2010/9/24 Jose Quesada <ques...@gmail.com>: > Hi, > We've had previous discussions on whether or not it's useful to have some > kind of real-time collaboration in LyX. > The death of wave seemed to reinforce the idea that this is not a killer > feature, and people don't need it. Collaboration using a VCS is sufficient.
I think the problem with Wave is that... well... what's it for really? It's not an editor, not a chat program, not...anything...except a tech demonstration. Not likely to win the public over. > Well, recently I found two counterexamples. > One is http://docs.latexlab.org > A decent latex editor built on top of google docs. > The other one is... abiword. surprised :) ? > While being a crappy word processor, it's actually better than anything > built within a browser: > http://msevior.livejournal.com/28805.html > http://www.abisource.com/wiki/AbiCollab > > I still think LyX would benefit from such functionality. > Thoughts? For myself, I doubt I would use it much, however: I'm a geek and I love version control. For other users, I think collaborative editing would be a killer feature. Not long ago I held a little demonstration of Zotero for some rather non-geekier people, and the thing that really sold them (and got them off Endnote) was the collaborative features. They thought the plugins for OpenOffice and LyX sounded convenient, but were really disappointed that there was no true Google Docs integration, as all of them were mainly using Google Docs to write their master's theses... again because they could edit the same document at the same time as the rest of their group. Even the ones who plan on eventually getting a LyX document in the end insist on copy-pasting back and forth between Google Docs and LyX, just because it's supposedly so much more convenient (yes, they lose formatting and have to re-add references; they still do it). Even from the slightly geekier camp I've had lots of requests to install SubEthaEdit back when I ran OS X, so it's not just the non-geeks who get hooked on that stuff. best regards, Kevin Brubeck Unhammer
