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To give a counter-perspective to many of the current comments: this is awesome. Maybe HN isn't the right demographic, but for someone that works with people th

To give a counter-perspective to many of the current comments: this is awesome. Maybe HN isn't the right demographic, but for someone that works with people that aren't super tech savvy, this seems like it will have a good place with them. I clicked through to treenotation.org too and I really like the direction the treenotation ecosystem is heading in. Looking forward to more of what's to come. Kudos.

specialist 6y ago
I'm with you. This is a "Yes, And..." tool. Dumbdown compliments existing solutions. TDLR: Dictation, transcription of voice input. First use case I thought of is voice transcription. Dictating HTML, markup, misc sucks. Dumbdown could make it practical. Better dictation has been on my mind a lot recently. Once I got a dog, I got A LOT more interested in audio & voice. Podcasts, audiobooks, voice commands. Now diving into using Siri Shortcuts for transcribing my Quantified Self stuff. eg I speak my weight and blood pressure, which creates entries in Health.app. Neat, right? Well, dictation of text messages truly sucks. No editing mode. There's no vi style out of band meta language to munge stuff afterwards. At least none that I've found. And Siri's auto carrot truly pisses me off. Not the mistakes, that's tolerable. What I can't handle is editing and correcting pops me out of whatever task I'm doing. For my Night Shift style ramblings, I now just use the voice recorder. Basically sending voice mails / memos to my future self. I feel stupid doing it. Always reminds me of a boss (Peter) who'd do this. Very clever strategy. But omg his messages made us worker bees howl. He'd call his home phone and say something "Hi, this is Peter, remember to buy milk. Bye bye." Like he wouldn't know it was himself calling. Gods, I still crack up thinking about it. Any way...
- pastage 6y ago
  I truly admire those that can code via voice input, it may even be envy if the mobey they spend on it. I wonder why we can't have custom commands, or meta language as you aptly call it, with siri and google. I do not feel this makes voice input much easier though, that lack of good meta language means editing will still suck.
filleduchaos 6y ago
> but for someone that works with people that aren't super tech savvy, this seems like it will have a good place with them. People who are bad enough at tech that it's genuinely easier for them to type "paragraph" rather than hit enter twice every time they want a new paragraph were never the target audience for Markdown in the first place. They simply...use regular old rich text editors.
- tylerchilds 6y ago
  Rich text editors to dumbdown to markdown seems like a pretty good educational pathway to me. Might take a tech savvy person 5 seconds and a less tech savvy person 5 weeks, but for some, they might never get it without something like dumbdown to help pave their neural network.
  - filleduchaos 6y ago
    It doesn't seem that great of a pathway to me. It's designed to solve a perceived problem with Markdown, without considering the problem that Markdown itself was created to solve (an easier way than HTML to write rich text in a plain text editor). What's the set of people who both have that problem and have symbols vs keywords as their only barrier to fixing it? Plus to me brackets, asterisks and other symbols are not an obscure tech thing. It's literally how tons of sites and apps do their rich text formatting - Reddit and many other forums for one, messaging apps like Whatsapp and Discord for another. From observation on e.g. Reddit, picking it up is a fairly straightforward process: - someone does fancy formatting trick - "whoa how did you get your comment to come out like that?" - "it's easy, you put blah blah [in front of/around] your text and it does blah" - [tries it out] "neat! thanks" I don't really see how having people type out "paragraph", "title", "list", etc helps with that process.

specialist 6y ago

I'm with you. This is a "Yes, And..." tool. Dumbdown compliments existing solutions. TDLR: Dictation, transcription of voice input. First use case I thought of is voice transcription. Dictating HTML, markup, misc sucks. Dumbdown could make it practical. Better dictation has been on my mind a lot recently. Once I got a dog, I got A LOT more interested in audio & voice. Podcasts, audiobooks, voice commands. Now diving into using Siri Shortcuts for transcribing my Quantified Self stuff. eg I speak my weight and blood pressure, which creates entries in Health.app. Neat, right? Well, dictation of text messages truly sucks. No editing mode. There's no vi style out of band meta language to munge stuff afterwards. At least none that I've found. And Siri's auto carrot truly pisses me off. Not the mistakes, that's tolerable. What I can't handle is editing and correcting pops me out of whatever task I'm doing. For my Night Shift style ramblings, I now just use the voice recorder. Basically sending voice mails / memos to my future self. I feel stupid doing it. Always reminds me of a boss (Peter) who'd do this. Very clever strategy. But omg his messages made us worker bees howl. He'd call his home phone and say something "Hi, this is Peter, remember to buy milk. Bye bye." Like he wouldn't know it was himself calling. Gods, I still crack up thinking about it. Any way...

pastage 6y ago
I truly admire those that can code via voice input, it may even be envy if the mobey they spend on it. I wonder why we can't have custom commands, or meta language as you aptly call it, with siri and google. I do not feel this makes voice input much easier though, that lack of good meta language means editing will still suck.

filleduchaos 6y ago

> but for someone that works with people that aren't super tech savvy, this seems like it will have a good place with them. People who are bad enough at tech that it's genuinely easier for them to type "paragraph" rather than hit enter twice every time they want a new paragraph were never the target audience for Markdown in the first place. They simply...use regular old rich text editors.

tylerchilds 6y ago
Rich text editors to dumbdown to markdown seems like a pretty good educational pathway to me. Might take a tech savvy person 5 seconds and a less tech savvy person 5 weeks, but for some, they might never get it without something like dumbdown to help pave their neural network.
- filleduchaos 6y ago
  It doesn't seem that great of a pathway to me. It's designed to solve a perceived problem with Markdown, without considering the problem that Markdown itself was created to solve (an easier way than HTML to write rich text in a plain text editor). What's the set of people who both have that problem and have symbols vs keywords as their only barrier to fixing it? Plus to me brackets, asterisks and other symbols are not an obscure tech thing. It's literally how tons of sites and apps do their rich text formatting - Reddit and many other forums for one, messaging apps like Whatsapp and Discord for another. From observation on e.g. Reddit, picking it up is a fairly straightforward process: - someone does fancy formatting trick - "whoa how did you get your comment to come out like that?" - "it's easy, you put blah blah [in front of/around] your text and it does blah" - [tries it out] "neat! thanks" I don't really see how having people type out "paragraph", "title", "list", etc helps with that process.