Show HN: Nuclino – a lightweight and fast real-time wiki for teams

https://www.nuclino.com

by kiejo • 10 years ago

45 33 10 years ago

kiejo14• 10 years ago

Hey there, co-founder of Nuclino here!

After having tried countless knowledge management tools that were either too bloated and slow or focused on single users, we set out to create a lightweight wiki optimized for teams.

Some of the main features include:

* Everything is shared in real-time

* Instant fuzzy search

* Markdown commands

* Easy linking of pages using "@"

* Automatic tagging based on page titles

* Graph visualizations of tags and pages

You can think of it as an nvALT + real-time collaboration + rich content.

We've been dogfooding and testing this with a few startup teams over the past few months and would be happy to get your feedback and to answer any questions!

tarr11• 10 years ago

Can you be more specific on how your tool compares to specific product? I've used many and been disappointed. Yours (from the home page) seems similar to Quip, which is nice but seems a bit clunky and doesn't have enough integration with tools i already use.

We do a lot of this stuff on Google Drive, Github and Slack Posts. Google Drive is nice because it has permissions and company administration. Slack is nice because everyone uses it, it is easy, and it's naturally where these types of conversations happen already. But Slack posts are sort of buggy and unfinished, and Google Docs don't have persistent chat.

Github is nice for developers but doesn't extend beyond them, and has no real-time functionality.

Curious how you see yourself fitting in this world?

kiejo14• 10 years ago

Great question, we are using similar tools!

Slack is where our conversations live, but trying to keep more persistent and organized information there didn't work well for us.

We are also using Google Drive, but mainly for file management and working on documents which require full control over the styling and layout (e.g. legal documents that need to be printed). For more dynamic content and ad-hoc information, it feels too heavy to us.

Github (Wiki) is great for static text content and fine grained change tracking. Besides that, it's rather hard to use for non-developers as you pointed out.

We use Nuclino for collaborating on rich content that is more persistent than conversations in Slack and which does not need the overhead of a system like Google Drive. We haven't used Quip too much, but feel that it's rather similar to Google Drive with the files, folders, documents, spreadsheets and the likes.

To keep the core experience lightweight in the long term, we plan on supporting integrations that extend Nuclino.

misiti3780• 10 years ago

what technologies are you using; cool product

kiejo14• 10 years ago

We're using ES6 and React on the frontend and the editor is based on ProseMirror. On the backend we use Docker, Node.js, and OrientDB.

So far we're pretty happy with the stack, especially React turned out to be a great choice for us on the frontend!

philippnagel• 10 years ago

Congratulations on the product. I will suggest this to my colleagues at work. We're currently using Google Docs to share/work on knowledge and we're not happy with it. Although Google Docs style comments would be nice to have in the future.

Unfortunately your "Try it now for free" button doesn't seem to resolve at the moment.

I saw that you are supported by UnternehmerTUM and would be interested to hear about your experience. I am studying at LMU and I am currently in the process of starting my own gig. Especially the Techfounders program sparked my interest.

If you want to, you can also E-Mail me. My address can be found in my profile.

kiejo14• 10 years ago

Great! Let us know how it goes with your colleagues :)

That's strange, the button should actually work. This is probably related to a bug in Safari. Would be great if you could try it in Chrome, as it is the only browser we currently test in.

Sure, we'll write you an email!

alphapapa2• 10 years ago

I'm not joking: much of the light gray text on your site and your screenshot becomes literally unreadable when my LCD monitor is viewed at certain angles, not far off perpendicular; it becomes the same color as the background. My monitor may not be expensive, but it's not a cheapo, no-name one either.

I absolutely detest this current fad of thin, light gray text on white backgrounds. Instead of using high-contrast, easy-to-read text, people are using gray-on-white, white-on-gray, even gray-on-gray, and always with thin, narrow-stroke fonts and enormous amounts of whitespace.

And if it's hard to read indoors with no glare on a full-size screen, imagine trying to read it on a mobile device, outdoors, with sun/sky glare, or indoors on a reflective, glossy screen with fluorescent lights' glare.

I mean, look at the bottom of your page. One of the most important links on the page, the "Contact" link, is very light gray, thin text on white. When the cursor hovers over the bottom of the page, the links become slightly darker gray. And when the cursor hovers over a link, it becomes an even darker--wait for it--gray. You've effectively made the "Contact Us" link invisible.

And the screenshot of your product exhibits the same problems: the UI fades into the background to such a degree that it is difficult to see. This is bad enough when talking about a web page whose primary purpose is to look stylish, but your product's primary purpose is to be a usable tool. Are you trying to make the wiki equivalent of Das Keyboard?

Where do these fads come from?

For a good illustration of the problem, I just discovered this web site (which also lists HN as an example of the problem): http://contrastrebellion.com/

bjoernm2• 10 years ago

Thanks for the feedback. We didn't test the landing page under lots of different conditions yet, but we'll continue to make improvements. For example, I just deployed a new version with an improved contrast of the footer.

Regarding the product, themes and customizations will most likely be the best option to maximize the usability for each individual user. This way, users could choose high contrast themes if they are not happy with the default.

As for the general design question you are proposing, my opinion is that there is no one-size-fits-all approach that pleases and maximizes the usability for everyone. For example, making all text larger might increase readability for people with below average eyesight, but will punish users with normal eyesight by decreasing the information density. I think that adaptive design, which software can uniquely offer to some degree, is the only hypothetical solution. However, this is obviously limited by the context-awareness of systems in that it doesn't help that a system could automatically adjust it's font-size if it does not know the state of the users' eyesight.

MelmanGI3• 10 years ago

Love that markdown editor, very fast and easy to use. Well done! Although they could improve the contrast a bit (or maybe my screen just sucks).

Probably will give this a try with a few colleagues and see if it scales when you accumulate a larger amount of documents.

kiejo14• 10 years ago

Thanks for the feedback! It's always hard to get contrast right on all the different screens, but we'll look into it.

I can say that we've reached about 500 pages in our team and it's still working great. Nevertheless, we definitely plan on introducing more advanced organization and visualization features for teams with large amounts of documents.

dbyte2• 10 years ago

The product is sweet. Enjoyed the UI/UX. However I think the landing page needs a little bit more love (pricing, team, contacts, use case, features lists) what about importing from existing Wikis or plain documentation text files (e.g. markdown, asciidoc)?

alxppp• 10 years ago

Looks really neat! Any details on pricing? Will there be a free plan?

kiejo14• 10 years ago

We plan on charging a monthly fee per user similar to the premium offerings of products like Slack, Trello, and Asana. We're also thinking about offering a free version with a limited feature set, but have not decided how this will look exactly.

jaequery• 10 years ago

Pretty neat

baseh• 10 years ago

How do you add a link? - like a hyperlink to external page

kiejo14• 10 years ago

There's currently a bug that forces you to hit Space after pasting a link, for it to be recognized as a link. We'll fix this soon, but for now you can just hit Space after the link.

kiejo14• 10 years ago

We just deployed a new version which fixes this! You can now just paste a link into the editor.

bgnm2000• 10 years ago

This seems really cool - would love to see a demo app I can play around with before handing over an email address.

kiejo14• 10 years ago

Thanks for the input! We might add an open "Test Team" to the landing page. Until then you're free to use a spam address to convince yourself of the product ;)

waimbes• 10 years ago

Really love the idea, we have been struggling with this issue quite a bit in my office.

For me the one killer feature that I would want is comments. The commenting feature is the main reason our team uses Google docs, despite the major issues with it as an information hub.

kiejo14• 10 years ago

Great to hear that as we have comments on our roadmap. We're not sure yet how the best experince for commenting would look like.

Would you prefer inline comments, that appear directly inside the page or comments that appear on the side like in Google Docs?

drakmail• 10 years ago

Does after release there are will be free version?

kiejo14• 10 years ago

We haven't decided on this yet. We are still evaluating how a free version might look like.

konart• 10 years ago

Wish we could use it on our servers.

kiejo14• 10 years ago

Thanks for the input, we are generally open to that, but we still have to see how much demand there is for a self-hosted solution.

Show HN: Nuclino – a lightweight and fast real-time wiki for teams

Related Stories