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Parent post was not criticizing Excalidraw, but rather highlighting problems with other apps that are so prevalent today. They are saying that Excalidraw is gre

Parent post was not criticizing Excalidraw, but rather highlighting problems with other apps that are so prevalent today. They are saying that Excalidraw is great in comparison to apps that have those bad features, in other words "this is like the good old days".

ctvo 5y ago
And what were those tools in the good ole days that had the features enumerated by the parent? Primarily free, open source, hosted, instant open, local storage along with the usability? Excalidraw feels like a product of this time, and demonstrates some of the things we all enjoy about the web as an ecosystem. People compare it to some yesteryear product because of its purposeful feature set and look / feel, but name something from back then.
- peterkelly 5y ago
  > but name something from back then You insert the CD, install the software, and then it's ready to use. That's it. To reiterate the quote from the article the GP mentioned: > There's no onboarding. No signup. No confirmation email. No OAuth. You're just in the product.
- kazinator 5y ago
  Nothing is being contrasted in my comment. The software in question has the above features, and it has "no onboarding. No signup. No confirmation email. No OAuth." It's just sad that you even have to have that in your checklist of things nowadays. Like it's amazing when software doesn't ask you to make another damned online account and just lets you use it. (And it's good that this doesn't, yay.) Hosted is a negative feature to me (other than for trying the software). You don't control the software installation. Tomorrow you could wake up and try to continue your work, to discover that some feature is missing you were depending on, or new bugs are happening that weren't there and so on. Or your local storage is borked because it's not being read correctly by the newly installed code. It's good if something is hosted for trying out, but you want it to be locally installable so you and your team can depend on it, and evaluate updates before rolling them out, and roll back bad updates. "Has local storage" is another thing that is sad to see as having to tick off a checklist.

ctvo 5y ago

And what were those tools in the good ole days that had the features enumerated by the parent? Primarily free, open source, hosted, instant open, local storage along with the usability? Excalidraw feels like a product of this time, and demonstrates some of the things we all enjoy about the web as an ecosystem. People compare it to some yesteryear product because of its purposeful feature set and look / feel, but name something from back then.

peterkelly 5y ago
> but name something from back then You insert the CD, install the software, and then it's ready to use. That's it. To reiterate the quote from the article the GP mentioned: > There's no onboarding. No signup. No confirmation email. No OAuth. You're just in the product.
kazinator 5y ago
Nothing is being contrasted in my comment. The software in question has the above features, and it has "no onboarding. No signup. No confirmation email. No OAuth." It's just sad that you even have to have that in your checklist of things nowadays. Like it's amazing when software doesn't ask you to make another damned online account and just lets you use it. (And it's good that this doesn't, yay.) Hosted is a negative feature to me (other than for trying the software). You don't control the software installation. Tomorrow you could wake up and try to continue your work, to discover that some feature is missing you were depending on, or new bugs are happening that weren't there and so on. Or your local storage is borked because it's not being read correctly by the newly installed code. It's good if something is hosted for trying out, but you want it to be locally installable so you and your team can depend on it, and evaluate updates before rolling them out, and roll back bad updates. "Has local storage" is another thing that is sad to see as having to tick off a checklist.