That would be pretty awesome actually. All of the noted features, but particularly syntax highlighting and some sort of versioning. Key use case would be "multiplayer programming," rather than just one person driving while the other person stares at the screen over their shoulder.
TeX and Markdown would be good, but they strike me as different enough uses that maybe they'd be a separate app -- with TeX or any other markup language, you'd want to be able to plug it into a publication system, or at least generate nice output (whether DVI, PDF, XML, HTML). Lot of users there as well, but they might be different users.
I don't see why it's worrying. Half the reason to do something like 'make an etherpad competitor' would/should be to learn how it works. Once you have that, there's a ton of different products you could make/morph into.
I would personally be inclined to join the open source development.
But to 'compete', tailored support for any non-technical niche. The equivalent of the "Basecamp for X" phenomenon, where X equals churches, fashion, teachers, politicians, etc.
Something for co-authoring & proofing academic papers would be nice, but I suspect neither a professor or a student would pay for it.
Focus on collaborative editing for things like school reports, round robin novels, etc. Support TeX eventually, images sooner. Then hook it up to print on demand and allow people to sell beautifully bound copies of their stories/theses/whatever right from the site.
I'd like a real-time-updating version of instacalc. Great tool for communicating about calculations, but it sucks having to send the URL back and forth all the time.
Man, I can't wait to build this locally. In its raw form I expect it to work great for essay writing, etc., but I can imagine all kinds of cool modifications, like allowing cross-pad hyperlinks. Let the hacking begin!
Edit: I realize that a local build makes very poor use of etherpad's killer feature--its super-fast realtime collaboration--but the biggest draw for me was actually their "playback" mode.
Not completely related but, super interesting that etherpad actually started as appjet.
via crunchbase:
AppJet intends to simplify the process of writing web applications. The applications are programmed on a web based text editor in the simple but powerful JavaScript programming language. JavaScript is used on both the server and client side.
I guess they ended up realizing that the code editor was a better product/market to go after than the app creation/hosting itself.
Also, interesting that pg invested in the angel round as well, post-YC.
I have my last final today. This comes as a perfect school-is-over-and-i-can-start-hacking-again gift! I'm hoping to be able to integrate LaTeX export into this so I can collaborate on LaTeX reports without having to download and build manually.
That's pretty cool! But only useful for the few of my friends that would know how to run a perl script (and have LaTeX installed) unfortunately LaTeX is a rarity at Swedish schools and I need to make it super simple and install-free to make some of my classmates use it.
Thanks! You could use that script yourself to keep a copy of the pdf live on the web. Then your collaborators could edit the LaTeX on etherpad and keep re-fetching example.com/foo.pdf for the pdf of what they're editing. If they're not hardcore LaTeX people then maybe that will suffice for them.
Yay! Now we can do remote pair-programming totally within our internal network (the IT Policy goons are quite unhappy when it comes to using cloud-based services).
Huh, looks like the whole thing, client and server, are written in Javascript. I think I would be fine with that. Beats writing it in C++ that's for sure.
Not necessarily: maybe Google also wants to use some of the acquired technology, which they now can in its open source form. They're just not stopping anyone else from using it.
Awesome! You guys handled this incredibly well, and open sourcing with an Apache license is super classy. Can't wait to see what comes of this, and starting up our own internal instance. Thank you!
$ sh bin/rebuildjar.sh
using JAR jar...
usage: cp [-R [-H | -L | -P]] [-fi | -n] [-apvX] source_file target_file
cp [-R [-H | -L | -P]] [-fi | -n] [-apvX] source_file ... target_directory
including etherpad JARs...
using cached JAR-etherpad...
updating...
java.io.FileNotFoundException: ../../build/appjet.jar (No such file or directory)
at java.io.FileInputStream.open(Native Method)
at java.io.FileInputStream.<init>(FileInputStream.java:106)
at sun.tools.jar.Main.run(Main.java:175)
at sun.tools.jar.Main.main(Main.java:1044)
done.
cp: build/appjet.jar: No such file or directory
Awesome, following the directions, it took just a few minutes to get a local copy running. I used to run my own online word processor, written about 6 years ago for my own use, but a few thousand people signed up to try it. It is tempting to run an EtherPad instance for my business clients, and another one for my friends and family. That said, eventually I think that Wave will be awesome so sticking to that makes the most sense. Investing a lot of time to get into the EtherPad codebase seems like a slippery slope to non-productivity.
Hopefully this will lead to strong community around real-time eventual-consistency text synchronization. Here a link to etherpad's implementation of their magic algorithm: http://code.google.com/p/etherpad/source/browse/trunk/etherp... -- though it's pretty tightly integrated with their editor component, "ACE".
Coming to the competition : http://uxoo.com
Now what? A feature race? Back to the problem of monetizing a website based on free software, where there is little to no entry bar.
I took a quick look too and it looks like its javascript calling over to Java using Liveconnect (http://www.mozilla.org/rhino/scriptjava.html). The infrastructure folder contains support for Rhino.
http://code.google.com/p/etherpad/source/browse/trunk/infras... http://code.google.com/p/etherpad/source/browse/trunk/infras...
Thanks for sharing them!