Dear Ideal Collaborator,
EDIT: It's been put to me that the following could look like an attempt to piggy-back on someone else's skills to make money or gain reputation. As that is 100% not my intention I thought I should preface my original remarks with these points:
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There is zero chance of this project earning money.
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I am willing and positively keen to work on the hardware and device-level code if given the opportunity. Learning is one of my key goals.
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I am willing to contribute cash money for components, 3rd party services, training, books etc...(However, I don't necessarily expect a collaborator to be able to do the same.)
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To gain people's interest this project still needs skills I have to become useful: deep knowledge of the target user, marketing, websites, server-side code and interfaces for document management etc...
To continue my original observations...:
In some ways we're very similar and, in other ways, we're very different. Here are a few things on which we agree:
Neither of us care about making money out of this. Everything we do is solely with the aim of making something we think is good. We're never swayed in our judgement by base popularity or a chance of earning (or even recouping) money.
Both of us love text. We're both avid readers. We also love a simple, textual aesthetic.
Both of us like technologies that present a minimal interface: things like the command-line, Casio watches, classic iPods, early Kindle models. Both of us dislike notifications and skeuomorphic desktop interfaces. Neither of us consider something without a keyboard to be a creative machine.
We both have regular jobs and neither of us have any thirst for glory. We're willing to slowly work on creating something good. Learning is our main motivation.
Both of us have experienced at some time being short of cash. Neither of us are comfortable spending large sums of money on fancy stuff. We both believe that cheap products can be compelling.
However, as I said, in some ways we're quite different people:
You're a lot more technical than me. I've done a lot of programming in relatively high level languages like C#, Java, Javascript. I've built a lot of customer facing apps, websites and desktop software. You've spent most of your time working in C or Assembly, working on embedded systems, drivers, kernel features and so on. You understand hardware.
I'm much more of a communicator. I'm happy to talk, write and spend time articulating things to people. I'm comfortable with meetings and marketing and consensus-building and a load of other things that you find utterly boring and a total waste of time.
You're kind of a pessimist and sometimes your caution holds you back. You know how difficult things are. I'm excessively optimistic and often underestimate difficulties.
You've struggled to come up with a specific project to focus your skills and craftsmanship on. You have ideas but you tend to analyze them until they evaporate. I've got a definite idea and a willingness to see it through despite numerous obvious objections.
I have a degree in English Literature and you have a Computer Science degree. My main activity outside of work is editing fiction. Your main activity outside work is - something pretty technical.
So I'm hoping if you've read this far, you're interested in hearing what I'd like to make. Put simply it's a word processor. I was negatively inspired by the recent release of the Astrohaus Freewrite. Why negatively? Well it's a beautiful looking thing. I heartily approve of its conception and its execution. So what's not to like? Well it's the $613 price tag. To me that simply invalidates the whole thing. It turns a good idea into just another vanity toy for people with a lot of disposable income and very little time. It's not a tool for real writers. It's just another way of people who'd like to be writers spending money as a substitute for spending time (and time makes writers).
Let me back up a little to add a bit of credibility to what I'm saying. I'm a director of an independent publisher. I'm a fiction editor. I've worked with a few commercially successful writers. I've worked with a lot of commercially unsuccessful (though excellent) writers. I work with many young and aspiring writers. All of them have had this in common at some point: they had no fucking money. I don't know a single one of them that would consider spending $613 on a writing machine. The biggest purchase most of them made was on a laptop, which they needed for many other things in their lives: editing other people's work, doing freelance work, writing college papers, living a normal modern life. The idea they would then, separately spend more money on a writing machine is ridiculous. Writers try to spend money acquiring only one thing: free time.
And to me this is what makes the Freewrite seem like such a wasted opportunity: The driving concept behind it is an excellent one. Create a simple, distraction-free word processor for writers which can automatically make online backups. This is something writers badly need nowadays. They're not technical people. Most of them are on Windows 10 getting badgered to death and unable to resist the lure of Twitter. Yes they have the ironically named Self Control software. Yes Jonathan Franzen can afford to put glue in his Ethernet port. But wouldn't it be lovely to create an environment where the user knows the only thing they're doing is writing? The tool defines the activity.
So, it's a great idea. Only it should cost $50. Not $613.
So that's my concept. Here's an outline of the key elements:
- Low price: ($50 +/-)
- Reasonable keyboard: doesn't have to be fancy
- Small display: 4 to 5 lines is sufficient, 50 +/- chars across. Can be monochrome.
- WiFi enabled
- Autosave: saves to cloud system which automatically versions and produces print-ready PDF for download
- Minimal editor: no cut & paste required. Opinionated indents. Markdown syntax highlight support would be nice (I really think writers need to adopt a version of this)
My vision is something like those 1980s typewriters that had a digital display built into them. At the time they cost a fortune. Now we can build something much better that's incredibly affordable. To me that is very compelling.
I believe together we can do it, have fun, learn something and produce a tool that a generation of real writers will love because it contributes to their freedom.
Yours sincerely,
Your Ideal Collaborator scandox@gmail.com