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Show HN: Gingko, a tree-document editor

gingkoapp.com

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Re: Show HN: Gingko, a tree-document editor

#51

Post by sid___ »

adriano_f wrote: post #45
victorf wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to try it, but I'm also not going to sign up for an online note/research app to use seriously. I want assurances that my notes are on my devices, read only by me, and, after a shitty experience with Notes.app this week, I'm going to be refusing any app that silos data and/or uses an unpublished nonstandard format.

Understood. We're planning on adding offline support, and a "Chrome Packaged App" version, so you could use Gingko offline entirely, and our servers will never touch your data. As for the format, we simply export to flat Markdown. We will be supporting other formats (including XML, and the OPML standard for hierarchical/outline text). Thanks for your feedback!

How about putting the code on github and let users run their own version of gingko on their own servers? i would like to see that..

Re: Show HN: Gingko, a tree-document editor

#52

Post by adriano_f »

JeremyBanks wrote: post #47
adriano_f wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we're definitely working on adding arbirary depth. We are starting with three because it's enough to realize the benefits. Infinite depth is coming (as well as other exciting features).

Do you have a newsletter or other way I could sign up to be notified of updates? This hits a lot of points that I've been looking for in an app/service. So much so that I was ready to sign up for the paid plan after trying this out for a couples minute, because I'm sure I'd use it enough to be worth it. But I didn't realize the three-levels limitation, and that prevents this from being useful enough to me to start us…

> This hits a lot of points that I've been looking for in an app/service.

Glad to hear that, Jeremy.

I've tagged you with "infinite-columns" in Intercom, so I can update you when we add that feature.

> That prevents this from being useful enough to me to start using it.

I agree, I struggle with this limit too, and it's my #1 most desired feature too... we're working on it!

Let me know if you have any other questions or comments.

Re: Show HN: Gingko, a tree-document editor

#53

Post by qznc »

tuananh wrote: post #6

I have always felt PDF is outdated for research papers. We need some kind of interactive paper format; yet universal, open specs, look the same and usable across platforms.

You might have heard of this World Wide Web thing. It works pretty well at CERN. We just just have to switch the academic publishing industry to HTML now.

Re: Show HN: Gingko, a tree-document editor

#54

Post by gjuggler »

tuananh wrote: post #6

I have always felt PDF is outdated for research papers. We need some kind of interactive paper format; yet universal, open specs, look the same and usable across platforms.

Have you seen eLife's Lens reader? Example article is at http://lens.elifesciences.org/#00772

They took a fresh, web-centric look at how to interactively display research papers. It's being used — right now — to display all of the new articles from a major biology journal.

I think it's quite nice.

Re: Show HN: Gingko, a tree-document editor

#55

Post by adriano_f »

zerni wrote: post #50
adriano_f wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great, thanks for the feedback Zemi. We have the ability to filter, using the Search feature. You can just type @tags, and searching them will hide all cards that don't containt that text. Let me know if you have any other questions or suggestions.

Well that's a workaround for now but it could be a little more user friendly (like showing all tags on the top) Another point: Make cards collapsible/expandable to get a quicker overview about topics. (It is also an aid to the process of memorizing cards)

Cool, hadn't considered having a tag list at top. Thanks.

Collapsing to "header only" is something we might have to add, after we implement infinite columns (so we can get a quicker overview of large trees).

Thanks for the feedback.

Re: Show HN: Gingko, a tree-document editor

#56

Post by adriano_f »

gjuggler wrote: post #54
tuananh wrote: post #6

I have always felt PDF is outdated for research papers. We need some kind of interactive paper format; yet universal, open specs, look the same and usable across platforms.

Have you seen eLife's Lens reader? Example article is at http://lens.elifesciences.org/#00772 They took a fresh, web-centric look at how to interactively display research papers. It's being used — right now — to display all of the new articles from a major biology journal. I think it's quite nice.

Cool, I hadn't seen that.

Personally, I think that things like this Lens reader are evolutionary advances, but science communication needs a revolutionary change.

I don't expect actual journals to be using Gingko any time soon, but there are already grad students collaborating on research papers right now :)

Re: Show HN: Gingko, a tree-document editor

#58

Post by adriano_f »

marcamillion wrote: post #57

This looks awesome, but the elephant in the room is how does the document look offline? Can it be exported to PDF or be printed or something? When you print it, how does it look?

With better support mobile devices (including eReaders and whatever comes after them), we hope it'll be less of an issue as time goes on.

Right now, we simply export the Markdown to flat text (breadth-first). But we will be adding PDF export options, for exporting the whole document, or one column.

That way, you can still end up with a traditional document at the end, if you want.

Any other ideas?

Re: Show HN: Gingko, a tree-document editor

#59

Post by IanCal »

Hopefully this criticism is helpful.

I find this really hard to read, sorry.

I can't just scroll through or scan read, and I'm met with a variety of different things all at once. Everything's always visible, so I don't know what I'm looking at. I've scrolled down on the lowest level, and read a bit but have no understanding of the context. Clicking on it makes me realise where I am but I've skipped over a load of stuff in the middle so I'm scrolling back up that to find where I left off... I think this is a visual thing though rather than a major issue with the idea. Fiddling a bit I've only just found that not every node has children, but this this is only indicated by nothing happening (which is identical to something that should happen but doesn't)

This is really a different formatter for the same structure of text we've already been using, so the hyperbole is a bit of a turnoff for me.

    \section{some title}
    
    Explanatory text
    
    \subsection{subsection title}

    Sub text
etc.

Or

    
        heading
        
Text

        
            heading 2
Why do we need something new? What's being added? What couldn't I do before that's now possible? These are the things I want to know when you tell me you've got a new hierarchical document. Can I already read these well with a screen-reader? The ordering in the source would (I think) read each column individually, which wouldn't make sense. Try loading your viewer without CSS. Imagine a screenreader hitting the massive block of JSON at the bottom of the page. Why is that in the body?
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