A Web App For Real-Time Collaborative Writing

adamengst writes in with good news for anyone who needs to collaborate remotely on a writing or editing project — coding too. It's especially good news for those using Windows and Linux. Mac users have had SubEthaEdit for a few years now. With EtherPad, two or more people can edit a document and see all the edits simultaneously. EtherPad's main differences from SubEthaEdit: it's a Web application that de facto supports many platforms without the need for a central Mac OS X host; and it's free. Here is a comparison of EtherPad and SubEthaEdit.

Comments

There's also the Eclipse Communication Framework

[toby]

ECF home, articles at IBM DeveloperWorks, InfoQ.

From the latter: ECF is...

• Real-time communication and collaboration features for teams using Eclipse such as peer-to-peer file sharing, remote opening of Eclipse views, screen capture sharing, and real-time shared editing.
• A set of communications APIs and frameworks built upon existing protocols (like Google Talk, XMPP, SSH, HTTP/HTTPS, Rendevous, IRC, and others) for developers to add communications and messaging to their own Equinox-based plugins, or customize and extend the ECF applications.

Re:Looks great!

[Ed Avis]

Have you tried using a version control system such as Subversion or Mercurial? You don't all see the same screen in real time, but it automatically coordinates changes that need to be merged in.

Re:Mmm...

[Skinkie]

http://gobby.0x539.de/trac/ seems very cross-platform to me too. Who needs ctrl-z anyway if not using bash?

screen -x

[Anonymous Coward]

I use `screen -x` for collaborating on anything.
And, to add to this flamebait, I use a good editor (i.e. vi or vim).

Gobby

[kwalker]

Linux and Windows users (And I think there's an OS X port too) can use Gobby, which is like SubEthaEdit, but free, written in GTK+, includes a free server for collaboration over the net, and zeroconf support for finding users on the local network. Since it's based on GTK+, it has things like syntax highlighting, spellcheck, etc. already available. It should also be in most popular distros' repos already.

Google Docs, Abiword Collaboration,IRC, SVN etc.

[apathy maybe]

I've seen it written that IRC is just multiplayer notepad before...

But anyway, Google Writer does this, Abiword is a non-web app freely available on all major platforms, and has a Collaboration plugin (never used it personally).

Oh, and this one still requires you to use their server... That rules it out for most use cases I can think of in a commercial setting.

Interestingly, they say on their FAQ
"One thing that Google Docs does not do is real-time collaborative text editing." Actually, yes it does...
"Google Docs are cumbersome to share with other people. It requires sending an email, and all collaborators must have a Google Docs account. With EtherPad, you just copy and paste a link, no emails or accounts required."
Wrong on the first point (you can just copy and paste the link, or just see it through your list of files).

Score, 4/10, interesting sorta, but actually rather boring. Give us the code, let us host it locally, force user accounts if desired.

Otherwise, not interested.

Everything it can do can already be done using some other tool.

Re:Looks great!

[Cowmonaut]

GoogleDocs....

Re:Drawing version?

[tepples]

Does anybody know of a collaborative drawing tool in the same vein?

You could start your research at Wikipedia: Oekaki and Paint chat

Re:Google Docs, Abiword Collaboration,IRC, SVN etc

[x102output]

Na, Google Docs does not do this. This is REAL-TIME collaboration, updating on the screen as you type.

CollabEdit

[Maexxus]

This has been done before, http://collabedit.com/ :)