One advantage of Microsoft Office is that I can reasonably expect that in 20 years Word will still be around and will be able to read the files I write today. With these apps, I would be surprised if in 5 years I could read the files created with these apps.
Agree, data lock-in is probably the biggest concern I have with any new productivity or note-taking tool.
It's tough because innovations in tools generally require some degree of schema or file format customization. I don't know about other tools but at least with Airtable I know I can always hit the API to get my data, though I will miss out on certain business logic around it like data validation, and probably a lot of other details.
The best proxy I have to allay some of my data portability concerns is how much funding the companies have. Funding is a double-edged sword but comparing two companies, one funded at $50m and the other at $5m, it's hard not to go with the former. I am heartened though to see that some of my favorite tools (Airtable and Coda) have gotten very large investments, which tell me they'll be around for a while. When I see similar products not getting those investments, it's a strong signal to stay away or only use them as a toy.
New tools need to signal their trustworthiness by exporting to legacy formats. Even if it means losing something in the process. Give me CSV, DOCX, or an SQLite DB. Not exactly rocket science.
Or better yet, give me a native app that I can download to my machine and use forever no matter what happens to your startup.
The reason word is gonna continue to exist long after all these fly-by-night productivity startups have gone under or been bought up and wound down is because it doesn't rely on the cloud to work, though ms seems to be trying to head in that direction unfortunately.
> It's tough because innovations in tools generally require some degree of schema or file format customization.
It's not tough. All it needs is to allow me to download the data in whatever format you actually use to store it, or some serialization of it. Myself, or other interested parties, can reverse-engineer it if they're too lazy (or too much into abusive business models) to provide documentation of the format. It's simple as that. The lock-in isn't in the format, it's in the inability to get the full document (and possibly reimport it later) in any format at all.
It's worth noting this is a testament to Microsoft's (extreme) dedication to backwards compatibility.
I sometimes wonder who's more fanatical: the glibc folks or MS. But it seems to have paid off for both teams in the end, so (especially as a young engineer) who am I to judge?
The binary formats that immediately preceded the current OOXML were OLE compound files (aka "structured storage), which is basically a filesystem-in-a-file that's intended to be used for serialization purposes - to allow files to have arbitrary nesting of COM components.
Individual data structures are then binary-serialized into that compound file, but I don't think it's accurate to call it a "memory dump". People often get that impression after looking at the compound file and seeing garbage there, much like unused blocks in memory - but that's because it's a filesystem, and as such, has a concept of unused "sectors". This is also why a freshly saved binary Word file might still contain bits and pieces of old data and metadata.
That's how the DOC format in the 90s and early 00s worked. I was under the impression that the early formats for Word on DOS, Windows and Macintosh were all different and represented in-memory structures written directly to disk. Unfortunately, I can't find a citation, so I may be mistaken.
There was certainly some format that Word and Excel used before compound files, since COM Structured Storage only appeared in 90s, and the first version of Office to use it was (IIRC) Office 97. That older format may well be some kind of a memory dump. But I don't think there are many Office files still floating around these days, and most third party software that works with them seems to assume that it's 97 or later.
When talking about SaaS (or more accurately, SaaSS[0]), you can "share" stuff between devices and people, but you don't control the data. You don't get a self-contained file that you can store and use independent of the service.
Just that is enough for me to prefer Word or OpenOffice whenever I can (and really, I just use Org Mode whenever I can get away with it).
While we have no plans to go anywhere at Notejoy, we do acknowledge that this fear is very real. So to address it we support full bulk export of all your notes to Google Drive at any point, so you can rest assured that you'll always be able to take them with you.
What a great solution! I've been on the lookout for a basic (non-bloated) local, html-based word-processor to replace RTF (for myself and as a recommendation for others). HTML-notepad is loading very quickly on an older dual-core 1.2ghz laptop I'm using right now (xfce, debian 64bit). The resulting html is remarkably tidy.
Love the fact that it's portable! Plus... no data-mining:)
I have a large set of local html pages that I use for bookmarks, PIM stuff, etc. It's my goto personal organizer. Mostly html 3.x, lots of tables. HTML-notepad has handled these pages without issues. To my surprise, it even displayed a search form embedded on one of these pages elegantly. Really like the way you implemented the editing of links to minimize the steps: click on link, pop-up to edit.
Also integrates into Firefox as a "view source" editor - nice (since it handles my local html pages so well)!
The only basic tag that's missing is the HR tag (horizontal rule). It displays fine but doesn't appear on any of the menus. Tables are very well behaved but... minor point: I expected that pressing TAB within a TD would jump me to the next TD.
It doesn't seem to care about html tags it doesn't understand - basically leaving them alone. This is pretty awesome, since I use the following a lot:
<details>
<summary>
Title (data)
</summary>
Expanded, multi-line (data)
</details>
I've been "playing" around with html-notepad for about an hour and so far, no issues whatsoever. It's not often that a new program appears that could potentially become an integral part of my daily workflow. Thank you for sharing this!
Yep. A few years back I tried out a handful of new apps, or at least new at the time. Two have folded, the third merged with another service and offers very basic backward compatibility. While I'm not a huge fan of Office, and I think Google Docs/Drive is in need of a big update, they're both likely to be here in five years.
