editing) and no more. From the website, they have plans to iterate quickly, with the help of what I'm sure will be a lot of feedback from the initial release. This kind of discipline in feature selection is admirable, and something we should all strive for in app development.
My only critique is that in the new user dialog, the app showed a screenshot of adding an account _before_ the screen where you could actually add an account. I found this a little confusing (why can't I click to add my account now?). I wouldn't mind seeing that screenshot after adding my first account to let me know how to add another.
Hi thomas-st, thanks a lot for bring this up. we just fixed the issue and changed credentials on the server as well. All transmission also happen securely through HTTPS and contents are only stored on Google's server, not ours.
Hi Xb95, we first removed the heroku add-on and thought that it would automatically destroy the database, but that turned out not to be the case. So what we did to fix the issue was purge all of the tables from the database. Now the credentials still work, but they reach an empty database without any content. We're working on revoking the access token for all affected users right now. Thanks for helping us through this.
Hi Thomas, just following up on this. After fixing the security issue, we revoked access for all of the potentially affected user accounts and emailed users individually to apprise them of the situation and the steps we took to address it.
We've turned off debug mode and reset our database credentials. We are looking through the database server access log right now and going to make sure that 1) all connections were made from our own servers and 2) users in the timeframe affected will be notified of the issue and guided to resolve it as soon as possible
Don't deploy Django apps with DEBUG=True in production. Or more generally, don't let your production environment spit our error messages with debug information that reveals internals of your app.
I suggest you not use this app right now. It is currently throwing up debug pages that include information that allows someone to connect to Postgres and dump the database containing information about your documents.
App developers -- please update your Heroku settings and/or turn this off immediately. You are exposing confidential company information to the wild.
Hi xb95, thanks for alerting us to the issue we've turned off debug mode and reset our database credentials. We are looking through the database server access log right now and going to make sure that 1) all connections were made from our own servers and 2) users in the timeframe affected will be notified of the issue access token revoked immediately.
This is fantastic and solves a huge pain point. Google docs is a crutch for most people, but the interface and accessing it is generally terrible. The onboarding was simple. This is a good start, I'm looking forward to what you guys do next. As for feature requests, I'd like to see collapsible sidebars, the real estate on the editing is a bit small. Good luck guys!
This is awesome. Navigating Google Docs is the worst. But PLEASE do away with the preview mode. I don't want to have to click edit all the time, and I don't really lose anything by just always having the web view.
At least for spreadsheets get rid of it. I could see it being nice to remove all the junk chrome that Google puts around docs though. But if I'm viewing a spreadsheet, not being able to add to cells is useless.
Try double clicking on either the preview or the list of documents. That will get you into the edit mode right away without having to click on the edit button
One small criticism... Calling your app "Collections" leads to some ominous looking emails when you contact customers: "This is Mike from Collections" makes me immediately feel like I've forgotten to pay a bill.
Kind of confused by this heroku error message I received? Are you storing my gmail credentials on heroku? When I tried again I have a google /looking/ login screen?
I haven't used this so I'm not sure what's going on, but I believe OAuth involves a redirect back to servers controlled by the third party to actually do something with the authentication token. This doesn't strike me as necessarily fishy.
Hi bdittmer, we don't store any of your content, nor any of your passwords. We only store meta data that describes the organization of your documents and do so server-side so that we can add features in an upcoming release that we otherwise wouldn't be unable to add.
Well I'm not at a Mac so I can't confirm but it's unfortunate to see such misinformation in this thread. I apologize for repeating it, I was too trusting of other comments.
Since you are framing in the login with webkit, why not show the URL as well? User's need to see htts://google.com or they'll assume it's a phishing attack.
Super nice, but I worry about the slower webkit in webview. If it is much slower, you would get a better experience in the browser, despite the nice UI additions in this app.
This is the case at least with apps from Mac App Store. Safari uses WebKit2 which is a private framework. If you want to ship your app on Mac App Store you have to use WebKit1 which does not support split-process model. Flags that enable GPU accelerated compositing are also private on Lion.
I know that this isn't really related to the application, but anyway...
Please, don't let the browser scale the images for you. I don't like opening a site, and seeing something like this (http://sadpanda.us/images/1078451-DUYING8.png).
Beside that, this client seems something really awesome, especially the ability to easily edit docs from different accounts.
Firefox. Yes, it's a know problem and there is already a patch, but as always is taking forever to get approved.
And yes, Chrome do a better job, but still it doesn't look totally right.
Last semester I did a big group project using Google Docs but we kept running into an issue where the spacing was different on everyone's computers. The title page would look perfect on one computer and overflow to the next page on another. This was in Chrome on OS X and Ubuntu. It really made me pine for native apps.
I recently did a small group project in which we shared a .doc on dropbox between users on Windows and Ubuntu. We had the same issue, as well as disappearing page numbers and other spooky trivia. Multi-user document editing is hand-wavy art at best.
One of my favorite things about this is its presentation. You've placed your app in something that people lust after (a macbookair) and then something 'cool' inside of that (x-men).
Probably more compelling than a screen shot of a spreadsheet or a table, I bet it triggered an "I WANT THIS" reflex that I wasn't consciously aware of.
I love it. I have three different Google accounts I use for docs and being able to not have to open up a new tab just to see the other docs is worth the download. The only thing I'd want is a little bit less agnosticism about which docs belong to which accounts.
Awesome! Now I don't have to switch accounts! Sparrow for Google Docs. Now make an app for iphone! It's annoying to open webpage to access google docs on iphone :/
An icon to access the sort menu would make the interface a little easier to use. Context meus are nice, but they should be a shortcut to an action rather than the only way to trigger it.
I also noticed that the search box only searches document titles. It would be nice to have it filter document titles as you type, and then perform a full-text search when the user hits enter (like Google's online Drive search).
Ah. Yes, that was precisely what I was looking for. It wasn't very obvious though, so you might want to add some more visual ways to make the user aware that the option exists.
Good work guys, i tried it but...I don't really understand why do we need a desktop client. With google drive all the documents/colelction are available offline and accessible with one click from spotlight "cmd+space -> name of the document - et voilà"
