"I love Hackpad. And it's strange because most of what Hackpad does, Google Docs does. And I really like Google Docs."
Google Docs has never felt webby to me. It feels like a big Flash or ActiveX component, as it's mostly aiming to emulate 1990s desktop software, with menu-bar and all. So it carries considerable UI baggage and is not a clean web app with a DOM that could be effectively inspected or manipulated.
For real-time collaboration, I much prefer Etherpad-type tools as they're lightweight. For private one-off docs, I find secret Gists much simpler to deal with.
What other Etherpad-type tools would you recommend?
For dealing with less-tech-literate people, Google Docs is nice because they instantly recognize and understand it (and they can see me collaborating at the same time and I don't need to explain anything).
Google Docs has never felt webby to me. It feels like a big Flash or ActiveX component, as it's mostly aiming to emulate 1990s desktop software, with menu-bar and all. So it carries considerable UI baggage and is not a clean web app with a DOM that could be effectively inspected or manipulated.
For real-time collaboration, I much prefer Etherpad-type tools as they're lightweight. For private one-off docs, I find secret Gists much simpler to deal with.