Their interface is available in Esperanto. That's already a huge point for me.
Show HN: Airborn – Private Google Docs Alternative
51–60 of 218 posts
Re: Show HN: Airborn – Private Google Docs Alternative
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes and no :) I did indeed not implement OT, but it's also a true story that I would create a Google Doc and share it, nobody knows what to write, I type a sentence, and my classmates delete it as a joke, to mess with me :) But yeah, feedback on the collaboration is welcome. Do you think editing one sentence with multiple people is necessary, and if so why? And on the other end of the spectrum, Word-style edit reques…
My main use case for Docs is collaborative fiction writing. There's no concept of "paragraph ownership"; there will be two or more people editing the document, and we'll go over it a half-doze or more times, editing as we go. The ability to make arbitrary changes is essential for this.
There's no permanent paragraph ownership in Airborn OS either, but it's locked for about 10 seconds when you edit a paragraph. Or are you saying that the two editors would be editing the same paragraph at the same time?
Re: Show HN: Airborn – Private Google Docs Alternative
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm. Do you mean it sounds like we'll get hacked any day now? Do you have a suggestion for better wording?
You should speak to me, as a customer, about my benefit in using your product. Currently you're telling me what won't happen in a very unfortunate event. I think this is wrong in 2 ways. 1. You're telling me a message "the other way around". Even if you just say "Keep your documents secure" is better than "Nobody will access your documents". 2. You're comparing w/ Google docs so, following the logic of your message,…
You have good points and in you might be right for the common user.
But as a technical user I despise that and I liked the honest way this was presented. Because this is something everyone should be thinking before signing up (granted most don't, so, yeah).
Re: Show HN: Airborn – Private Google Docs Alternative
#54This looks great! Minor nits: In what way is this an OS? Also in the US, Airborn (e.g. to be in the air) is spelled "Airborne" and it's difficult to type it without the trailing 'e' without spellcheck fixing it automagically.
The most significant ways in which it's a bit like an OS are 1. It has a Window Manager (try it out in the demo, you can drag around windows and such) 2. It has a File System, which does encryption and compression. This makes it so that the "apps" (documents and presentations, and in the future hopefully spreadsheets) don't have to know anything about encryption. This made it very easy to port the presentations app,…
Names barely matter, but yeah, the "OS" is confusing, airborn makes me think viruses and plagues, don't get any feelings of "documents", or "encryption", or "security" from it, and the namespace is overloaded, it will be hard to get rank.
Otherwise I really like the project. I want all my data on all sites to be locally encrypted and backed up in the cloud. Documents is the perfect start, because there is very little server-side introspection needed. I'd like my friend graphs and contacts to be next.
In terms of UI, start by copying google docs exactly, they did a fine job.
Re: Show HN: Airborn – Private Google Docs Alternative
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
You state that the problem of fraud is particularly challenging "at Google scale". There is a fairly easy solution: Don't do things at Google scale. Many of these nearly unsolvable social problems we've created, such as YouTube content moderation, are manageable, or simply don't occur, outside Google scale. Which begs the question: Is doing things at Google scale really something to aspire to? Has even Google solved…
Better shut down access to your service after a couple of hundred users?
To be fair, Google has a little more than 200 users.
Re: Show HN: Airborn – Private Google Docs Alternative
#56Good timing with Google incorrectly flagging some Docs as abusive? ( https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/zmz3yw/why-is-my-... )
When you were running an operation at Google scale, the challenge of fighting fraud is something that people who have not worked at that scale can only imagine. These guys will also encounter fraud at some point. And when they do so, I guarantee they will be no better at it than Google this.
You're probably right about that. But, I believe that reading and blocking private, non-shared, documents in a user's account is not the right approach to abuse. If it ever becomes necessary, Airborn OS could inspect publicly shared documents for abuse, too.
Re: Show HN: Airborn – Private Google Docs Alternative
#57Good timing with Google incorrectly flagging some Docs as abusive? ( https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/zmz3yw/why-is-my-... )
When you were running an operation at Google scale, the challenge of fighting fraud is something that people who have not worked at that scale can only imagine. These guys will also encounter fraud at some point. And when they do so, I guarantee they will be no better at it than Google this.
If they can't access the data, then they shouldn't be able to moderate it.
There are plenty of things on the web where you can upload data and they don't use machine learning algorithms to decide if your content is "valid" or "invalid". It all depends on various tradeoffs.
Re: Show HN: Airborn – Private Google Docs Alternative
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm, that's not supposed to happen. It might be just that the server returned an error for one of the requests the first time.
Your code needs to detect and recover from errors, otherwise no-one will trust it to keep their text safe.
There's error detection and recovery for writing files, and creating accounts, but not opening the demo, currently.
Re: Show HN: Airborn – Private Google Docs Alternative
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should speak to me, as a customer, about my benefit in using your product. Currently you're telling me what won't happen in a very unfortunate event. I think this is wrong in 2 ways. 1. You're telling me a message "the other way around". Even if you just say "Keep your documents secure" is better than "Nobody will access your documents". 2. You're comparing w/ Google docs so, following the logic of your message,…
Thanks for the suggestions. The reason I mentioned getting hacked in the copy, is because I think that for the average customer, it's now starting to seem like every web service is getting hacked. I wanted to highlight that we're trying to solve that in a better way than "well, this time we really won't get hacked!" But yeah, I'll try to bring out that message in a more positive way.
> for the average customer, it's now starting to seem like every web service is getting hacked.
It did have a positive influence on me right away. It also established this sense of trust. Enough that I began to crawl through the other pages for more info.
I also appreciated how you managed to convey, in a single image, exactly what was encrypted (ie, both document content and filename).
The first question I had was how Google Docs handled this. Do they also encrypt? If so, do they encrypt both filename and content? Considering Google's business model, I always assumed that they did less in this regard - relying instead on other mechanisms to protect user data.
I would keep the encryption message and double-down... comparing how other services handle privacy, tracking, data-mining, encryption. It's your strongest selling point.
Re: Show HN: Airborn – Private Google Docs Alternative
#60Is this page not designed to handle 4K displays? The tiling background is really not great to look at