"I love Hackpad. And it's strange because most of what Hackpad does, Google Docs does. And I really like Google Docs."
Google Docs has never felt webby to me. It feels like a big Flash or ActiveX component, as it's mostly aiming to emulate 1990s desktop software, with menu-bar and all. So it carries considerable UI baggage and is not a clean web app with a DOM that could be effectively inspected or manipulated.
For real-time collaboration, I much prefer Etherpad-type tools as they're lightweight. For private one-off docs, I find secret Gists much simpler to deal with.
What other Etherpad-type tools would you recommend?
For dealing with less-tech-literate people, Google Docs is nice because they instantly recognize and understand it (and they can see me collaborating at the same time and I don't need to explain anything).
I was unable to scroll the hackpad document as it was busy thrashing my cpu, then it popped an 'Unresponsive script' error in my browser. Not impressive.
Hackpad looks great, but I tried the link ("Yesterday, we created this document on Hackpad.") and it immediately froze Safari - each and every time I tried it.
Needs to work reliably before I'll consider even a free trial. I could see myself paying money for something like this - so I suggest they fix these issues :-)
Julia here from Hackpad. Sorry to hear you're having performance issues in Safari and Firefox. We just launched a new feature that shows the live position of your active collaborators' cursors, and we're in the process of polishing it to ensure optimal performance across browsers. Thanks for your patience and stay tuned!
No particular reason - hustler is just and has always been my preferred compliment for folks doing awesome stuff, whether in code, offline or anywhere else.
In basketball, a hustling player is the guy who goes the extra distance, works particularly hard and gets by as much on effort as on skill. The guy who throws himself to the ground after the ball if that's what it takes.
The Meteor core team uses Hackpad for almost all our internal text -- technical design documents, checklists and procedures, note taking, drafting emails and website content, and documenting much of what we do and how we do it. I find the spare UX just about perfect for getting ideas down.
We've also experimented with using public hackpads for some core framework design discussions once or twice. It feels like a promising option. I hope we can try more of this.
It's what I wanted to use it for. That, and basic communication.
I just think Google bungled the beta process, trying to treat it like GMail when the same beta model isn't gonna work for anything but e-mail or XMPP.
However, I'm definitely going to recommend this product to my team, as right now we're using Github wikis, which is fine for us developers, but for real business use(as in, the rest of the team), this could be just so much better.
We're excited to hear you're going to recommend Hackpad for your team! I'd be happy to set you up with your own private Pro Site, three months of free service, as well as a private orientation and platform training. Email me at julia@hackpad.com to set up some time.
Exactly what I thought about. I enjoyed Google Wave when it came out.
EtherPad was really cool as well - its functionality has been absorbed in Google Docs and elsewhere.
Today a key devops workflow I see on a daily basis is team-based HipChat rooms with deploy / alert notifictions and links to GoogleDocs, especially spreadsheets.
Which somewhat duplicates Goggle Wave - at least how I remember it.
neither me, my wife, or USV has an investment in Hackpad. i always try to disclose such things and mostly do that. when i fail to, my comment community lets me know so i can fix it
(somewhat controversial opinion) I would have rather heard you say that you do have an investment in Hackpad. Why don't you consider making an investment, especially if it brings value to you and USV?
> The reality is, critical readers should read analytic posts and the rest of [the internet] with the blanket assumption that the author is totally "conflicted." ... This turns the conversation to the content, and away from the author, the author's biography and the contents of their IRA account / blind trust. This (the content) is, of course, where the focus should be.
The school for poetic computation (http://sfpc.io) is using hackpad to document our work. Its lightweight enough that people actually use it and the search is good. I also really like the fact that recently edited pads go up top, with a highlight of what was edited - makes it easy to see who is doing what.
My name is Julia and I'm Hackpad's Community and User Research Manager. Hackpad uses your Google contacts in one way only: to expedite the process of inviting collaborators to a Pad. As soon as you begin typing your contact's name, we suggest their email address. We take user privacy very seriously.
This looks neat. The comparison has been made to Google Docs, and obviously it's similar, but I can't help but feel it's almost identical. What are the differences?
There are a number of differences (attribution, the way the stream shows you edit diffs from your team members, the way content such as code and media is handled, the way email integration works, etc).
But fundamentally it is a difference of design intent. Hackpad is not a replacement for a word processor. It is not designed for cosmetically designing papers or reports. Hackpad has been designed from the ground up for collaboration on ideas and for living documents (which evolve over time). It's in use in a number of leading tech companies (airbnb, stripe, upworthy) as well as on the open web.
Google Docs has never felt webby to me. It feels like a big Flash or ActiveX component, as it's mostly aiming to emulate 1990s desktop software, with menu-bar and all. So it carries considerable UI baggage and is not a clean web app with a DOM that could be effectively inspected or manipulated.
For real-time collaboration, I much prefer Etherpad-type tools as they're lightweight. For private one-off docs, I find secret Gists much simpler to deal with.