Tag: text editor

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GitHub gets a dark mode

It’s GitHub Universe week and unsurprisingly, the ubiquitous code management service is announcing a slew of updates. Companies can now become GitHub Sponsors and invest in open-source projects by paying developers directly, there is automatic merging of pull requests (if that’s your thing), discussions for all public repositories and the beta of dependency reviews. GitHub is also making some updates to its continuous delivery features.

That’s all good and well, but let’s face it: you came here to see GitHub’s new dark mode.

Here it is:

Image Credits: GitHub

“Dark mode may offer respite from the visual overstimulation of a bright screen or simply give you a more consistent development experience across your text editor, IDE, and terminal. Whether you like your screen bright or if you want to feel like Mr. Robot in dark mode, it’s your choice in how you experience GitHub. Enable dark mode from your settings or set it to track your system preferences,” the company says. That sums it up pretty well.

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Document editor Coda adds third-party integrations with G Suite, Slack, Twilio and more

Coda, the smart collaborative document editor that breaks down the barriers between documents, spreadsheets, databases and presentations, is today launching one of its most important updates since its launch in 2017. With this update, users will be able to pull in data from third-party sources and send out messages to their teams on Slack or by SMS and email. With this, the company’s take on building living documents that are essentially small apps is now really taking shape.

“Coda is a new type of documents,” Coda co-founder and CEO Shishir Mehrotra told me. “It combines the best of documents, spreadsheets, presentations, applications into a new surface. The goal is to allow anybody to build a doc as powerful as an app.” That means you can use your inventory spreadsheet to build a small inventory management app, for example, that lives entirely in a tabbed Coda document. Mehrotra noted that many businesses essentially run on documents and spreadsheets, but they don’t have the ability to use that data to its full extent.

One part of these new integrations, which Coda calls “Coda Packs,” is that you now have the ability to extend your spreadsheets with data that you typically would have had to pull in by hand — something few people are likely to do. That may be stock, sports or weather data, but also open GitHub requests, Intercom tickets and data from your Google Calendar. But there also is a second set of integrations that now let you push out information to Slack and Twilio . In addition to these, Coda supports Figma, Greenhouse, Instagram, YouTube, Walmart Shopping and Wikipedia.

Two Google alums just raised $60M to rethink documents

What’s cool here is that Coda lets you build buttons that can combine dozens of different actions. Maybe you have a spreadsheet about an upcoming event with the phone numbers of a dozen friends and want to text them all a reminder? You can now build a button that talks to Twilio and sends an SMS to all of those who haven’t RSVPed yet. And with the weather integrations, you can tell them what the temperature will be.

I’m typically rather skeptical when I see a company that tries to reimagine a well-established concept like a text editor or spreadsheet. And who knows if Coda will be a commercial success. But I can see how the overall concept makes sense (especially thanks to the ability to add a formula anywhere in a document). It’s worth noting, though, that Microsoft is also moving in this direction with the ability to pull third-party data into Excel (though mostly under the guise of artificial intelligence). What Microsoft doesn’t really do as smoothly as Coda is combine all the different document types in one.

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Rich-text editing platform Tiny raises $4M, launches file management service

Maybe you’ve never heard about Tiny, but chances are, you’ve used its products. Tiny is the company behind the text editors you’ve likely used in WordPress, Marketo, Zendesk, Atlassian and other products. The company is actually the result of the merger of Moxiecode, the two-person team behind the open source TinyMCE editor, and Ephox, the company behind the Textbox.io editor. Ephox was the larger company in this deal, but TinyMCE had a significantly larger user base, so Tiny’s focus is now almost exclusively on that.

And the future of Tiny looks bright thanks to a $4 million funding round led by BlueRun Ventures, the company announced today (in addition to a number of new products). Tiny CEO Andrew Roberts told me the round mostly came together thanks to personal connections. While both Ephox and Moxiecode were profitable, now seemed like the right time to try to push for growth.

Roberts also noted that the merger itself is a sign of the company’s ambitions. “I think we’ve always been searching for how we could get that hockey stick growth to kick in,” he said. “I don’t think we would’ve done the merger if we weren’t hungry for that next level of success. So after two or three years [after the merger], we started to feel like we had the signs of a business that could grow into something significant and big and with some good numbers behind it. So were: ‘alright, now is the time.'”

While Tiny continues to offer its free open-source editor, it offers a cloud-hosted version of its service with a fee based on the number of users for developers who want the company to handle the backend infrastructure, as well as a self-hosted version that Tiny charges for based on the number of servers it runs on.

Roberts noted that quite a few developers try to build their own text editors. Yet handling all the edge cases and ensuring compatibility is actually quite hard. He estimates that it would take two or three years to build a new text editor from the ground up.

As part of today’s announcement, Tiny is also launching a number of new products. The most important of those from a business perspective is surely Tiny Drive, a file storage service that developers can integrate with the TinyMCE editor. Tiny Drive offers all of the file storage features that one would expect, including the ability to handle images and other assets. Tiny Drive uses AWS’s S3 file storage service and CloudFront CDN to distribute files.

Also new is the Tiny App Directory, which Roberts likened to the Slack App Directory. The idea here is to offer a curated list of TinyMCE plugins. For now, there is no revenue sharing here or any other advanced features, but it’s definitely a play for creating a larger ecosystem around the editor.

Tiny also today announced the first developer preview of the TinyMCE 5 editor. The updated editor features a new user interface that gives the editor a more modern look. Developers can customize it to their hearts’ content, with plenty of compatible plugins and advanced features to extend the editor based on their specific needs. There’s also now an emoticon plugin.

Talking about customized editors: You’re probably aware of WordPress’ efforts to modernize its text editor. The new editor, called Gutenberg, focuses more on page building than the current one, but as Roberts stressed, the underlying rich text editor is still based on the TinyMCE libraries. He noted that even the classic version, though, was always a subset of TinyMCE’s editor. What’s maybe even more important for Tiny as a company, though, is that none of WordPress’ changes will influence its business, even though WordPress and TinyMCE have long had what he describes as a “symbiotic relationship.”

“Tiny’s core business comes from a mix of software vendors, large enterprises, and agencies building custom solutions for clients that has little to do with the WordPress ecosystem,” he notes. “It is a popular and commercially viable project in its own right.”