(Re?)Introducing LineloNet

Over the past couple of months our focus has been on developing the ability to easily publish Linelo documents. You can see an example of this in the page we put together to track the schedule and results for the Canada winter Olympic team in Sochi. You can see it here: http://linelo.net/public/sochican.

LineloNet page to track Canada's Sochi Results

We're not going for anything particularly fancy here - we just want a very easy to use way of publishing information on the web. In fact we see LineloNet as kind of a middle group between Twitter on the one hand, which is extremely simple but a little TOO simple and ephemeral for many applications, and full-blown websites which are a lot of work to maintain.

It will be possible to edit these pages using Linelo on your mobile device. There is already a Linelo button that allows you to sync to the cloud; we'll simply add a Publish button that works the same way. Edit your document, click "Publish" and Voila! your content is up to date for everyone to see on the web. We even take care of notifying Google that your page is there and needs to be indexed, just like any other webpage.

But the real power tool for editing these documents is LineloWin. Here's a screenshot...



LineloWin being used to update Sochi Team Canada page

As you can expect would expect of a desktop application, it has a ton of power features that make it easy to build up and manage massive documents very easily, including import tools that can pull data in  from a variety of different sources. Right now LineloWin is in Alpha mode, but you are free to give it a try if you're interested. You can find it here: http://linelo.net/Products/Linelo/LineloWin/publish.htm. As we said though, it is still in Alpha, don't be surprised if you find a few issues with it.

Pinch to Zoom

One longstanding feature request we've finally implemented is "pinch to zoom". Previously you had to select the zoom level using a menu option, and that only had a limited number of zoom levels. Now, you can pinch to unzoom (or "unpinch" to zoom). Each time you do the pinch or unpinch gesture, the Linelo document will be zoomed one level.



Another very useful feature is that Linelo now carries formatting over from one line to the next. That is to say, if you have a line that is blue and underlined, then if you create another line that line will also be blue and underlined. Previously you either had to format each line as you entered it, which translated into a lot of unnecessary keystrokes.

One minor twist is if the current line is "expanded". In that case, the format applied to the newly added line will be the format of the first child line, rather than the format of the original line. This sounds more complex that it is... basically it just means that formatting behaves the way you would expect it to.

Introducing "Lobots"

You can think of "Lobots" as Linelo's way of helping you to get started; they are essentially templates that help you to apply Linelo to a variety of common activities. Each Lobot adds a few generic lines to help you get started. Some lines are there to be completed -- they might be where you would put in the date, or a telephone number. Other lines are just there  for organization or as examples.



The video above shows how you might use Linelo if you are unlucky enough to get into a car accident. You simply copy the "Car Accident" Lobot into Linelo, then complete all the fields that are appropriate. It even has tips about for when to call the police, what to do about your car, and what NOT to do at the scene of an accident.

Each Lobots comes from LineloNet (the cloud) so you will eventually have access to  hundreds, or even thousands of Lobots that will be able to do everything from organizing a meeting or event, to outlining a research paper for your class in Robotics.

Our First Video

We've created a small, three minute that shows how Linelo can help you build up big documents very quickly, using the Wikipedia integration. The video was created for the Google play listing, but stands on its own pretty well. Have a look, let us know what you think:



Over the coming days we'll post a number of additional, smaller, byte-sized videos that each explain a simple concept or feature of Linelo.

4.3 Million Linelo Documents

It's been a busy week here, we've just finished converting 4.3 million documents (!) into Linelo format so at long last, everyone can see what a powerhouse Linelo is when you throw a boatload of information at it.

To get started, there is a new "Wikipedia" menu option under the Cloud icon. This brings up a text field where you can type in pretty much anything from apple to zebra. Linelo will then find the document in Wikipedia, convert it into Linelo format and display it as a normal Linelo document. As we've mentioned before, Linelo is the ideal format for showing and storing big documents on your phone because of the way it collapses all the sections within sections within sections.

Once you've got the document on your phone, you can do whatever you like with it. You can add or remove content, adjust the formatting, copy bits of it into other documents, whatever you like - you are working with your own personal copy of the document, stored only on your phone or tablet.

The best part though is the navigation. All the links are translated into Linelo as well, so you can navigate from "Einstein" to "Violin Sonata" to "Relativity" to "Physics" to ... whatever, in a matter of seconds, with all of it ready to be included in whatever activity you happen to be working on. 

We've been finding it hard not to waste time just navigating around -- almost like back in those early days when the web was just getting started on desktop computers.

When we started the Wikipedia conversion we were just hoping to get a little content into Linelo so new users would have a few interesting lines to work with. Instead, we stumbled on a way to turn phones and tablets into the most powerful information tool we could have imagined, 4.3 million documents you can carry around in your pocket. 

Yowsers.

Edit Shared Documents

Yesterday we put out a major update, with lots of small bug fixes and features, and one very significant new function. As you may recall, Linelo allows you to open public and shared files, such as http://linelo.net/yegcc. Then we added the 'store locally' function, which meant that the file would be stored on your phone/tablet, so so the device wouldn't have to go back to the cloud every time you wanted to see the file.

That left us with a couple of options as to how we would like the file to look. On the one hand, we could take away all the editing functions and make it a completely read-only file. This is pretty much the way the web works -- you access lots of web pages but they are always "look but don't touch". You can read them, but that's it.

We really don't like that option.

Even before the Internet came along, when you had to buy a book in paper form, you had the option to whatever you liked with the pages. You could underline passages, bend the corners on the pages to mark your spot, even rip pages out to take with you. (I remember more than once stepping into a telephone booth, grabbing the yellow pages, and finding the page I wanted had been ripped out by somebody else.) In short, the physical thing was yours, to do with as you please.

So our model is different. Once you pull the page down, you can edit it just like you would your own Linelo file. You can move lines around, add your own notes, delete stuff you don't care about, add some formatting, whatever you like.

Of course, this completely changes the relationship between author and reader. Especially for reference documents, the author can put in lots of stuff you don't care about. The reader then has the option to just keep the bits that are relevant.

Let's take an example.

The yegcc file lists all local politicians (mayor/councillor/trustee) for every ward in Edmonton, as well as all the unsuccessful candidates from the 2013 election. Now that the election is over, you might want to delete all stuff except the contact information for the representatives for your own ward, and be left with just a small, simple, useful file that allows you to send in requests to fix the potholes to just the right people.

Caveat...

But there is one caveat.

Let's suppose the original author of yegcc decides to add contact information for other city departments. Now you have to decide whether to grab the new version of the document or keep your original, whether to "refresh" your yegcc file. If you do this, all of your changes will be lost - replaced by the new version from the cloud. That's why there is a warning before your refresh the file, that any changes you have made will be lost.

If you have changes you want to keep, you can copy them into your own notes file before doing the refresh.

If you have LineloPro you will also have the option to "merge" the changes, so the effect of the refresh will be to combine the author's changes with yours. But that's a story for another day.

Facebook Terms of Service

Continuing in the legal documents mode, our document of the day is comprises Facebook's Terms of Service. If you're like us, the chances of reading documents like this are vanishingly small, even though you may use Facebook every day and knowing your rights and obligations is pretty very extremely important.

So imagine if the document looked instead like this:

Ok, maybe it still looks a bit intimidating, but in reality, Linelo makes documents like this very easy to read and navigate because in essence, it hides most of the content that you are not focused on at the moment, allowing you to focus on just one little piece at a time.

Maybe "fun" is a overstating the case a bit, but Linelo makes documents like this much more accessible. If there is a document like this that has public interest, send us a link and we'll consider making it into a public LineloNet document.