Multiple Account Support

Exciting news! We just launched support for multiple accounts, enabling you to use Hackpad for work and leisure, all in the same browser window! Gone are the days when you need to use pesky Incognito windows to edit several Hackpad sites simultaneously.

Switching accounts is easy. Once you’re logged in to Hackpad, just simply click your email address at the top of the right rail, then click “Switch accounts” in the resulting dropdown menu.

After that, click “Sign in using another account”

This will take your to our sign-in screen, where you can sign in with your email, Google, or Facebook.

Now, when you click a different site name in your header bar, the brains behind Hackpad.com automatically log you in to the handle you use with that site, so you never have to worry about contributing to your corporation’s crisis management Hackpad with your “GameofThronesfanboy” handle.

What do you think about this new feature? Let us know by leaving a comment, or shoot us an email at support@hackpad.com

NASA uses Hackpad to organize its biggest hackathon ever

 This past weekend, during its second annual International Space Apps Challenge, NASA deeply integrated Hackpad using our new API.

More than 9,000 people from 44 countries gathered in person and online in what NASA calls “the galaxy’s largest mass collaboration ever.” Seven hundred and seventy plus solutions to 52 challenges were submitted in just 83 hours.

To coordinate the international contestants, the Space Apps Challenge embedded one Hackpad into each challenge page on SpaceAppsChallenge.org:

Contestants used the Hackpads to find team members and share tips, code, and data.

Currently, all projects have been submitted and contestants are waiting to hear back from the international judges. Winners will be announced May 22.

If you have any questions about how your organization might use Hackpad’s API, please email us at: support@hackpad.com

New open source bitcoin exchange organizes on Hackpad

Last week, the value of bitcoin–a digital crypto-currency whose value gained nearly 800% in in the last two months–crashed.

Inadequate infrastructure was one of the main causes of the crash, for despite being theoretically decentralized, 80% of bitcoins were traded on a single exchange, Mt. Gox, which collapsed first from high trade volume and then from a “stronger than usual” distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.

As the market begins to recuperate, a group started by Paul Bohm has begun developing a new, scaleable, currency-agnostic exchange. The project, currently called Buttercoin–“because the transactions will be smooth as butter” according to their FAQ–is being organized on buttercoin.hackpad.com. More than 100 people from around the world, most of whom have never met, are taking part.

The project is currently looking for developers to chip in. You can read more about Buttercoin here.

Update: In the few days since the crash bitcoin’s market cap has recovered to about 50% of it’s height.

Hackpad is great for editors

 Inspired by last week’s Online News Association Conference here in SF, and an article on online collaboration for editors, it feels like a good time to point out how Hackpad can benefit editors.

Dave Copeland, an editor and journalism professor, writes on ReadWriteWeb about how live, collaborative editing not only makes it easier to teach writing, it also makes students better writers. Copeland uses Google Drive to address four problems facing modern editors:

1. Battling incompatible text editor versions and operating systems, and big email attachments.

2. Trying to figure out what those scribbles in the margin mean.

3. Wasting time figuring out when to meet in person to discuss changes.

4. Working on (or worse, publishing!) the wrong draft of an article.

Hackpad is designed to make remote editing much easier.

Battling incompatible text editor versions and operating systems, and big email attachments.

In addition to being a comfortable, cross-platform editor, Hackpad automatically removes all formatting when you paste so that you don’t end up with half your document in a different font, and aren’t constantly having to click “paste text only.”

Trying to figure out what those scribbles in the margin mean.

Copeland says: “[The writers] will see my changes in live time and start to see why I’m making the changes. If they don’t like the changes I suggest, they can simply use the ‘Restore Previous Version’ feature. And if they have a question about what I’m doing, they can open a chat box and we can discuss in real time.”

Well, we see your “chat box” and “restore previous version” and raise you in-line chats and a latest-changes feed available from your homepage or at the bottom of any pad. Plus, our updates really are in real-time–no lag.

Wasting time figuring out when to meet in person to discuss changes.

With Hackpad, you send collaborators an email or a Facebook chat letting them know you want to collaborate NOW by inviting them to a pad. And you keep them updated on your edits as you make them. If they disagree or question your edits, but don’t have time to log into Hackpad right now, they can respond directly to the email and their comments will appear at the bottom of the pad you are.

If you’re working with multiple collaborators, quickly get the right person’s attention with the handy “@mention” feature.

Working on (or worse, publishing!) the wrong draft.

This is the worst, and it’s happened to every editor I know. Also, sometimes changes are not tracked, and you’ll miss a section of new text and publish it without editing it. With Hackpad, there is a single version of the document and new changes are clearly marked, appearing in bold in the latest change feed on your home page as well as in emails. Of almost equal importance, the author of each change is clearly denoted, so you know where the edits are coming from.

Hackpad is designed for editors, and works great in schools too. Check out our getting started video and give it a try.

Announcing Hackpad API, version 1.0

Almost since we started Hackpad, we’ve had questions about when we’re going to have an API. As of today, we’re happy to announce the wait is over! We’re releasing two APIs today, a REST API and a Javascript Embedding API.

The REST API provides functionality such as creating pads, listing pads, searching pads, getting content in-and-out of pads, and inspecting the revisions of a pad. In the case of a Hackpad Site (like example.hackpad.com) the site admin can use the API to automatically get a list of the most recently edited pads from the whole site.

The Javascript Embedding API, on the other hand, is focused on the scenario where you want to integrate Hackpad directly into your site. It also makes it possible (and easy) to use Hackpad with your own user authentication model. You tell Hackpad who the users are and what the ID of the document is and Hackpad takes care of the rest.

The documentation for the API is available at:

Hackpad API v1.0

There’s a sample Rails app and a node.js module contributed by @hoverkraft.

Our API is still in beta, so please get in touch if you have feedback or run into any problems.

We’re looking forward to seeing what you all do with the API!

Improved Hackpad Heading Support

At Hackpad, we pride ourselves on making software that understands people. For example, one of our users’ favorite features is that if you make any full line bold, Hackpad understands that you want a heading, and adds the line to the Table of Contents on the right of any pad.

However, many of you have been asking us for more than one level of headings. In fact it has been our number one requested feature. Today it’s available. You can make a heading as usual and then you get a new menu that let’s you select the heading level. It works like this:

Sample Heading 1
When you select Heading 1, you’ll notice that it not only displays underlined in the text, but it also displays in the Table of Contents to the right in bold.

Sample Heading 2
A Heading 2 displays in the Table of Contents in normal font. You can add additional layers of headings by indenting them.

Besides selecting your heading type from the drop-down menu, you can also simply type:

# heading
or
## heading

So “# ” to start a Heading 1, and “## ” for a Heading 2 just as you would in Markdown. Hackpad will automatically transform the line into the appropriate heading. This adds to a list of existing keyboard macros Hackpad understands, such as starting a line with “- ” to crate a bullet point, “[] ” to create a task (as people often do in text editors), or “// ” to create a comment (like you would in most programming languages). If you think of any others you’d like to see us add, let us know!

Linking to Headings

Another frequently requested feature we’ve added is the ability to link directly to a heading. Just click the “Link to Here” button in the heading drop-down and you’ll get a URL you can paste anywhere to link to that spot in the document.

Like this: New Publishing Options: Make Your Pad Public

10 Reasons Hackpad is Better than Google Docs

1) Edits are clearly attributed. In Hackpad, editors are color coded so you never have to ask: who changed what?

2) Easy to read document history. Click the “Latest change” time at the bottom left of any pad and it will take you to a page illustrating the most recent changes.

3) Link inline to files on your Dropbox, and Access your pads offline with Dropbox.

4) Media embedding. Just paste the URL (not the embed code) for media on YouTube, Tumblr, Flickr, Google Maps to fill your pads with pictures, charts and videos–which you can watch within the pad. See Hackpad Rich Media Demo for more.

5) Code syntax highlighting. Title a pad ending in a common code extension like Hello.html or Hello.js and the body of the pad will be highlighted correctly for that language. To add inline code snippets to a pad, begin a line with four spaces and you’ll start editing in code mode. See Hackpad Code Syntax Highlighting for supported languages.

6) Easy sharing. Unlike Google Docs, you don’t have to have someone’s primary email address to share and collaborate with them. You can connect by email address, Google contacts, Facebook friends, directly through Hackpad or by simply sharing the pad’s URL–your friends don’t need to have a Hackpad account to view your pads.

7) Instant, inline linking to other pads. Just type “@” and the beginning of the title of another pad to link to that pad. If the pad doesn’t exist yet, you can highlight the text you want the new pad’s name to be, and click “Create Pad”–now that new pad exists and it is linked inline.

8) Automatically generated table of contents. Just put your section headers in bold, and Hackpad generates a table of contents on the right side of your pad. Click on the header of the section you want to jump to and save time.

9) When your pads change, you find out. As long as you are following a page (big, green button, upper right side of a pad — if it’s grey, you’re following) you will get a friendly email every time a change is made, so you don’t have to keep checking back.

10) See all the things you’ve collaborated on with someone by clicking on their name. Just click on their name on the left or avatar on the right of a pad to see a list of other pads shared between you.

11) Maybe you are just allergic to Google Docs. (Go see a doctor.)

New Publishing Options

Over the past few months, many of you have been using Hackpad to publish public-facing content, and have requested easier ways to publish directly from Hackpad. We’ve responded with a couple options.

Make Your Pad Public

The first and easiest way to publish your pad to the public is to make it open to “everyone (public).”

Once you’ve done that, you can optionally enable moderation mode to prevent anyone from making changes to your public pad without your approval. Don’t worry, people will still be able to propose changes!

With these two steps in place, you can now circulate the URL of your pad to show it off, and search engines will be also be able to find it. You can also make whole collections public, like The Hackpad Blog, which allows readers to follow the whole collection via RSS feed.

Embed Your Pad

Another great option to publish your pads is to embed the pad directly in your blog or website. Here is an example of how that might look from the blog A VC:

To embed a pad, click on “Embed” at the bottom of any pad. A dialog box will pop up with a snippet of code, which you can paste into the code of your blog or webiste.

We hope these will help you get your content out to the public. As always, let us know what you think by writing us at support@hackpad.com

Introducing the Hackpad change feed

Something we noticed pretty early in Hackpad product development is just how tough it is for groups of people to stay up to date on changes to their documents. That’s why we’ve spent a lot of time making it easy to follow documents you care about and then receive succinct updates via email when others make changes.

Unfortunately, email updates can become overwhelming when you begin to track tens or hundreds of documents. We realized we needed a new, better way for people to quickly track exactly what is happening across all their stuff.

After some experimentation, we decided to take the document change descriptions we already send via email and assemble them into a feed-like list on the Hackpad homepage.

Each entry shows you which document has been changed, who did it, when they did it, and displays the changes inline. You can click on a changed line to immediately jump to that line in the document, allowing you to respond right away or see more context.

When multiple people edit a document at once, their changes get color coded so you can see who changed what.

Now that you can always catch up on changes you missed by reviewing the feed, we don’t have to rely on individual change emails to let you know about every edit. So in the coming days we’ll be experimenting with sending a digest email to let you know about changes you missed since the last time you visited the homepage.

Eventually our feed will grow into a great way to discover new relevant documents across your organization, in addition to keeping you up to date. For example, we’re adding a feed view to profile and collection pages so you can quickly catch up on what people and groups have been up to lately.

The change feed is just the latest product of our efforts to make your Hackpad experience more efficient, pleasant and productive. And we’re constantly brainstorming, designing, and implementing the next set of improvements. We hope you’ll love the change feed as much as we do!

Thanks for reading!
Comment on this post over at the Hacker News thread.

Hackpad as live conference schedule

This is a guest blog by Wayne Moses Burke, executive director and founder of the Open Forum Foundation.

So I designed and facilitated an event last week that was co-hosted by the US State Department, the Veteran Administration’s Innovation Initiative, and NASA. The topic was open source software, and the goal was to bring together open source in government advocates and move beyond the tired old discussions about whether it’s secure or capable enough and move into actual problem solving about how to get it done inside government. More details at http://open4m.org/project/open-source-summit/.

It was a wonderfully successful event, in no large part due to Hackpad. We used Hackpad as the main page for participants (Open Source Summit 2012 Live Schedule) and did several fun and interesting things with it.

The format of the event was a combination of amazing speakers and break out sessions designed to ensure that participants were getting tangibly useful information that they could put to work directly when they got back to the office. Here is a brief overview of the agenda items, with areas that Hackpad was useful delineated:

1. Introduction
2. Keynote speaker
3. Structured networking

• HACKPAD! During the intro and keynote speaker, participants added their topics of interest into the schedule, each next to a number that corresponded to numbers on the wall around the room. During this period, they were welcome to wander from one number (topic) to the next and meet other people that had the same interests.

4. Speakers – there were 3 periods where a group of 4 or 5 speakers each gave a 6 minute talk.
5. Deep discussions

• HACKPAD! Each speaker was assigned a room and time slot following their speech. In addition, participants could suggest other topics for discussion if they preferred. All of this information was captured in Hackpad and changed live and in real time by the participants and the organizers. The discussions were engaging and even the speakers said that they had learned things during the event.

6. Everything else

• HACKPAD! This section of the event was closest to a traditional unconference (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconference) except that we didn’t create a paper board – we used Hackpad! The entire agenda for this afternoon’s discussions were proposed by participants. Each was responsible for adding their content into Hackpad, and then making a public (short) announcement to the rest of the group about their topic. Once this was done, they all headed off to engage in serious and intense conversations about a diversity of topics.

7. Information collecting

• HACKPAD! In addition, Hackpad was used for collecting notes that were collaboratively created by the participants during the event, as well as crowdsourcing lists of relevant communities and resources that other participants should know about.

All in all, Hackpad made the process very easy and we had no difficulties with the technology. While we only had about 70 people editing simultaneously, Hackpad allows up to 150. This ensured that no one ever got locked out. In addition, the real time nature of adding information during a live event allowed us to create a virtual unconference board that all participants had immediate access to through their computers, smartphones, and iPads.

All in all, Hackpad was the star of the event. Thanks, guys!

The complete blog–including his lessons learned–and details on the conference can be found here: http://open4m.org/2012/06/27/virtual-in-person-collaboration-with-hackpad/

Photo courtesy of justgrimes on Flickr.

Hackpad for Mac gets an update

As your collection of pads grows, you may find opening a browser, navigating to the Hackpad website and finding the desired pad takes too long. We do.

That’s why we created the Hackpad for Mac app. This small app sits in your Mac’s menu bar so you can find and open your pads, or create new ones, instantly.

We’ve just released a new version of our trusty app, and it has some fantastic new features we think you’ll love.

New Global Hotkey: ⌘-Escape

Getting to your pads has never been quicker! With the new hotkey, ⌘-Escape, you can instantly show your list of pads and be ready to search, select or create a new pad.

Navigate to an open pad

Rather than opening the pad in a new tab or window, we now check to see if that pad is already open in your browser. If so, we bring it to the front. No more duplicate tabs and it’s much faster too! (So far this only works for Safari and Chrome due to limitations in Firefox.)

Create new pads instantly (now with titles!)

When you type into the search bar, there will be an option to create a pad using the text you’ve typed as the title, similar to the search bar on every Hackpad page. It’s a small but useful improvement when you want to start a new pad with whatever is on your mind at the moment.

Download it now!

You can download Hackpad for Mac from the homepage at http://hackpad.com after logging in. Or download it directly from https://hackpad.com/static/app/HackPad-0.5.1.zip.

We hope Hackpad for Mac is an awesome addition to your workflow. We have a lot planned for this little app, so stay tuned!

Special thanks goes to our newest contributor, Tyler Bunnell for helping out with this release!

 

Introducing Reading mode

One of Hackpad’s best features is marking every edit to a pad with the editor’s name, but on very collaborative pads, this can get confusing!

That’s why we’ve launched Reading Mode™. Reading Mode™ is simple: Just click on the white area of the pad when you want to add something, or see who said what, and click off the pad—onto the grey margins—to make all of the authorship colors on the pad invisible.

Using this feature you can turn something like this from our Hackpad Improvement Requests pad:

Into something like this:

We’re still experimenting to create the best reading and writing experience online, so please let us know what you think in the Comments about Reading Mode pad!

Using Collections – They’re like Folders

Collections are like folders that show up to the right of your home screen to help you get organized when you start accumulating pads.

To create a collection, go to your home screen (click on “hackpad” in the upper left of the screen). In the upper right, you’ll see an option to add a collection.

Once you’ve created a collection, its name will appear to the right side of your home screen.

To add a pad to a collection, you can simply drag and drop a pad into the collection from your home screen. From within a pad you are working on, you can search for a collection by name in the invite search bar on the right.

Click on the collection name, to go to the list of pads in the collection. From here you can search to add pads to the collection in a bar near the top of the screen.

Collections are useful for organizing team members or project collaborators. You can invite people to a collection by typing their name into the invite search bar. Invited people will have access to all the pads that have been added to the collection.

You can also make a collection public so that anyone can join it. Here’s a public collection we made to gather together all the Hackpad Welcome Pads.