Real-time collaborative editor shootout

MSch — Sat, 17 Dec 2005 14:26:00 +0100

Wolfgang Sommergut found SynchroEdit an open-source browser-based simultaneous multiuser editor. But unfortunately the Demo seemed broken when I tried it out, so I started to look for alternatives.

And alternatives I should find: Wikipedia has an article, that although sparse on content contains links to seemingly every collaborative editor there is. JotSpot Live is a hosted application that works (I actually tried the free plan) on Firefox and Internet Explorer, but not Opera. It once told me it lost it’s connection while I was typing on IE, but apart from that it seem slick, stable, WEB 2.0 like.

There’s also LivePad, a Mozilla only browser based rich editor, that’s free as in speech and works flawless, but takes quite some processor power.

Because i couldn’t find any really mind-blowing web applications, I decided to give standalone applications a look. Although there are two working, free solutions, I’ll ignore MoonEdit and just describe my experience with the better looking, cross-platform Gobby, because Gobby is what the developers of the great game Clonk use.

After some initial work to get Gobby running on Windows (you have to download and install GTK support packages), Gobby itself is a great piece of work. Editing works smooth and changes are visible immideatelly. Furthermore multiple documents, syntax highlighting (even for Ruby) and a seperate chat during the editing process are supported.

All in all I have to say, whenever possible I’d use Gobby, because it’s simply ten times more powerful then it’s web based equivalents, and free. If I’d to go with a Web Application I’d choose the non-free JotSpot, because it supports many different browsers and just works out of the box.

schuerrer.org Weblog: Tag Collaboration

Real-time collaborative editor shootout