wish #1 Web based project editing...

[itexnz]

I'd would be marvelous if I could edit H+M projects anywhere via 'the cloud'

My projects are source controlled via Mercurial/Bitbucket so I can edit the XML manually via BitBucket's web-based code editor, though of course this is not WYSIWYG, hard to do and very easy to make mistakes. It'd be fantastic if there was a web based editor that gave me an easier interface to make some changes on the fly - even if I cannot build outputs.

I use a Chromebook quite a lot, the flexibility of being able to do a fair amount on the road (or more likely from a nice cafe) would be brilliant. Any excuse to get out of the office in the NZ spring time!

[Tim Green]

Hi Itex,

This isn't going to happen any time soon in that way because it would require a huge amount of development to provide functionality that is already possible, just in a different way, and that would be a waste of time. Online editing like that would require a completely new version of Help & Manual written as a web application, which would still be severely limited compared to the real thing, plus a server-based system for storing and managing projects in an online database, which would be an additional development project of comparable size.

You can already do what you want, just not with Chromebook, which is really just a weak, cheap computer running a web browser and nothing else. Get a decent Windows Pro tablet like a Microsoft Surface Pro, which will be lighter, more flexible and more powerful than a Chromebook, providing the genuine power and functionality that professionals like yourself require, which a Chromebook cannot do. Then store your project in a Subversion repository. You can then edit your project offline -- even without an Internet connection -- in a linked project that you can synchronize with your central copy as soon as you have Internet access. You can generated your updated WebHelp builds directly on the Windows tablet and update your online version with it as well.

[itexnz]

Fair comment about the limitations of web editing.

However, the Chromebook is actually a lot more powerful than they appear at first glance, by default yes they only effectively run ChromeOS (linux under the hood) web based apps, but it is also very easy to implement Ubuntu (and other linux flavours) natively alongside the ChromeOS shell (and also very fast) - which also enables me to use Wine etc if I really must run one or two Windows-based apps. Personally I'd like finalise my complete move away from being beholden to traditional hardware and their inefficiencies. This is really why the Chromebooks are taking off in a big way and has MS so worried. The joy of switching on a chromebook in 7 seconds and be working, without constant Windows updates and required reboots makes computing fun again. Windows hasn't been fun for about a decade.