Nontrivial Exercises

Gobby - Collaborative Cross-Platform Text Editor

At the recent CocoaDevHouseDallas event, several of us got together to collaborate on the design and development of a new note-taking app for the Mac. After a lot of whiteboarding and discussions, we wanted to capture some of the requirements and use cases that we had come up with for this app. The problem was, all of this info was distributed across the minds of 4 or 5 people who had commented and discussed the design of the app.

Since this was a group focused on developing in Cocoa, the Mac object-oriented development framework, everyone had Macs … except me. I was along for the ride with my Tablet PC in hand (which, by the way, caught a few people’s interest). There is a Mac app called SubEthaEdit, created by The Coding Monkeys in Germany, which is a collaborative real-time text editor for Macs.

At one point in the evening, then, at CocoaDevHouse, several people fired up SubEthaEdit on their Macs and began listing the requirements and use cases that they remembered from our discussions. After several people added their ideas to the list, we had a fairly long list of items, created and modified in real-time, that we could then save.

Pretty cool. Well, SubEthaEdit is a Mac-only app, and the developers apparently don’t plan any port to other OS’s like Windows or Linux. However, thanks to Tyler from CDH, I’ve found a close equivalent that will work on Mac OSX, Windows and Linux.

Gobby is a free open-source app that allows for real-time collaborative editing of text documents. Although it is easiest to install on Windows – there is a pre-built Windows installer, but you have to compile from source on OSX and Linux – you can share and collaborate on a doc with multiple users on multiple platforms.

I’ve tried it out on 2 Windows machines and it works great. You can check out some screenshots on the Gobby homepage, and I’ve added a few of mine here as well.

User list of all users currently connected:

Editing screen with changes shown in each user’s specific color.

One disadvantage of Gobby compared to SubEthaEdit is that you have to manually enter the host name or IP address to connect to a shared session, whereas SubEthaEdit will find a list of people to connect to if you’re on a local network using Bonjour (an Apple networking utility). However, with Gobby you can manually specify a specific port to use, and you can specify passwords with each session / document on which you collaborate.

Technorati Tags: gobby, subethaedit, cocoadevhouse, editor, collaboration