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Show HN: HackPad is the best wiki ever
- wslh 15y agoNice, seems like they are taking some of the features of Microsoft OneNote to the web (checkboxes)
- jff 15y agoUnfortunate that they don't offer the software itself; I could use this at work, but I don't think we'd be allowed to use it on an external server.
- kofman 15y agoIf there's demand, we'll definitely consider offering this.
- arctangent 15y agoI promise you that there's absolutely loads of demand from companies for things like this, so long as they can be deployed inside their own network. On the plus side, you can charge them lots of money. On the negative side, it's not as easy (or cheap!) to market to these people and take care of their needs.
- king_magic 15y agoCouldn't you offer something where you host the UI, but you allow a client to provide their own data source? That way the data stays on the client-side, and they never have to worry about upgrades, since you host the UI?
- X-Istence 15y agoConfluence is the wiki we use where I work and I absolutely hate it (ending tags is like you are opening a tag, so {bold}this would be bold{bold} (example, I don't remember any tags off the top of my head). If something better came along that helped us rather than slowed us down it would be fantastic.
- jdp23 15y agoI checked out Confluence earlier this year and wasn't too impressed at all. So agreed, it would be great for something better to come along!
- drivebyacct2 15y agoOh god. I helped support an overly customized Confluence wiki that was to be THE wiki for the entire company one summer. I quickly grew to hate the software quite strongly. Took me a while to be objective about JIRA's other products when I used them later.
- X-Istence 15y agoJIRA is the bug tracking software. Atlassian is the company. JIRA is absolutely terrible as well. I can't express in words how much I hate and dislike JIRA, it's horribly slow and bloated user interface and how complicated it makes certain tasks... using it as an Agile tool makes it even worse especially with Greenhopper the add-on.
- modoc 15y agoLots of people here seem to dislike Confluence and Jira. What do you folks prefer? Having used Bugzilla, Trac, Mantis, MediaWiki, and several other tools I 100% prefer Jira and Confluence...
- berntb 15y agoI agree... Multi resistant TB is to be preferred, compared to the black plague. :-( (Mantis might have less capabilities than Jira, but I almost enjoyed working with it. That might have depended on the project. [Edit: On consideration, Mantis was simpler and didn't make me scream from pure hatred.])
- dools 15y agoAfter a long journey we settled on Basecamp. It is kind of shitty until you nail down your own workflow and the API allows you a lot of scope to do that through automation.
- brunoc 15y agoGithub does this perfectly. You get a VM, fire it up and you're good to go.
- arctangent 15y agoI'm also a frequent complainer about exactly this sort of thing. Maybe there is some space in the market for a B2B company which could package up software like this for deployment within the firewalls of the ultimate customer...
- hessenwolf 15y agoCheck out Confluence, from Atlassian, for the competition.
- ilaksh 15y agoThe original Etherpad is open source. https://github.com/ether/pad https://github.com/ether/pad "Etherpad Lite" is built on node.js which to me makes it more desirable from a developer standpoint for a number of reasons, mostly for the same reasons one would generally favor node.js over Rhino, so I would definitely look into that one first. https://github.com/Pita/etherpad-lite https://github.com/Pita/etherpad-lite Hackpad might have a few advantages but the basic concept of tracking individual changes with colors is built-in to Etherpad and Etherpad Lite.
- netghost 15y agoIt looks neat. Why does it want access to my google contacts?
- king_magic 15y agoI really don't like that I have to sign in with Google or Facebook to try it in read/write mode. Read-only mode is not good enough for me to tell if it's something I want to use, and having to use Google or Facebook just to try it is a dealbreaker for me, sorry. Which is a shame, because it looks neat. Fix that, then I'd be interested in giving it a try. Edit: I missed the ability to sign in without Google/Facebook. It was a bit too small to notice. That being said... I signed up and gave it a try anyway, despite my misgivings. It's a neat product.
- StavrosK 15y agoAbout your login issues, I integrated BrowserID to a project I'm working on the other day, and my god, am I in love. BrowserID.org is beautiful and very well made, easy to use and easy for the users to understand (you don't really realize you're at a third party website). Integration with django took about ten minutes and I don't have to wrestle with all the forgotten password templates and workflows, changing passwords, storing them securely, etc etc any longer. Also, it doesn't depend on Facebook, Google or anyone else (if I want to run the verification myself). I really hope it catches on, and I'd strongly recommend it to any dev.
- mintplant 15y agoBrowserID looks interesting, but what about on public terminals? The average user may not understand that they're logged in to your site and BrowserID, and as such would leave themselves mistakenly logged in. See the BrowserID demo site - http://myfavoritebeer.org/ http://myfavoritebeer.org/ - as an example of this. Once you're logged in, the "logout" button does not truly mean logout - anyone could log you back in in two clicks.
- StavrosK 15y agoThat's a good point, they need a "public terminal" option at browserid.org. I'll email them now. However, considering that it's pretty easy to add two-factor authentication to the provider (in this case, browserid.org) using Google's open source libraries or any other way, I'd say this is a huge net plus. After all, logging in via Google, Facebook, Twitter or any other such provider has the same weakness.
- AdamGibbins 15y agoWhy does this request access to my Google Contacts when signing in using my Google Account? No thanks.
- kofman 15y agoWe do it in order to let you auto-complete your contact's names in order to invite them to pads. We absolutely never email your contacts unless you explicitly invite someone. That said we understand your concern and hence offer the regular email sign-in option.
- moss 15y agoConsider saying this explicitly during the sign-up process! I avoided using my Google account to log in, but I probably would have gone ahead and done it if I'd known that you weren't going to email my contacts.
- alx 15y agoif you look for something similar and opensource, you should have a look at etherpad-lite: https://github.com/Pita/etherpad-lite https://github.com/Pita/etherpad-lite
- mindctrl 15y agoEtherpad with a bit of sexiness. Would love to see this contributed back to the open source community from where it came.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- grusk 15y agoI really like the execution of this. It's like the Quick Notes web extension, however my beef with Quick Notes app is that I've lost some notes because I didn't realize that there might be a maximum character limit (not sure if there is or if my notes got wiped some other way). https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mijlebbfndhelmdpmllgcfadlkankhok https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mijlebbfndhelmdpml... Could you make this into a Chrome web app, please?
- thamiam 15y agoYes, please. I would really like something to replace sidewiki for capturing, sharing, and later finding notes about Web sites.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- michaelw 15y agoThank you for making this. I really like it. A long time ago in a startup far far away a friend and I built something like this. Ours was nowhere near as elegant. We would look for CamelCaseWords to kick off the autocomplete but your use of @ is much better. Delightful moments: pasting an image url embeds the image. Consider letting me backspace the image to get back to the url. The multi-user edit seemed very smooth. Better than collabedit to this user. The task list is nice. I'd love to have a title to the task list and be able to query for and surface all task lists across pages. Please consider supporting #hashtags if only so you can show a tag cloud. The built-in search is great. I couldn't figure out how to link to a person. Finally, for users who login with their own email address, please consider letting them in right away. At most have the confirmation step be something they can complete later. Eliminate friction at every turn. All in all a really nice product.
- michaelw 15y agoCame across Dropbox integration but couldn't see it doing anything.
- michaelw 15y agoJust discovered the refactoring feature. Select some text. Click "Create Pad" and give it a name. The new pad is created with the selected text and the name links to it. This was a little disconcerting at first but it's absolutely the right thing. I got the @User stuff to work. I think it matches contacts from my google contacts against other users who have signed up for HackPad. That's reasonable.
- damncabbage 15y agoQuick note: read-only mode isn't very read-only. Pasting and typing quickly still works. I clicked a checkbox within the page copy, and the entire page suddenly blanked. (It may have just been a coincidence, though.) Otherwise, looks great. :)
- orph 15y agoThis is probably an IE bug?
- heyitsnick 15y agoI can do this in Chrome windows. I can check a checkbox or type a few letters; I get a popup saying "sign in to make edits", but my changes still happened. I can dismiss the popup and again type in a few more letters before the blocking popup.
- moss 15y agoThis is really slick! It's the first realtime, WYSIWYG tool I've used that still feels like a Wiki.
- rorrr 15y agoHow is it different from EtherPad and hundreds of its clones/instances?
- irondavycole 15y agoDesigner of EtherPad here. I'm a big fan of HackPad and I encourage people to give it a shot. I get a lot of questions about the best version of EtherPad out there, and HackPad is the one I recommend. It might not look that different, but they handle similar features in smart ways.
- timc3 15y agoWould be interesting to know which features?
- kofman 15y agoSome of hackpad's features are: task-lists, inline linking and page creation, simple image embedding, search, deep email integration, dropbox integration, mobile (iphone,android) support, an osx launcher/search app. The way hackpad handles basic editing and authorship annotation has also received a lot of attention and iteration. Play with it and let us know what you think!
- ilaksh 15y agoInline linking and page creation, image embedding, and search are plugins that are part of the etherpad source and just need to be enabled. When you say it supports iPhone, does that mean you somehow made the contentEditable issue go away and can edit on iPhone, or is it just read-only support?
- kofman 15y agoiPhone support is currently in beta. Basic editing works but it's fairly easy to break.
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- slig 15y agoIs it based on Etherpad source?
- kofman 15y agoYep
- PabloOsinaga 15y agoPeople seem to be liking it. What I think they like (at least that's my experience with it) is to see the HN community materialize in real time. Just my 2 cents so that you can try to isolate feedback taking that into account.
- msellout 15y agoGood point. It's very much fun to see more realtime interaction with a forum. You feel less like a lurker and more like a real participant. Still, I think that in itself is good feedback about the product more generally--how you market it--rather than about the specific features.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- bjtitus 15y agoThis looks very interesting! I hope you guys keep improving it. I really would like something like Google Wave/Etherpad that is robust and is actually being developed. I would happily pay money for something like this if the performance and features can be maintained.
- dbbo 15y agoExcept for that stubborn 504...
- kofman 15y agoFixed, sorry!
- skeptical 15y agoI like it but needs to improve many things: There's no point in including formatting/wysiwyg if the formatting options are so limited. not even the possibility of writing headers? There's no way to view the source. We're stuck on the wysiwyg editor, include a source view or tab. No picture upload. While I understand the challenges this raises, you did include a picture embedding feature. Why would I keep my notes on a service that doesn't give me any warranty that the pictures will not be there when I need to access them? If you offer such feature, you should commit to it. Include a picture upload option, limit user diskspace usage and hotlinking if you're worried about server resources. Keyboard shortcuts. This targets power users, no keyboard shortcuts is a huge deal breaker. No way I'm going to take my hands away from the keyboard while typing. Include keyboard shortcuts. On the other hand, there are some really cool details. Flawless implementation of linking and searching, the way it should be done.
- tathagatadg 15y agoIs it possible to embed a hackpad in a site? I really looked around for an embed-able etherpad that can be easily made available into pages for users to collaboratively note down stuff ...
- beza1e1 15y agoYou could use any Etherpad Lite site [0]. Probably also works with the "heavy" Etherpad. [0] https://github.com/Pita/etherpad-lite/wiki/Sites-that-run-Etherpad-Lite https://github.com/Pita/etherpad-lite/wiki/Sites-that-run-Et...
- jv22222 15y agoWith regard to saying "the best wiki ever". I think it's best to show that its the best product (by being the best) rather than to explicitly to say it.
- tensafefrogs 15y agoOr just pull a Fox News™ and add a question mark to the end: Hackpad: The best wiki ever?
- silverlight 15y agoVery neat. I actually had a similar idea 2 or 3 months ago (although I'm sure this is older than that) to modify Etherpad Lite into a wiki to replace the Dokuwiki we currently use at work. I was going to just build a front-end that managed the documents, though, and only pass it off to Etherpad for the actual editing. This is a much more elegant solution, and the "@" linking is genius! If you were ever considering contributing your modifications back to the community/Etherpad/Etherpad Lite, I would certainly make good use of them. Unfortunately our wiki is a highly integrated component of our custom-built Intranet, so we couldn't make use of a SaaS solution for it. But congrats all the same! I will keep an eye out for potential non-work uses.
- WA 15y agoIt's nice. But how do I delete my account and my Google contacts that were imported in your database?
- extension 15y agoSome iPad bugs: I can type newlines and backspaces, but no characters. And when I leave the site, my keyboard stays open on whatever site I visit, which is really strange.
- wmat 15y agoThis is an interesting project, however, as someone who administers several wikis, both public and private I honestly wouldn't give up control of the server side to the cloud ever. The simple reason is data control. I want daily backups of my wiki data. Can I do that with this? Similarly, where's the source? Where's the install for private wikis, such as a company's private internal wiki? Where's the api so I can write plugins? Where are the plugins? What is preventing wiki spammers? Can I theme this for groups? I see that groups are 'private' based on my invitations to them, but how can I be sure this isn't easily compromised? Anyway, this looks interesting, but I don't think it can be used yet for any serious wiki work.
- kofman 15y ago> I want daily backups of my wiki data. Can I do that with this? Yes. We back up hourly, and we give you a way to get a full html zip dump with a single http request. > Similarly, where's the source? / Where's the install for private wikis, such as a company's private internal wiki? Hackpad is not open-source but would a jar or VM you can run internally do the trick? > Plugins? Nothing yet - we hope to make something > What is preventing wiki spammers? Private instances are invite-only (or can be setup to automatically let people with certain email domains in), there's also revision history etc. >Themes? Not yet. >I see that groups are 'private' based on my invitations to them, but how can I be sure this isn't easily compromised? Hackpad always runs on https and we take security seriously. Outside of that as I said - if there's interest we may offer a jar/vm you can run inside the firewall. Thanks for the feedback / questions!
- colinhowe 15y agoThis is nice. I'd love it if I could create a company account, invite my colleagues and then know that only those people can access the pads that we make. Also, ability to download all data as a dump would be nice.
- jakobe 15y agoI think the best feature of a wiki is that you can edit it anonymously without logging in. I just won't bother contributing to wikis that require logins.
- duncanj 15y agoPricing?