Hi, I think Greg's post is key here. Even if the two users are never editing at the same time, having always the latest version with all merges applied is reassuring.
@Rob: "Yet, I've never actually met anyone who writes with others in real time." I think this is because the tech didn't even exist a year ago. Any tech takes a while to get adopted. Most people don't even know it exists, and the ones who do don't know why they need it. Plus, leaving the tech aside, I can imagine there's a mental change when writing this way. I'm using abiword to collaborate on a paper. Will report how things went after a few days. Btw, the latex on gDocs thing is way too beta to be usable. It lost edits, crashed, etc. It's just a pity that abiword is so limited in other features (search, adding references, etc), but it looks really promising. Best, -Jose Jose Quesada, PhD. Research scientist, Max Planck Institute, Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition, Berlin http://www.josequesada.name/ http://twitter.com/Quesada On Sat, Sep 25, 2010 at 7:51 AM, Jose Quesada <ques...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi Kevin, > I tried Gobby. it's as simple as notepad, so for serious > programming/writing it'd feel a bit limited. But the deal breaker is no > undo. Yes, you hear that right. I think Gobby is actually feature-wise worse > than in-browser alternatives. > > Best, > -Jose > > Jose Quesada, PhD. > Research scientist, > Max Planck Institute, > Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition, > Berlin > http://www.josequesada.name/ > http://twitter.com/Quesada > > > On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 8:21 PM, Kevin Brubeck Unhammer < > kun...@student.uib.no> wrote: > >> 2010/9/24 Gregory Jefferis <jeffe...@gmail.com>: >> > Non-interactive collaborative editing means that there can always be one >> > live version of a document to which anyone can apply changes that are >> > versioned, identified and much more likely. Essentially it solves the >> > conflicting merge problem by automatically merging all the time so that >> you >> > are always looking at the latest version (and can be alerted to recent >> > changes). You can try and do this with traditional version control >> > arrangements but you will always run into a conflict if the system isn't >> > designed for the possibility of interactive collaborative editing. >> >> And this is the reason why most users love Google Docs and will never >> use git (even though as we all know, merging with git is Fun and >> Easy). >> >> >> I think the ideal situation would look like Gobby[1] running inside >> LyX (not necessarily with chat features, but at least showing where >> the other user is editing), but I can understand how that would be a >> lot of work to implement. Sponsorship project? ;-) >> >> >> -Kevin >> >> >> [1] http://gobby.0x539.de >> > >
