EtherPad

[Chow Loong Jin]

On Wed, 9 Jun 2010 11:52:35 +0100
Matt Zimmerman <mdz at ubuntu.com> wrote:

> http://etherpad.org/
> 
> This seems like a potentially useful tool for the Ubuntu community,
> especially at UDS time.  It's a bit more Google Docs than Gobby, being
> browser-based, but is free software and seems worth exploring as an
> alternative.  Has anyone tried it?  What was your experience?
> 
> There are some public installations already available which you can
> experiment with.
> 

I've used it before, with some friends who are Windows users. It's pretty
pleasant to use, especially if you don't have a dedicated server and are
blocked from hosting a Gobby session due to being firewalled in. Latency-wise,
it's approximately one-second with ietherpad.com, using wall-clock time
observations.

As for features, everything Gobby has, Etherpad has, and more, except that
Etherpad seemingly doesn't have a listing of all available pads, and
also no option for naming the pads. I'm not sure it is impossible
though. It might just have been impractical for public Etherpad services like
ietherpad.com.

To summarize,
Pros:
 * No need for external software
 * No worries about getting blocked by firewalls
 * Has support for rich-text and plain-text formatting
 * Can import from and export to PDF, text, ODT and DOC formats.
 * Has inbuilt revision control.

Cons:
 * Doesn't seem to have a listing of all available documents
 * Doesn't seem to allow naming of documents.

-- 
Kind regards,
Chow Loong Jin
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