| I'm certainly drawn to the idea and am inclined positively towards it. I'm even willing to overlook the ridiculous hubris of "This new medium will be the way most text is read and written in the future." However, there are many confusing things to me as a person who arrived at the site through HN. Since one of the developers is promoting the "app" here, it might be useful to hear from him on these points: 1. Is this an input format or is it a publication format, or is it a viewer? Does it rely on a time-tested plaintext markup format like LaTeX or markdown? Perhaps it is a HTML viewer for a LaTeX markup document with special structure, rather than an actual typset web publication format. 2. What is the conceptual structure of the document system? Giving me a screenshot does not show me anything about the way you are conceptualizing your document. Is there a separation of content and output, output and viewer? 3. Is any part of this open source? Are you incorporating any other major technologies which have already been developed? I apologize if any of the above seems harsh, but this is an important topic and I have become slightly tired of seeing flashy presentations about poorly-thought out "revolutionary" new document formats/tools/whatnot. |
1. It's both a viewer and a word processor. It relies on Markdown (and LaTeX through extensions). We export to Md, but will be adding more import/export options in the future. We hope to create a publication standard for it.
2. The structure of the document is an "outline of index cards". Each card can have one or more children. Source content (in markdown) is edited by toggling edit mode on that card.
3. Yes, we are extracting parts of this as open-source. The rest remains proprietary (for now, at least).
> I apologize if any of the above seems harsh
No need to apologize. Thoughtful criticism is what we need.
Thanks!