Back in January I played with Libre office on Roll.app which of course allows the editing of native odt documents on a Chromebook on those occasions when the GoogleDocs import does not quite work.
You can also use the linux markdown editor Retext on Roll.app - here the use case is less clear but given the availability of StackEdit in the Chrome environment, but it does provide an easy means of generating a pdf to share or indeed email off to some other service such as evernote.
Running Apache Tika over a pdf generated from the online version of Retext shows it to be an incredibly standard implementation:
Content-Length: 17202
Content-Type: application/pdf
Creation-Date: 2014-04-14T15:59:03Z
created: Tue Apr 15 01:59:03 EST 2014
date: 2014-04-14T15:59:03Z
dc:title: New document
dcterms:created: 2014-04-14T15:59:03Z
meta:creation-date: 2014-04-14T15:59:03Z
producer: Qt 4.8.1 (C) 2011 Nokia Corporation and/or its subsidiary(-ies)
resourceName: richard_carew.pdf
title: New document
xmp:CreatorTool: ReText 3.1.3
xmpTPg:NPages: 1
(doing the same thing with the original markdown file is utterly uniformative due to markdown's lack of embedded metadata:
Content-Encoding: ISO-8859-1
Content-Length: 197
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
resourceName: richard_carew.mkd
which is of course what makes markdown so portable)
Application performance could have been faster, but given that the servers are topologically a long way from where I am quite acceptable for typing, something to bear in mind if using the service for field work to type up a bunch of notes.
All in all I find the Roll.app business model quite interesting - provide an execution environment, show people Macca's ads before starting the app, and have people connect their dropbox and google drive accounts to save providing storage - something that saves them the trouble of providing storage, and yet, unlike some other freemium services, lets them garner some revenue from casual users ...
You can also use the linux markdown editor Retext on Roll.app - here the use case is less clear but given the availability of StackEdit in the Chrome environment, but it does provide an easy means of generating a pdf to share or indeed email off to some other service such as evernote.
Running Apache Tika over a pdf generated from the online version of Retext shows it to be an incredibly standard implementation:
Content-Length: 17202
Content-Type: application/pdf
Creation-Date: 2014-04-14T15:59:03Z
created: Tue Apr 15 01:59:03 EST 2014
date: 2014-04-14T15:59:03Z
dc:title: New document
dcterms:created: 2014-04-14T15:59:03Z
meta:creation-date: 2014-04-14T15:59:03Z
producer: Qt 4.8.1 (C) 2011 Nokia Corporation and/or its subsidiary(-ies)
resourceName: richard_carew.pdf
title: New document
xmp:CreatorTool: ReText 3.1.3
xmpTPg:NPages: 1
(doing the same thing with the original markdown file is utterly uniformative due to markdown's lack of embedded metadata:
Content-Encoding: ISO-8859-1
Content-Length: 197
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
resourceName: richard_carew.mkd
which is of course what makes markdown so portable)
Application performance could have been faster, but given that the servers are topologically a long way from where I am quite acceptable for typing, something to bear in mind if using the service for field work to type up a bunch of notes.
All in all I find the Roll.app business model quite interesting - provide an execution environment, show people Macca's ads before starting the app, and have people connect their dropbox and google drive accounts to save providing storage - something that saves them the trouble of providing storage, and yet, unlike some other freemium services, lets them garner some revenue from casual users ...
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