Show HN: Precursor, a lightweight prototyping tool with real-time collaboration

by dwwoelfel • 12 years ago

10 5 12 years ago

dwwoelfel2• 12 years ago

This is a weekend project I've been working on with a few friends. The goal is to build a prototyping tool that lets you express your ideas in a sharable format.

It's built with React.js/Om, datascript and Datomic. They've worked out really well for us. I'm amazed at how often things that seem difficult to build turn out to be fairly easy. Last night I leveraged Datomic's transaction model (implemented by datascript) to add Emacs-style undo in about 30 minutes.

I'm very curious to hear any feedback you have. The url I posted tries to group people in buckets of 10 to show off the collaboration aspect. If you want a page to yourself, just click the "New Document" icon on the left.

linkeex2• 12 years ago

Hi there,

I just fell in love with this!

It's fast and responsive, collaborative and MOST-IMPORTANTLY it's easy to use! Go to the url, boom doc got created for you, link is shareable.

Only thing I'd like to see now is some kind of document explorer and maybe a way to protect documents or make them mine because right now I could theoretically access any document: https://prcrsr.com/document/1

RichardZite• 12 years ago

If you liked precursor, you may find http://ziteboard.com a fit as well. Although different perspectives for different use cases, both are great. Find more here as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8609634

dwwoelfel2• 12 years ago

Thanks for the suggestions!

We’re definitely planning to make private and moderated documents. Ping me at dwwoelfel@gmail.com and I’ll let you know when it’s ready.

For the document explorer, do you want to see the documents that you created or just interesting docs that anybody created? Either way, we just pushed up a way to export a doc as an image by appending .svg to the end of the url--I’m excited about using them as thumbnail previews in the explorer.

We set up a twitter account @prcrsr_app if you want to follow along with our progress.

linkeex2• 12 years ago

For the document explorer, do you want to see the documents that you created or just interesting docs that anybody created? Either way, we just pushed up a way to export a doc as an image by appending .svg to the end of the url--I’m excited about using them as thumbnail previews in the explorer.

Me personally, I'd like to see a list of my own recent modified documents and a way to name them. Like Google Drive for example. I wouldn't integrate a way for looking at other documents before you're not able to "lock" documents so that others can't destroy them.

Show HN: Precursor, a lightweight prototyping tool with real-time collaboration

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