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Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust

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Re: Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust

#111

Post by piker »

lionkor wrote: post #110

Hi, good to see you respond to criticism here, too. Personally, I can't try it locally right now, and the web demo refused to load on Firefox. On Chrome, it loaded, but it's... very slow to load files when I click on them, and there is a visible delay between taking an action and seeing that action reflected in the demo. I bet this is a WASM limitation, I work with WASM and with Rust every day (though sadly not relat…

Thanks so much. It does have this banner: "Some features are unavailable in Web Preview. Download the Desktop version for full speed and functionality." which is intended to capture that exact issue.

I'd love to coordinate a demo for you personally if you can spare the time. I'm at drew@tritium.legal or you could drop your info here: https://tritium.legal/demo. I'm familiar with working with and onboarding to regulated IT departments.

[NOTE: some of the speed issues are coming from the pipes clogging up due to the traffic. There's no CDN here unfortunately.]

Re: Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust

#112

Post by piker »

miki123211 wrote: post #108
piker wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a great point. This uses the canvas element only because it’s rendering in the browser. But this is really a desktop application, so the canvas element doesn't come up as a concept outside of WASM. Your main contention seems to be that nobody other than web browser implementers can render and edit text, and thus we should be limited to the set of applications that can run on the DOM and leverage the web browser’…

> thus we should be limited to the set of applications that can run on the DOM and leverage the web browser’s shaping and layout engines. Yes, if you want to run in the web browser, use the APIs the browser gives you. If you want to go wild, run directly on desktop OSes. Web browsers just straight up don't have some of the APIs you will need for a working app. Accessibility is a major example. If you want to stay com…

Very true! That's why this is just a "web preview". It's not intended to be used as the primary application. As mentioned elsewhere, the primary application is a desktop application that does look to leverage native APIs that aren't available on the web.

Re: Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust

#113

Post by notpushkin »

piker wrote: post #92
vorpalclub wrote: post #79

Just a thought: I think it would be neat if you could include one of Mathew Butterick’s fonts ( https://matthewbutterick.com/ ), as a fellow lawyer/software developer. I don’t know how practical that is, but it’s a smallish club and they are very pretty fonts.

Thanks so much for the idea. You may already know this, but fonts are actually little pieces of software subject to their own licensing terms. For that reason, Tritium (like most word processors, I believe) relies on the system fonts available for rendering. Those are already owned by the user. I'll reach out to Matthew and see if there's any possibility for collaboration.

The letterforms themselves, on the other hand, might be uncopyrightable, depending on the jurisdiction. But paying for the fonts you use is just common decency – especially if used in a commercial product.

Re: Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust

#114

Post by piker »

WolfOliver wrote: post #109

I was wondering why the creation of docx files does not seem to have any formatting options but just plain text? Is this not required in legal context?

It actually does on the desktop versions. The "web preview" doesn't have any access to the browser's fonts, so it's limited to an open-source embedded font. Check out the downloads!

Re: Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust

#115

Post by b0a04gl »

gamblor956 wrote: post #98
b0a04gl wrote: post #75

> "Finally got sick of diffing contracts in Word and emailing PDFs back and forth" this is the actual iceberg. forget ai clause generators and buzzwords, 99 percent of the pain is version chaos. localfirst editor is cool and imagine pairing that with proper gitstyle branching across teams. redlines you can merge without manually eyeball.

Word has offered redline merging for over several decades... There's a reason it's still the standard in the legal industry. The funny thing is that Word has tons of functionality that techies aren't aware of because they don't actually use it so they keep building products around features Word has had for years. And then they wonder why their startup failed to get any traction.

[dead]

Re: Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust

#117

Post by piker »

truekonrads wrote: post #116

Hi! Tech/cyber person at a law firm here. Major concern I can see is “will this make the formatting go haywire”? Also which kinds law practice groups would benefit them most. Finally - how can this be collaborative ?

The promise is what you see is what you get between Word and Tritium [desktop].

Transactional practices like RE, funds, capital markets, finance, derivatives, M&A are the target audience.

The roadmap includes a shared history but iManage integration is also in the works. So the experience will target google-docs like collab with something more familiar in terms of version control. That's on the roadmap though.

Can we chat offline? drew@tritium.legal

Re: Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust

#118

Post by socks »

gazpacho wrote: post #82

I like the idea! I wish I could use git / PRs to do rounds of edits on legal documents instead of whatever Word’s track changes is. Speaking of, could we start using version control for keeping track of laws and updating old laws? It seems to me like a much better system than randomly burying in a new law that it strikes out some text from an old law.

Reminds me of this old HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4353389

Re: Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust

#119

Post by eviks »

chrismorgan wrote: post #88

If you want people to use it on the web: do not under any circumstances use the pure-canvas approach. You must use real DOM, or it will be an endless frustration that turns many people away. I’ve written about the problems quite a few times, look through https://hn.algolia.com/?type=comment&query=chrismorgan+pure+... if you’re interested. If you’re not intending it to be used via the web, don’t worry. But it’s a gene…

Wait, which 2 do you expect to become usable?

Re: Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust

#120

Post by speerer »

piker wrote: post #39
aidenn0 wrote: post #37

Probably dumb question: Given that many lawfirms bill by the hour, are there incentives to make their work more efficient? I.e. if a firm were to adopt this tool, can they practically charge more per hour than a firm that does not?

Yes, they are not incentivized to adopt new technology in their current state. The senior partners don't want to wait around for the eventuality of charging more per hour. That's why Tritium is marked to in-house lawyers for now. I talked a little about this back in September: https://www.legalinnovators.co.uk/post/legal-innovators-uk-t...

As a private practice lawyer in a tech-heavy firm, I can assure you that not all of us are stuck at the wrong end of that paradigm!
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