Nice subtle "Professional" marketing with the Quip Business screenshot for the desktop NOT being on a Macbook. :)
However, this says nothing of compatibility with existing docs. What if I have a ton of content trapped in .docx? What about Tables in docs? Are they supported?
How do you send a document to a non-Quipper? Does it PDF? Export to ODF? DOCX?
Or are we to expect an email "Hey, I sent you this awesome document! All you need to do to open it is install this app and reate an account!" type of spreading?
Finally, while the UI is definitely beautiful, the collaboration part looks like it suffers from Facebook's one-scrollable-column...
Ill definitely give it a try - but if the app is just a vertical data-silo into which my content is trapped... then I don't see it being very useful for me. Looks nice - lets hope its useful.
EDIT: I am really interested in the UX of creating a nice looking document without a mouse! The speed with which I can type and navigate on any phone or tablet is fractions of that of my desktop... I guess some people like producing on a phone/tablet - I personally HATE it - so I'd love to hear how people deal with it on this...
For example, there is no Search function for text on my iOS devices. They'd better implement search and replace. Highlighting SUCKS on any touch based device as well...
I am wondering if these UX issues are overcome by well built software?
Basically I see phones and tablets as almost exclusively data/content CONSUMPTION devices - not because of size or form - but of the HID/Input.
We also support "high fidelity" copy and paste, i.e., if you paste a doc from Quip into Word or similar products, it preserves all the formatting correctly. Not awesome and we will improve in subsequent updates, but it actually does most of what you'd need in the meantime.
One of the best word processing docs I have ever used was Page Maker 5.0... Everything you put into it was treated as an object. Tec: Object box. And they were extremely precisely controllable. None of the god-damned app trying to auto snap/move your stuff around.
You had a "page" which was actually just a backdrop on top of which your content object hovered - and you had very very fine control.
If you have the ability to treat each piece of content as a discrete object - and move, size and shape them precisely - that would be fantastic.
Then you might like Office Publisher. But this seems like an entirely different use case. In this case, writing/editing/collaborating is the primary purpose, and formatting and style is only there for those purposes. This is not a design tool - this is a writing tool. When I'm writing, all I want to have to do is write (I might want to do some basic formatting, but that's still within that purview). I don't want to design the document; I want to write it. It seems that this is the main purpose of Quip, as it is the main purpose of Word (despite that application being bloated and horrifically misused by many).
However, this says nothing of compatibility with existing docs. What if I have a ton of content trapped in .docx? What about Tables in docs? Are they supported?
How do you send a document to a non-Quipper? Does it PDF? Export to ODF? DOCX?
Or are we to expect an email "Hey, I sent you this awesome document! All you need to do to open it is install this app and reate an account!" type of spreading?
Finally, while the UI is definitely beautiful, the collaboration part looks like it suffers from Facebook's one-scrollable-column...
Ill definitely give it a try - but if the app is just a vertical data-silo into which my content is trapped... then I don't see it being very useful for me. Looks nice - lets hope its useful.
EDIT: I am really interested in the UX of creating a nice looking document without a mouse! The speed with which I can type and navigate on any phone or tablet is fractions of that of my desktop... I guess some people like producing on a phone/tablet - I personally HATE it - so I'd love to hear how people deal with it on this...
For example, there is no Search function for text on my iOS devices. They'd better implement search and replace. Highlighting SUCKS on any touch based device as well...
I am wondering if these UX issues are overcome by well built software?
Basically I see phones and tablets as almost exclusively data/content CONSUMPTION devices - not because of size or form - but of the HID/Input.