OpenDoc?
Google Docs New Feature: Pageless
171–180 of 233 posts
Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless
#172I'm in the business of building an online word processor - https://www.zoho.com/writer It's interesting how the documents industry is moving from print oriented legacy softwares (Google Docs, Word) to block based, app-ish, smart canvases (Notion, Coda, etc). Also both Microsoft & Google have adopted completely different strategies to compete in this market. Microsoft launched Loop as an entirely new app while Google…
Thanks for your insights, that's really interesting. Also, if you are putting the same amount of attention to detail and focus on pragmatism over beauty that Zoho Mail uses, I think you'll kill it. I'm by no means dogging on Zoho Mail, I think it's good looking. But the reason I love it is that it's loaded with features/settings, and it's done in a way that is intuitive and highly usable.
No connection to Zoho other than being a happy mail customer
Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just a vote for Zoho. It's a really impressive collection of integrated business tools. I keep discovering new things every time I check it out.
The breadth of Zoho apps is incredible, the price is unbeatable, but the quality is bad enough to make it not worth it, as of late 2019. I implemented the full Zoho suite a couple times at different companies, in 2016 and 2018-2019. What hurt most are the endless papercuts on the core CRM tool. Ultimately the pains for my users weren't worth it.
Is your criticism limited to the CRM tool? I've had nothing but great things to say about Zoho, but I haven't used the CRM tool. Are your criticisms for Mail?
Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
ismorphic to xml. it's markup. not structured data
Pretty sure database is also isomorphic to XML, in that sense. I agree that Notion-ish documents are more structured than Word-ish, though.
A SQL database, with indexing configured correctly, allows you to look up a row in O(log(n)).
A bag of XML bytes doesn't give you that. It takes, at best, a SAX parser to do an O(n) scan through the whole document to find stuff. Most DOM implementations give you O(1) indexing by ID, but they require you to parse it first, and that's going to take O(n).
Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
81% of Googles revenue is from advertising, only 7.5% is from Cloud Services (Google Workplaces and Google Cloud Platform) I think its fairly safe to assume that the majority of that cloud revenue is from their Cloud Platform, not Workplaces. So it wouldn't surprise me if its as little as 1-2% of revenue (it could easily be less than 1%). There is no surprise then that it is such a low priority for them. It's mostly…
>I think its fairly safe to assume that the majority of that cloud revenue is from their Cloud Platform, not Workplaces. I'm not sure I'd make that assumtion. Google workplaces makes a lot of revenue. $20/user/month * 100k users in a large company is 24MM/year. I'm sure GCP will grow faster, but Google workplaces has had more market penetration for longer.
I'd bet that if a company has 100k employees, it's not paying $20/user/month.
Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
A tangential question on Zoho Writer: why isn’t there any information on pricing (or a statement that it’s free)? I looked for pricing links. I even went to the resources page and searched for pricing and found no results. The very first thing I need to know when looking at an online platform is what kind of lock-in exists, how I can safely try it out and how much time I should invest in trying it out. The Writer pag…
Hi, sorry about the confusion. We didn't have a pricing page because the app itself is free for individuals (along with a bunch of other editors as well for spreadsheets and powerpoint presentations). You can sign up with your email account right away and start using. We do have paid plans in case you need to onboard a team and want access to a bunch of other apps as well - https://www.zoho.com/in/workplace/
It's "free"... but as a SaaS office suite, the documents (along with any attached images, etc) are stored in the cloud. And if you're not paying for WorkDrive, then the storage limits (if any?) are not really documented or clear at all.
I recently signed up for Zoho mail hosting, after Google announced the sunsetting for their legacy free customers. But the mail plans don't come with WorkDrive access. So even though I'm a paying customer to get IMAP access, I haven't really touched any of the Zoho office suite apps yet because I simply don't understand what my caps and limitations are.
Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless
#177It is still linear/ rigid in a way.
We try to break this approach with OrgPad (https://orgpad.com/) and propose an alternative way of working with and thinking about information. In OrgPad, you have cells (nodes/ vertexes) and connect them with one or more directed or undirected connections (links/ edges) or can leave them without a connection. This is all done using a mouse and dragging or clicking. 7-year-olds don't have a problem doing that. The cells have optional title and optional content, yes, they can be empty which show just a little square. If the cells have a title, you can hide the content, which is visually suggested by raising the cell so it drops a bit of a shadow. The cells can contain anything, text, images, files even whole websites in iframes. You can add pages inside the cell, useful e.g. when learning vocabulary. If there is only an image in the cell, we analyze it for alpha color and render a bit differently so there is no extra canvas and the image pops out more. We support links on such images too. With this, it is possible to build simple websites actually and OrgPad can mostly replace e.g. Linktree. We will improve this even more in the coming days.
Of course, when you have created an OrgPage, you have split the problem into atomic ideas mostly contained in singular cells or a groups of cells. You can with a few clicks create a presentation by basically setting up a path of views on your graph. There you go, Prezi is also covered sufficiently well. Then you add our physical animations, just the overall clean design and powerful keyboard shortcuts and you can do pretty much the same work like with Google Docs Pageless, Miro, Padlet just a bit differently and we feel with less hassle.
Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not a big fan of notion, but printing a document (even as a pdf) is an increasingly niche usecase in an increasingly digital-only world and I can totally understand if they don't put in much effort into it.
I wish. One of my clients wants it for everything (typically text, stats, and graphs), and typically views it as just an "add a button" sort of feature, when it winds up being a "reimplement the layout in a different language" sort of thing. (leaving apart the thing where basically they want a gigantic lovecrafian horror of an excel file translated to the web) PDFs have the ability to be a fixed, baked reference of a…
I never quite understood why PDFs are considered to be fixed baked references.
Plenty of software can edit pdfs. I have used affinity designer in past to fix up issues in PDFs received from designers.
Seems like this can be better addressed by versioning and audit logs or checksums.
Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless
#179It is still linear/ rigid in a way. We try to break this approach with OrgPad ( https://orgpad.com/ ) and propose an alternative way of working with and thinking about information. In OrgPad, you have cells (nodes/ vertexes) and connect them with one or more directed or undirected connections (links/ edges) or can leave them without a connection. This is all done using a mouse and dragging or clicking. 7-year-olds do…
This just seems like it is solving a fundamentally different problem than Google Docs/Microsoft Word. When I'm using one of those I usually want to express my ideas in a linear fashion. I see the value in your product but I would never consider it to be a replacement for a document editor
Re: Google Docs New Feature: Pageless
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
> My bet is on Google Docs style, Also in the industry. My bet is on all of them. Some people prefer block based, some prefer text, some prefer Markdown, some don't care. Writing a book on Notion is impossible for now, but building beautiful pages is much easier in Notion. Microsoft and Google (And Atlassian) have all adopted the same strategy which is "Look more like Notion". I don't think that Microsoft should be w…
I'm one of the original authors of Writely / Google Docs, and worked on relatively heavy-duty word processors in an earlier life. I'd agree with you, and add that there are are a lot of other details that make Notion nicer to use. We made the move from Docs to Notion at work a year or two ago, and I've recently switched for personal use as well. Some of the differences are power-user things (e.g. easier to manage cer…
I preferred notion initially, for many of the same reasons you outlined, but eventually I just couldn’t stand how slow notion is. Google Docs is so much faster.
I’m interested to try Google’s new tables product when I get a chance.