I'm in love. This is like seeing conversations in GMail for the first time. Of course you should be able to do this. I want this function everywhere.
The most surprising thing I've seen in 2009, courtesy of Etherpad
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Re: The most surprising thing I've seen in 2009, courtesy of Etherpad
#92I've been wanting to play back the writing of an essay for years. Since Etherpad saves every keystroke, I convinced the founders to add a way to play them back. "Startups in 13 Sentences" was the first essay I wrote on Etherpad. Now I'm going to write all of them on it. Playback is just one little feature of Etherpad, but think of the implications of this alone. Among other things it will make cheating impossible in…
This 'feature' seems ripe for a MS Word add-on, if it catches on. I doubt everyone will abandon their word processing software and user Etherpad.
Re: The most surprising thing I've seen in 2009, courtesy of Etherpad
#93I've been wanting to play back the writing of an essay for years. Since Etherpad saves every keystroke, I convinced the founders to add a way to play them back. "Startups in 13 Sentences" was the first essay I wrote on Etherpad. Now I'm going to write all of them on it. Playback is just one little feature of Etherpad, but think of the implications of this alone. Among other things it will make cheating impossible in…
I really liked this sentence I caught. "Launching lets you observe the collision between your presuppositions and the needs of actual users." I know, every word should tell, but I wish it had made it.
I noticed that sentence too, but my brain saw:
"Launching lets you observe the collusion between your presuppositions and the needs of actual users."
I went back, and you are right, it is collision.
Collusion is more fun though. :)
Re: The most surprising thing I've seen in 2009, courtesy of Etherpad
#94I've been wanting to play back the writing of an essay for years. Since Etherpad saves every keystroke, I convinced the founders to add a way to play them back. "Startups in 13 Sentences" was the first essay I wrote on Etherpad. Now I'm going to write all of them on it. Playback is just one little feature of Etherpad, but think of the implications of this alone. Among other things it will make cheating impossible in…
Might I suggest, from the watcher's perspective, it'd be handy if the final feature sets the vertical scrollbar such that the currently playing change is on the screen? It might be kind of jerky during the editing stage, but it's better than scrolling around trying to find out where the action is. ;) What I learned from this is that I write very differently from the way you do. My first draft is almost straight strea…
> It might be kind of jerky during the editing stage, but it's better than scrolling around trying to find out where the action is. ;)
With a bit of Javascript I'm sure you could make it scroll smoothly.
Re: The most surprising thing I've seen in 2009, courtesy of Etherpad
#95An incredible website. Finally I have found the motivation I need to write my IB Extended Essay (days before it is due). How do you get the play back link though?
For now they just hacked together something custom for me. However, Etherpad saves every keystroke, so once they enable this for everyone, you'll be able to replay stuff you wrote with it.
I was also trying to figure out how to roll my own replay on Etherpad. I look forward to seeing it live for all users.
This will be a great tool for the classroom. Whether it's tracking collaboration on papers or "showing work".
Re: The most surprising thing I've seen in 2009, courtesy of Etherpad
#96I'd like to see this applied as an embeddable feature in hacker news. see who writes comments, which comments get commented on and what people really have to say before they hit that 'add comment' button
Re: The most surprising thing I've seen in 2009, courtesy of Etherpad
#97I've been wanting to play back the writing of an essay for years. Since Etherpad saves every keystroke, I convinced the founders to add a way to play them back. "Startups in 13 Sentences" was the first essay I wrote on Etherpad. Now I'm going to write all of them on it. Playback is just one little feature of Etherpad, but think of the implications of this alone. Among other things it will make cheating impossible in…
I convinced the founders to add a way to play them back You often talk about releasing early, building something people want, etc. Since you carry a lot of influence, and (I guess) invest in Etherpad, and they've adjusted it to your personal request - do you worry that this effect might give you a distorted view of how well Etherpad specifically, and YC startups generally, are building what people want?
Valid point, but I think it's worth looking at the potential benefits. The thing I always hate about writing is that I'm constantly saving copies off to the side. At the very least I would think snapshots would be invaluable, but once you have playback, you basically already have snapshots with high granularity.
While solutions like DropBox or Sharepoint allow versioning and collaboration it's at a higher level. Maybe I've been spoiled by VMWare, but I love having branches of specific versions to fall back on and test things out. Why should writing be any different?
Re: The most surprising thing I've seen in 2009, courtesy of Etherpad
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is an incredible thing to watch! Can you do this with any piece of writing on Etherpad? What a great way of bringing attention to a start-up: make something that's inherently fascinating due to features. This is unlike anything online I've seen before because the functionality just doesn't exist anywhere else. So it's a great thing to watch and it also tells you about the service. I like that you keep constantly…
Can you do this with any piece of writing on Etherpad? Anything you write with it now you will be able to play back like this soon. Etherpad is already saving all the keystrokes. They just haven't released the player yet. (This is a one-off prototype.)
The playback feature reminds me of the master Etch-a-Sketch artist:
http://gvetchedintime.com/gvetchedintime/videos.php
This site shows how some fairly good illustrations are drawn (brushstroke playback). Unfortunately, not all drawings can be animated and the ability to search for playback-capable drawings is limited:
http://www.ratemydrawings.com/
http://www.ratemydrawings.com/drawings/animation/428912.html
It would be interesting to have the timestamp data (if it is recorded) of the keystrokes (adjusted to author's timezone - privacy withstanding) so you can see a clock/calendar [day|night icon] when the author wrote it (was it 3am in the morning? did they put it aside for a couple hours or was it a period of days?).
EDIT: Didn't see this comment. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=495812
Re: The most surprising thing I've seen in 2009, courtesy of Etherpad
#99Re: The most surprising thing I've seen in 2009, courtesy of Etherpad
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
> think of the implications of this alone There are already non-webapp mouselog/keylog and replay applications. And besides, think of the implications of letting students be on the internet while they are writing essays.
It's different when it's built into a generic, web-based editor. Imagine the difference between a) telling students to install a keylogger, write an essay with it turned on, then submit the essay plus the logs, and then the teacher figuring out how to replay the logs, versus b) telling students to write their essay at etherpad.com, they submit the url, teacher clicks on "replay." As for the matter of students being o…
Cheating is a difficult and important problem, but I'm not sure this solution would be worth the inconvenience it would cause. If it only inconvenienced cheaters that would be fine -- but I think it would also cause some honest students and teachers a lot of trouble.
First, there's the simple privacy issue. If a professor told me to install a keylogger on my computer or if she told me to use etherpad to write an essay - either way I'd feel like my privacy was being violated.
Then there's the practical issue of how this system would affect writing ability. I personally do my best writing when I'm able to ignore the critic in my head and focus on the words. Being self-conscious about someone seeing all the stupid things I wrote along the way would make it much more difficult to get into this state of concentration.
Finally, there's the issue of making teacher's not only read two dozen boring essays but also watch replays of them being written. I personally think their time could be better spent.