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alexpotato 8 hours ago [-]
As a kid in the late 1980s, my dad got me a PC (an Olivetti IBM clone to be precise).
I distinctly remember that there were separate apps for spreadsheets (Lotus 1-2-3 [0]), charts (Harvard Graphics [1]) and word processing (Chi Writer [2]).
And now we just have a basic office suite for free in one website.
If folks like this kind of thing, I discovered https://bento.page/ from a HN post and have been using it off and on for the past few months. It has a much larger featureset but is specifically focused on presentations (for now!). Unlike this project, the editor and content embed themselves in an html file, so you aren't dependent on the host site existing to serve the editor.
Maybe I'm a 2026 luddite but I can't bring myself to read about let alone try using products whose landing page is such a cookie cutter AI design. At least put some effort in to sand off the horrible unnecessary gloss and choose different fonts, colour schemes and layouts from every other project.
I am gradually becoming resigned to the fact that I'll have to get over this prejudice, though I'm not sure how I will.
NewsaHackO 6 hours ago [-]
I agree with you, but it is so funny that three years ago, a website that look like this would probably make the front page for its excellent design alone. Now, it gives off similar energy to a wix website.
earthnail 1 hours ago [-]
Landing pages are always a proxy for quality. Quality in implementation, quality in domain knowledge, in communication…
At a time when building such a page was hard, it communicated quality in implementation. Now it fakes that, and that is deceptive and therefore met with negative reviews reaction.
I find it completely logical.
thih9 3 hours ago [-]
You are right, then again: I think three years ago someone would have commented about the gloss in the background as well (saying that it’s unhelpful, distracting and resource intensive).
mtford 58 minutes ago [-]
That and the "The boring deck is dead. One file killed it."
It makes me kinda tense up - I've become almost allergic to it. Kinda interesting really.
altmanaltman 3 hours ago [-]
Not only the design but the text. Like it says so much and so little at the same time and constantly repeats the same cliches like "the file is the app" or "the api is the x". Unmemorable, unfocused and boring is what it comes across. I know devs don't care about marketing copy but it does make a difference on how you're presenting your app to first time potential users.
JMiao 4 hours ago [-]
it's a fair criticism though. learning and eventually relying on new tools is an investment. it helps to know the developer is invested too, not just moonlighting.
altern8 5 minutes ago [-]
Way too complicated. Tiny Office is nice because it's minimalistic and intuitive. Bad comparison
mdrzn 1 hours ago [-]
same, i've been using it extensively and it's very convenient having the ability to let Codex/ClaudeCode generate a whole deck, and then do the last edits myself in the browser.
I'm intrigued about the "Trip Planner" being a top-level app. Only tried it in a very surface level way, but the recent trips I've planned (Ottawa for 6 people, Cancun for ~20) have ended up as an ugly mishmash of spreadsheets + google maps saved locations list + random chatgpt sessions.
It feels like there's an unmet need there for managing something more flexible than a minute by minute itinerary, maybe like a list of must-do and want-do activities and dining options, with the system able to figure out what is open when and has other constraints like the weather, costs, what activities pair well together, which group members some things are more or less suited to, what the contact details are for things like a private tour, etc etc.
Why not just get your agent to write LaTeX? Use the beamer template and get a much more professional, customisable, git-commitable and transferable presentation.
gf000 36 minutes ago [-]
Then why not typst? Much faster to render and far more ergonomic/human-understandable when you eventually have to touch something inside.
simonw 6 hours ago [-]
You inspired me to knock together a LaTeX version of the same pattern - lets you drop LaTeX in the URL so you can link to the rendered version.
Open street map servers aren't really meant to be used in end user applications. They are primarily to support the editing of the map data. Usage like this should be with a provider like Mapbox, or your own supplied tiles.
jdranczewski 48 seconds ago [-]
I've recently found out that this is not quite true - while the primary purpose of their tile servers is mapping and editing applications, they do allow third party apps to use the servers as long as they follow usage policies: https://operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/tiles/
For my own needs I usually just go for https://openfreemap.org/ though, I like the default style, and it feels maybe a little faster.
oidar 9 hours ago [-]
Is there no way to open saved documents? Like it won't open a .csv, .txt or .ics file for example?
ArekDymalski 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah, the concept and execution are really impressive but lack of any import is a real blocker I think. Especially in case of spreadsheets - quite often they are not started from scratch, but require previous data or data from other sources etc.
pseudosavant 8 hours ago [-]
That gap surprised me too. But I couldn't find any way to open a saved document. I think it is just based on the URL.
Mashimo 3 hours ago [-]
The word processor is buggy. When switching between touch typing and swiping the cursor ends up in the middle of words.
rezaprima 1 hours ago [-]
reminds me to TiddlyWiki that saves to itself [0][1]
The advent of AI being able to reverse engineer anything will lead to an age of open source software being the expectation.
rullelito 42 minutes ago [-]
More like open prompts, so you don't have to trust "foreign" code.
oblio 19 minutes ago [-]
The problem with open prompts is:
If I ask 10 of the best developers on the planet to build me something and describe it in great detail, they will all build wildly different things unless I actually point them at the exact thing. And even then, the intent might be identical and the surface might be identical, but everything else in between will be different. Oh, and quality will still vary even in this best base scenario.
That's going to be even worse with LLMs. We would need the exact LLM model and its overall configuration (for open weights), the exact prompts and then the luck of the draw.
We should still encourage open prompts, but it's not a panacea.
haisin5555 2 hours ago [-]
To be honest, it looks amazing, but it would be great if there is a guide or like a "how to" cause I'm not sure how to use it.
hollowonepl 4 hours ago [-]
I’m waiting until somebody vibe code a proper desktop apps to provide more diversity than MS vs Open Office. just like I see options blossomed in the “Creative Suite” field.
But maybe I’m just one of those who don’t like web office apps and/or google docs related workflows.
can I do a PR for live collaboration? to be transparent, I'm going to use my own project puter.js for webrtc, but the project is open-source (https://github.com/HeyPuter/puter)
datas 10 hours ago [-]
I like stuff like this. Have you considered real time collaboration? Your not to far off from this with something like web sockets.
Edit: realized it looks like the data is stored in the url, which is a neat approach but I guess its not really that close.
nine_k 9 hours ago [-]
It's entirely possible to update the URL in browser without reloading the page.
Permalinks are needed to share documents, which would be something like a link shortener, with the target updating as the document is updated.
Woodi 3 hours ago [-]
Do "office suite" really need to be http app ?? Such hackers friendly trend...
kraf 2 hours ago [-]
This is absolutely lovely, well done!
eviks 5 hours ago [-]
> free office suite where your document is inside the link and easy to share
How is it easy to share megabytes encoded in a link?
123uijndfv 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
inatreecrown2 5 hours ago [-]
The Animator app is nice and simple, I would like to have something like it as a standalone app.
peter_retief 3 hours ago [-]
this is really great, just went through the categories and it is really useful to someone who work like me
10 hours ago [-]
mattoxic 8 hours ago [-]
I was musing on something like this. There is non zero chance that some US administration disables GSuite / Office365 for all of us living in shithole countries.
bartvk 60 minutes ago [-]
There's always OpenOffice, LibreOffice and friends.
I'd wish LibreOffice would have collab-editing by default for everything, as an option.
EGreg 4 hours ago [-]
This is so well done!
The only bug I found is that the presentation previews in dark mode have the text as black on a dark background, when it should be white (matching the canvas text).
kulahan 9 hours ago [-]
If you add a PDF annotation to this, it’d cover 100% of my (admittedly generic) needs. I know how big of an ask that can (used to?) be.
nine_k 9 hours ago [-]
Putting a PDF into the URL is not entirely impossible, but comes with serious limitations %)
johschmitz 2 hours ago [-]
I guess the PDF wouldn't have to be stored in the application/URL? Just a tool to load it, fill+annotate+sign it and export back to disk.
nine_k 2 hours ago [-]
The specialty of all apps here is that the entire document is in the URL.
It's a great idea, but this limits the size of the serialized document to 2048 kiB for Chrome, and 64 kiB for Firefox.
condorman 6 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
tyiz 19 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
syngrog66 7 hours ago [-]
so... the worst possible way to provide the functionality in question
and the functionality has been available already for decades. solved problems, kiddos
I distinctly remember that there were separate apps for spreadsheets (Lotus 1-2-3 [0]), charts (Harvard Graphics [1]) and word processing (Chi Writer [2]).
And now we just have a basic office suite for free in one website.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_1-2-3
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Graphics
2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChiWriter
Maybe I'm a 2026 luddite but I can't bring myself to read about let alone try using products whose landing page is such a cookie cutter AI design. At least put some effort in to sand off the horrible unnecessary gloss and choose different fonts, colour schemes and layouts from every other project.
I am gradually becoming resigned to the fact that I'll have to get over this prejudice, though I'm not sure how I will.
At a time when building such a page was hard, it communicated quality in implementation. Now it fakes that, and that is deceptive and therefore met with negative reviews reaction.
I find it completely logical.
It makes me kinda tense up - I've become almost allergic to it. Kinda interesting really.
It feels like there's an unmet need there for managing something more flexible than a minute by minute itinerary, maybe like a list of must-do and want-do activities and dining options, with the system able to figure out what is open when and has other constraints like the weather, costs, what activities pair well together, which group members some things are more or less suited to, what the contact details are for things like a private tour, etc etc.
Here's a deck I had it generate about how the URL format works: https://bit.ly/4yRBc1v
https://tools.simonwillison.net/latex
Who cares?
https://aboard.com/introducing-tinylittleoffice-com/
It seems they had the idea originally 6 years ago and did versions of it, but
> We moved on, and sadly, those sites fell off the web, and the old links all broke.
This recently came across my radar as Home Assistant has migrated to the vector tiles hosted directly by OSMF for all deployments: https://github.com/home-assistant/frontend/pull/53816
For my own needs I usually just go for https://openfreemap.org/ though, I like the default style, and it feels maybe a little faster.
[0] https://tiddlywiki.com
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TiddlyWiki
If I ask 10 of the best developers on the planet to build me something and describe it in great detail, they will all build wildly different things unless I actually point them at the exact thing. And even then, the intent might be identical and the surface might be identical, but everything else in between will be different. Oh, and quality will still vary even in this best base scenario.
That's going to be even worse with LLMs. We would need the exact LLM model and its overall configuration (for open weights), the exact prompts and then the luck of the draw.
We should still encourage open prompts, but it's not a panacea.
But maybe I’m just one of those who don’t like web office apps and/or google docs related workflows.
Edit: realized it looks like the data is stored in the url, which is a neat approach but I guess its not really that close.
Permalinks are needed to share documents, which would be something like a link shortener, with the target updating as the document is updated.
How is it easy to share megabytes encoded in a link?
The only bug I found is that the presentation previews in dark mode have the text as black on a dark background, when it should be white (matching the canvas text).
It's a great idea, but this limits the size of the serialized document to 2048 kiB for Chrome, and 64 kiB for Firefox.
and the functionality has been available already for decades. solved problems, kiddos