121–130 of 164 posts
Boy, Hacker News has gone in a strange direction. Killer new product from legendary engineers. Let's all get together and shit on it!
^^that's Marc Andreessen FYI, those of you downvoting him.
When I read about 'tablets' and 'interaction' and saw the screenshot of how interfaces haven't changed much, I got rather excited about the idea of a word processor that truly tried to change the way we 'process words' on touch devices.
Instead, it seems you've mostly focused on the stuff surrounding word processing. Which is a noble goal, but not what I was hoping/wishing for.
I'd like to see someone reinvent the word processor, or update it for touch interfaces. In the same way that the mouse greatly changed the way we work on 'normal' computers, surely touch should give us similar new advantages.
I've been following a number of projects that try to do this, but they are hyper-focused on just that text-input part. I'd love to see the best ideas from those experiments find their way into Quip.
(This is just a general observation, not an attack on Quip. I can understand that you have chosen a specific focus that doesn't happen to be what I care about.)
Maybe quip works out, maybe it doesn't, maybe it's just giving these guys and gals something to do for the next year or two... and that's just fine. Not every product has to shake the foundations of society and life as we know it.
Hmmmmm I'm personally not a tablet-typer and connecting a BT keyboard to an iPad with a case is basically a laptop, so I'd rather just use an Air (wouldn't you?) Quip looks nice, but from reading this thread, their and playing with the app myself I have a few observations. After all, this is a thread where we come to comment, so why not throw five minutes of my life into some writing, using my BT keyboard, on a big h…
Yeup, exactly. And now that 10 Hour 11" Airs will be coming....
It's always surreal to read Hacker News threads about the stuff you make. Harsh, but realistic. Anyway, I am Bret Taylor, co-founder of Quip. I am here if you have any questions, etc. (Also posted responses on the existing thread already). Just to clarify a couple of points I have read: 1. We do support desktops. We have a really nice web app. It is Chrome/Firefox only right now. 2. We have an Android app. It is a "p…
Yeah yeah I know, obscure device and all that. :P
Criticizes word processors as being from another era with old concepts. Then goes on to show a skeuomorphic interface based on even more elderly analogies, such as "desktop" and "folders." Minor nit aside, the diffs do seem very helpful to the folks who pass around Word docs and such. I guess either technology or the tech world has only now caught up to this need with things like this and Draft.
Without dropping the notion of a 'document' altogether I can't really think of a better way to convey a 'group of documents' than a folder. I feel like these metaphors aren't going away anytime soon. What would be better, do they need to be more abstract so as to not be skeuomorphic? A 'group', a 'set'? Having a single long list of documents and tagging them could work, but I've always felt a large proportion of users prefer actual 'folders' to tags, (probably why Gmail offers both).
I was really impressed with the UI. And it synced between my iPad and Chrome desktop very nicely. Look forward to playing with this more.
Just a couple of feedback and a suggestion for a feature
1. when editing a document, the left arrow works as opposite as one would expect: instead of sending the editing fullscreen, it brings the toolbar in foreground. In this case I would put a right arrow.
2. I would put the graphics/table menu together with the paragraph/heading/list
As a LaTeX user (and as a editor of many BS/MS thesis of non-technical friends) I have always thought that defining the structure of a long document before starting to write was fundamental. Therefore I would love a WYSIWYG editor that forces (or at least guides) users to define the structure of the document before and in a different place than where they write the content.
Compliments on the thing as a whole, but one thing stuck out to me (negatively). When I read about 'tablets' and 'interaction' and saw the screenshot of how interfaces haven't changed much, I got rather excited about the idea of a word processor that truly tried to change the way we 'process words' on touch devices. Instead, it seems you've mostly focused on the stuff surrounding word processing. Which is a noble goa…
Great stuff. Never easy tackling such an entrenced market. I have a few suggestions though as someone that not only actively uses Google Docs but practically forces people I work with to do so too. 1. How do I make this appear in my existin Google Docs folder? I really do not want to have another place for my documents. 2. The pricing of Google Docs makes it really hard to beat. How does quip plan to fight that? 3. S…
>> 1. Be the best at something and come inthrough the flanks. E.g the best way to edit your DropBox documents (I actually thought Dropbox would have launched a document processor by now). Coming through the flanks will remove the weight of expextation and at the same time allow people to What's a DropBox document? I have Word documents in my Dropbox, PDFS, photos, spreadsheets. I don't have Dropbox documents.
Sorry for the confusion and the one billion typos. I was typing on a mobile first thing this morning.