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How I reverse-engineered Google Docs to play back any document's keystrokes

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Re: How I reverse-engineered Google Docs to play back any document's keystrokes

#31

Post by bostonpete »

sbarre wrote: post #20
forca wrote: post #18

This 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.

I'm pretty sure you can just "Accept all changes" before saving the document too and the change history will be cleared.

Re: How I reverse-engineered Google Docs to play back any document's keystrokes

#32

Post by fillskills »

brk wrote: post #13
kens wrote: post #4

I find it fascinating to see how much deleting and rewriting the author did on the first two sentences of his Atlantic article. You can see the idea getting rewritten in many ways. Is this a typical way to write a magazine article? I wouldn't have expected so much time revising the opening sentences before getting the rest of the article in place. (But there's probably a lot of variation between writers.)

I've written a fair number of magazine articles, and also a lot of white papers and other documents. For me, I usually spend a day or two just thinking about it in my head. Going over what would be a logical thought flow and things like that. When I sit down to actually write , I tend to have very few revisions. My first draft is much closer to the typical persons 5th draft (I think), but that's because I've been rev…

Is this a practised habit? I mean, when you started out, did you do more revisions on paper and less in your head?

Re: How I reverse-engineered Google Docs to play back any document's keystrokes

#34

Post by killnine »

character0 wrote: post #6

The creation story for this is really neat. This could be an amazing tool in the school setting, especially for people that teach in university writing centers. This isn't just asking an author for a peek behind the curtain, asking a few questions about what they were thinking at the time of writing, this is Breaking the Magician's Code level stuff! I am curious to see who is (brave enough?) to show their writing pro…

Challenge!

Re: How I reverse-engineered Google Docs to play back any document's keystrokes

#35

Post by r00fus »

michaelx386 wrote: post #26

I 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.

I wonder how much sensitive information is inadvertently pasted into a browser location bar or autofill text box that's silently captured by web apps like Google Docs?

I know I've accidentally done the "paste password" into those places accidentally at times.

Re: How I reverse-engineered Google Docs to play back any document's keystrokes

#37

Post by hobs »

mattnewport wrote: post #17

When can we get an IDE that can do this, and track copy / paste across source files :)

That's what I was wondering, considering we have something like that for a live document in most IDEs (remembering changes character by character and the like). If a document needed to be played back each time to see what it was then it would suck, you would need a format that both represents the final product and also has all the history in one file.

Re: How I reverse-engineered Google Docs to play back any document's keystrokes

#38

Post by brk »

fillskills wrote: post #32
brk wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've written a fair number of magazine articles, and also a lot of white papers and other documents. For me, I usually spend a day or two just thinking about it in my head. Going over what would be a logical thought flow and things like that. When I sit down to actually write , I tend to have very few revisions. My first draft is much closer to the typical persons 5th draft (I think), but that's because I've been rev…

Is this a practised habit? I mean, when you started out, did you do more revisions on paper and less in your head?

Yes, it's a practiced habit.

I found that when I first started writing regularly I would spend a lot of time doing constant editing similar to the example shown in the linked article. This would become distracting and time consuming, then I'd forget other things I had wanted to say. So I found it better, for me, to just kind of write things in my head first and then sit down and write -almost more transcribing vs. "writing".

Re: How I reverse-engineered Google Docs to play back any document's keystrokes

#39

Post by mahyarm »

mattnewport wrote: post #17

When can we get an IDE that can do this, and track copy / paste across source files :)

Well you can get a general copy paste detector on a code base. CPD from PMP is one package. Language support isn't that great although, you mostly only get C/C++ & Java.
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