Dropbox's Hackpad to be open sourced

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Posted by jaslar
Aug 24, 2015 at 05:29 PM

Described as a collaborative note-taker.Anybody tried it?

Article here: http://venturebeat.com/2015/08/21/dropbox-finally-open-sources-its-hackpad-collaborative-document-editor/

Posted by zoe
Aug 24, 2015 at 06:01 PM

I’ve played around with Hackpad a little bit. It’s not really my preferred type of program, since I don’t usually collaborate with others in real time on document creation/editing. I’m more of a traditionalist and prefer the draft-revise-draft-revise approach.

However, Hackpad has some nice native features and is extremely elegant in the way it works with formatting. Headings are converted to clickable tables of contents as you write. There’s lots of support for inline media attachments.

Unfortunately, I believe that the reason Hackpad is being open-sourced is because Dropbox has essentially cut it loose. They took the elements they wanted for their own planned “Dropbox Notes” integration. I think I read something about people from the Hackpad acquisition being let go from the company (I’m not sure about this, though). I can’t find the iOS Hackpad app on the App Store anymore. I think this might be yet another example of when a large company sets their code “free” as a way of washing their hands of it. If the open-source community cares to do something with it, great. If not, oh well. But don’t expect any further development or support.

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Aug 25, 2015 at 12:45 PM

I was wondering why Dropbox bought it. Sorry they just raided its technology.

I was recently looking for the Hackpad iOS app too, Zoe, and I couldn’t find it. I started wondering if I imagined that it every existed. Thanks for letting me know that I wasn’t crazy.

Hackpad is interesting also for its wiki-life features. I hope it has a future in open source…

Steve Z.

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