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Dropbox Paper

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Re: Dropbox Paper

#81

Post by asidiali »

_qxjp wrote: post #22

It's not terrible. Personally, since I write in Markdown, it's an excellent tool for my niche documents. It doesn't integrate with Jekyll, but it's close enough. Simplenote is another decent app that happens to have Markdown support, but the implementation isn't very good. No image previews, no tables, and on occasion it will outright mess up the formatting in `code blocks`. Of course, I am very hesistant to put my f…

IMO all the current MD editors/previewers stink for some reason. I spent 10 min throwing together http://mrkdwn.pro - you can feed it any direct MD file URL and it will render it in Github flavored markdown. You can also directly go to a file like so:

http://mrkdwn.pro/#/?url=

and then add the URL to your MD file at the end.

Definitely not fully featured or anything, but a dead simple way to share and read markdown files on the go.

Re: Dropbox Paper

#84

Post by mesozoic »

ungzd wrote: post #21

After looking at landing page, it's completely unclear what it is. Powerpoint with comments? Pinterest for enterprise? Google Wave with Material design? "Create, review, organize" — but even Quake level editor is about creating, reviewing and organizing.

I think it's actual paper. Though April 1 isn't soon...

Re: Dropbox Paper

#85

Post by pducks32 »

I'm sorry but that first video is hilarious. That's the stuff Silicon Valley HBO makes fun of. I'm all for people working together to make the world a better place but I was in tears of laughter at that. I was looking for a (Made by HBO) disclaimer somewhere.

Re: Dropbox Paper

#86

Post by bachmeier »

I've been using the beta for quite a while. I haven't used it extensively, but I will probably use it more once it takes off. Early on in the beta process I requested Mathjax support. They added it, and now all you have to do to insert an equation is type a double dollar sign (ie, $$). That's sort of a killer feature, because most of my communications will involve equations at some point.

Re: Dropbox Paper

#87

Post by tekacs »

tnorthcutt wrote: post #63
tekacs wrote: post #51

I'll throw Notion ( https://notion.so/ ) into the mix here, as an (as far as I can tell far more full-featured) alternative to this. I've used Paper a number of times, starting from long before Notion was a thing, having been a happy Etherpad and Hackpad user in the past. Somehow Paper managed to inspire less in my collaborators than either the latter services (where perhaps plain text was the factor) or than Notion…

I've looked at Notion a few times, and it looks really impressive. It also looks really overwhelming – almost too many features/capabilities, so it's hard to know how it would fit into what I currently do, or what tools I should replace with it. But maybe that means I'm not the right customer for it :)

For better or worse, I replaced /most-all/ of them with it: :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12796027

A few months later, I'm still using it in place of most other tools that I had been using, with the exception that for lack of an API or good way of pulling the very rich content out, I still use Google Keep for very plain text notes.

Re: Dropbox Paper

#88

Post by tekacs »

acchow wrote: post #66
tekacs wrote: post #51

I'll throw Notion ( https://notion.so/ ) into the mix here, as an (as far as I can tell far more full-featured) alternative to this. I've used Paper a number of times, starting from long before Notion was a thing, having been a happy Etherpad and Hackpad user in the past. Somehow Paper managed to inspire less in my collaborators than either the latter services (where perhaps plain text was the factor) or than Notion…

Looking at the landing page, I have built some hypothetical mental model on how to use the app and its feature, but it's mostly guessing - it would be awesome if they put up a video showcasing real-world usage and features. "Task Board, Design Specs, Knowledge Base, Coding Docs, Team Handbook, Roadmap" - are these possible use-cases of the system? Or are they disparate document types? You create a document and pick o…

Use cases, kinda, yes, https://trello.com/, yes.

I started explaining all of these in depth, but aspects of it would take an order of magnitude more text to explain than they would to simply experience first-hand - I'd encourage you to instead simply try out the first page of the demo experience, which I think would be dramatically more information-packed.

Re: Dropbox Paper

#90

Post by rcymerys »

I just hope it doesn't end like Mailbox.

What I love about Paper (compared to Google Docs and similar tools) is it's simplicity. Formatting options are extremely limited, so all you have to do is just to type and it'll lay the document out for you.

This is actually the best feature, since you don't waste time adjusting tab stops and figuring out how to make bullet lists work (which was like 50% of my time when writing documents in regular editors).

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