Authorea - online collaborative editor for academic writing with LaTeX or Markdown

Posted by Dr Andus
Feb 15, 2014 at 11:32 AM

MadaboutDana wrote:
>It’s difficult for software developers! If they’re ambitious, that means
>producing apps for Android, iOS and Windows Phone (possibly also for
>Amazon Fire and Blackberry), optimised for both mobile phones and
>tablets. And if they’re seriously ambitious, it also means producing
>desktop apps for Windows and Mac at the very least, and ideally also for
>Linux (which implies multiple distributions by definition).
>6Wunderkinder (developers of Wunderlist) have been wrestling with this
>quandary for a while.

The other option could be to go down the ChromeOS route (also with an offline app). That would take care of desktops and laptops that can run a Chrome browser, and then there are the Chromebooks themselves, slowly taking off. Hopefully ChromeOS would connect with Android one day (there seem to be signs that things are moving that way).

The problem with Google though is that they are focusing on the lowest common denominator, rather than sophisticated users like the Editorially user-base. It’s all the cutting-edge niche applications that are suffering because they don’t have the financial muscle to even let the world know they exist (Editorially is truly excellent but few people seem to have heard about it, so it couldn’t even make its way out of beta).

We would need a business like Write Bros that specialises in and buys up a whole range of writing apps, so there can be a critical mass and a single place where you can buy them. Except that Write Bros don’t seem to be developing the software they acquire all that much and treat them more like cash cows (at least that seems to be the case with Outline 4D).