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I guess you didn't read past the first screen or two, then?
The section on "The Technical Origin" explicitly references that as the starting point for this project.
How I reverse-engineered Google Docs to play back any document's keystrokes
21–30 of 121 posts
Re: How I reverse-engineered Google Docs to play back any document's keystrokes
#22This is a very good reason to never use software in the so-called "cloud". I also remember years ago when someone showed me "Track Changes" in MS Word and other programs and how you could go back and look at, say, a bid offer and see if everything was on the up and up. You could see, esp. if the document was a form letter or canned response, to which other companies were offered different terms, you name it. I dislik…
You can also take advantage of all the great bonuses of revisions and then before sending the document just copy/paste the content into a new document that doesn't include the revisions. That seems sensible too.
Yes, I know about this, and thank you for reminding me, but in the end, I just don't trust software.
I really do like old school and I stick with it. I write most of my docs as text in either vi or nano. I neither want nor need formatting beyond the basics. My CV is the only document I own that has formatting, and I used LibreOffice for it. It's a single page.
Re: How I reverse-engineered Google Docs to play back any document's keystrokes
#23Interesting -- I would not have guessed they were storing all our keystrokes. It'd be fascinating to mine that data, for example, to find patterns of typos.
Re: How I reverse-engineered Google Docs to play back any document's keystrokes
#24Interesting perspective by the author and most of the commenters here. My first thought when I read the headline and the article was "privacy breach!". This is certainly interesting data. But it can also be dangerous if the owner of the document isn't aware of the implications of the storage format.
Re: How I reverse-engineered Google Docs to play back any document's keystrokes
#25Interesting. Is this a side-effect of the old Google Wave design, which had collaborative documents where you could watch your collaborator type in realtime?
Operational transformations are used by both Google Wave (now Apache Wave) and Google Docs [1]. The basic idea is to avoid latency by making sure all edit operations commute, so patches can be applied out of order to get the same result. This is not so different from source control except that merge conflicts are handled differently. Differential synchronization [2] might be easier to implement, though. [1] http://en…
Google's OT has some of its routes in EtherPad. YC-funded AppJet made Etherpad as a demo app, Google acquired it, and they incorporated the tech into Wave.
Re: How I reverse-engineered Google Docs to play back any document's keystrokes
#26I broke out in to a cold sweat watching this as I remembered all the times I've inadvertently pasted sensitive stuff in to a document. It's still very cool though, I'll just need to remember to be careful when sharing documents.
Re: How I reverse-engineered Google Docs to play back any document's keystrokes
#27I wish this was built as a Chrome extension instead of asking for OAuth access.
Re: How I reverse-engineered Google Docs to play back any document's keystrokes
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can also take advantage of all the great bonuses of revisions and then before sending the document just copy/paste the content into a new document that doesn't include the revisions. That seems sensible too.
Yes, I know about this, and thank you for reminding me, but in the end, I just don't trust software. I really do like old school and I stick with it. I write most of my docs as text in either vi or nano. I neither want nor need formatting beyond the basics. My CV is the only document I own that has formatting, and I used LibreOffice for it. It's a single page.
You should consider using LaTeX.
Re: How I reverse-engineered Google Docs to play back any document's keystrokes
#29Horizontal Scroll of the Death...
Re: How I reverse-engineered Google Docs to play back any document's keystrokes
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, I know about this, and thank you for reminding me, but in the end, I just don't trust software. I really do like old school and I stick with it. I write most of my docs as text in either vi or nano. I neither want nor need formatting beyond the basics. My CV is the only document I own that has formatting, and I used LibreOffice for it. It's a single page.
You should consider using LaTeX.
That's cool, but lots of people require .doc. It's just easier to use a word variant.